Reader comments - Australian Defence White Papers

Bushranger 71 • 3 days ago

Have to disagree with you Eric that Australia needs Defence White Papers. Even the ASPI man charged with authoring publicly attested that it would be a political document.

It is the unchanging regional geographic environment that should determine 
Australia's affordable military capabilities requirements.

Very few of 24 million Australians appreciate the geographic vastness and harshness of a remote and largely arid uninhabited land beyond the sparse populous suburban precincts, which are mainly around the south-eastern coast; and there is also a dearth of international appreciation regarding southern hemisphere geography and Australia’s regional military capability needs.

Australia has 35,900 kilometres (19,400nm) of continuous mainland coastline and 23,800 kilometres (12,850nm) of island coastlines Nearby Indonesia with a myriad of islands has the second longest island coastline in the world. Adjacent seas are largely pretty shallow waters.

Defence White Paper 2009 wisely outlined Australia’s principal area of military interest as south of the Equator between the eastern Indian Ocean and the island States of Polynesia. Alas; that realistic perspective was jettisoned in response to US pressure and replaced from DWP2013 onwards by an ‘all the way’ dictum to support maintenance of perceived American hegemony in the SE Asian region.

It is political folly for Australia to potentially alienate the ASEAN Plus Three Bloc of nations through US inspired hairy-chested military presence in SE Asian territories when China is our foremost trading partner and is gaining
increasing economic control of Australian business interests, especially
primary industry.

All of the ASEAN nations are very interdependent upon trade and there is
thus little foreseeable risk of impediment to trade corridors through 
that region that would adversely affect Australia.

Digressing a bit. According to the 2001 Census, 39% of the population were Australian born. In 2010, China surpassed the United Kingdom as the primary source of permanent migrants and since that time, China and India have continued to provide the largest number of new residents. Ongoing frantic population growth via recklessly excessive immigration will likely see the Australian born component very quickly shrink to around 20%, with a rapidly expanding Asian population.

The reality is Australia is militarily indefensible and borders are porous by multiple means. During WW2, some 33 ships were sunk around the Australian coastline, which was impossible to adequately monitor for intruder activity in those days. Even today, small vessels appear offshore within Australian territorial waters, before detection.

Australia's affordable military priorities should thus embrace a comprehensive intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) capacity to ensure continual monitoring of regional activities and a deterrent maritime strike capability to discourage interference with sea lanes in particular. Add to those capabilities ability, to deploy modest light-weight forces regionally where it might be in Australia's national interest to provide military assistance, if requested.

If that rationale is accepted, then arguably there has been monstrous waste of taxpayer funding under the ongoing John Howard inspired big defence spend since about Year 2000, with multiple inappropriate hardware replacements in lieu of cost-effective optimization of well-proven platforms.

The neighbouring tropical archipelago is characterized by few significant port facilities, mostly pretty rudimentary airfields, minimal strong roads/bridges and sparse transportation fuel storage. Off-road military ground vehicle movement is often largely limited to light-weight tracked vehicles (like M113 APCs) in much of the region. Deployment and withdrawal of any light-weight ground forces would ideally be cost-effectively and expeditiously accomplished by tactical transport aircraft with complementary support from multiple modest size amphibious capability vessels.

In earlier threads, MHalblaub has logically contended that larger numbers of small submarines would be more cost-effective for Australia. I would be bolder and replace frigates, patrol boats and submarines with a largish fleet of very flexible and versatile platforms like the JHSV-1, which could be easily manufactured in Australia by smaller shipbuilders (not the big multi-national arms players). These high speed shallow draft craft have low crewing and could be very effective in ASW and ASuW, if suitably equipped with modern weaponry. And they have good potential for Special Forces applications. In other words, I simply cannot see the operational merit for highly expensive submarines for Australia.

With regard to the Canberra dream of deploying expeditionary forces via LPDs and the escort requirements for those vessels, it will be very surprising if those platforms are ever adequately manned and equipped to provide a worthwhile military capability.

See this excellent contribution to the defence debate by one of few fine Australian journalists: http://www.afr.com/news/policy...

Defence White Papers are a wasteful political exercise which really just interrupts what should be a logical progressive maintaining of affordable military capabilities to suit Australia's near regional operating environment. Any need for upgrading of military preparedness should logically flow from the national strategic evaluations which are a regular component of government processes.