Australia's future defence policy
Updated
Warnings Australia's military could slide from being a regional big boy, to being the local runt, dwarfed by the emerging military might of its neighbours.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Hugh White, Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.
WHITE: Look I don't think it'll have drastic short-term impacts on Australia's force structure, but I think one of the key challenges for it is to identify the way in which Australia can best respond to the kind of deep long-term changes in the Asian strategic environment that you've been talking about.
And I think in a sense the risk for this year's defence white paper is that it will just end up being kind of more of the same. The opportunity is that it can provide a chance for Australia to really think again what kind of role does it want for us to play in its security. Over the next few decades what kind of force is sensible for Australia to be able to expect it can afford, and how then should it formulate its long-term defence plans.
LAM: But there's a fair bit of crystal ball gazing there isn't there? How difficult is it to foretell our security needs you know for instance in five years time?
WHITE: It's extremely hard, and if you like that's the real challenge, the heart of all defence policy, that is that you've got to make decisions over a very long timeframe because the projects always take so long to mature and cost so much, and there's so much you don't know about what's going to happen in the distant future but you have to make quite concrete decisions today.
On the other hand I think good defence policies when they work well can identify long-term factors which will, over decades, continue to influence the security of a country like Australia. In our case for example we'll always be very concerned about the stability of our immediate neighbours. We'll always be very concerned about our capacity to dominate our own air and maritime approaches, and we'll probably be concerned to continue supporting the US as the principle power in the western Pacific. And that can give us a few fairly clear clues as to what kind of approach we should be taking to building our defence forces.
And I think in some ways the challenge is to make sure that we actually make the hard choices which allow us to achieve those long-term strategic objectives as cost effectively as possible.
LAM: And the government when it announced this white paper promised that there will be community input. How will that work, how important is that?
WHITE: Look I think it's quite important, I wouldn't want to exaggerate it, I think in the end these are decisions that governments have to make and governments are elected to make tough calls like this. But because defence is such an important question and because it's one that raises quite strong passions in a lot of different directions, it's a good idea to have a kind of a formalised community discussion program.
What the government will be doing this time round rather modelled I think on what we did in an earlier white paper here in Australia is to nominate a number of eminent people who will go out and conduct a series of really public meetings, open seminars with people all round the country just to sort of gather their views, and then they will produce a report which minister will be able to consider at the same time as they look at the more expert material that comes forward to them from the bureaucracy.
LAM: And what do you make of the suggestion that the Australian defence force might perhaps broaden its role beyond conventional conflict and warfare?
WHITE: Well this is one of the really key questions that the white paper will need to address, because obviously a lot of the discussion in the security field over the last few years in particular has focussed on a whole range of security threats which are not traditionally military threats. Terrorism of course is one that's very obvious, but also things like global warming and pandemics and natural disasters and so on.
And one of the core questions the government is going to need to address is does it want to think of those non-military threats as central to the future role of our defence forces or does it want to think of them as we tended to do in the past as kind of incidental things, that you build your forces to fight conventional wars and you just use what you've got to do these incidental issues.
My own view is that it's best to continue to focus the development of your defence forces on the task of fighting conventional wars, because in the end that's what they're best at. If your really want to spend money on building capabilities specifically for things like disaster relief, it's much better to build forces precisely for that because you can do that much more cost effectively. And things like global warming I just don't think armed forces are going to be part of the solution to that problem.
