It's a great pleasure to introduce Hugh White. He has actually been around Oxford rather a lot already this term.
When I asked him to speak or he volunteered to speak to this group, I said, Great, you could do two or three other things at the same time.
But I didn't imagine it was really going to drag you up to London, from London to Oxford as often during his month over in the UK.
But it's great that he has managed to get here for the third time.
He goes back to Australia this weekend.
He is Professor of Strategic Studies at the ANU and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute and he has been in government himself.
He's been an advisor to Kim Beazley.
Where is Defence Minister and Bob Hawke when he was Prime Minister and he's been a Deputy Secretary for strategy and intelligence
in the Department of Defence before going on to being the first director of at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
He was the principal author of the Australian 2000 Defence White Paper.
I think it'd be fair to say, Hugh,
you're not quite on the same page as the most recent white paper and he has just published The China Choice Why America Should Share Power.
So I'm taking that moment to plug this, and I'm sure it's a snap.
Excellent value. So value. His title today is the end of the Anglo-Saxon Era Australia's defence of the Asian Century.
That's it. Well, thanks very much. It's a great pleasure to be here for that.
And it's no trip. It's no no trouble at all coming back to Oxford three times in a month.
Yeah. So it's nice to come back to this town. I have very happy memories of it and thanks for coming.
I really appreciate it. I should also thank Kings College London, who have been kind enough to shout me a month in the UK,
which is by far and away the longest time I've spent in the UK since I was a student here myself a long time ago,
and I must say I've enjoyed it enormously.
What I want to talk about today is what's happening in Asia strategically and what that means for Australian defence policy.
And by defence policy I'm going to mean something fairly specific and austere.
That is the decisions that governments make and in a sense through governments that communities make, societies make about the kinds of capabilities,
military capabilities that build the kinds of military operations that appear to undertake and the kind of money they spend on defence.
And I want to relate the choices that Australia now faces on those sets of questions to some
judgements about the trajectory of strategic affairs in the Asia Pacific at the moment.
But first, by way of kind of here, I want to just offer a slightly generic.
She had a comment about what seem to me to be some characteristic problems amongst
Western societies in general as they approach these questions of defence policy.
The questions that you sketched out,
because it does seem to me that many of many of our countries are facing in different ways a fairly similar set of
questions about the way they think about the future of their armed forces and the shape of their defence budgets and so on.
And I think it provides a helpful frame for the specific point I want to make Australia about Australia situations.
The core question that has to be asked perhaps said before you can get down to the nitty gritty of deciding what kind of armed forces you want,
what kind of military operation do you want to undertake,
what sort of money you want to spend is the most obvious one and still the hardest to answer.
That is what is armed force for? What are the circumstances under which societies like ours actually want to use lethal
force or capabilities capable of delivering lethal force to achieve policy ends?
I think, to be fair to say that since the end of the Cold War and that for a long time before
that the ways of answering that question can be divided into two seemingly artificial,
but I think actually quite robust categories.
The first is that there are big wars, old wars, state on state wars, a classic conception of war that we all, so to speak,
came out of the 20th century with such wars, particularly in the last century or even a century and a half,
have not characteristically been wars of choice. Of course, there's always choices that governments make about where they go into wars.
But the very fact that those wars are undertaken with a sense that there is a very fundamental national interests at stake,
often questions of national survival and so on, and that within a pretty broad definition there is these are not because of choice.
Their wars of compulsion under World War One and World War Two are.
In a different ways. The classic examples and in discussions of such wars, at least beforehand and afterwards, do not always during them.
Discussion of issues of interests tend to come to the fore.
And the second category, of course, of what we might call the new wars, but they're not really new at all.
They're the small wars that are wars in which the administration not necessarily state acted often outside act as if they are state actors.
They are relatively small and weak states, not big, strong ones. They tend to be wars of choice in a much stronger sense.
That is, there are there may well be interests involved, but more often they're pursuing objectives that are defined in terms of values.
And they often they often happen further from home, so to speak.
Now, after the Cold War, obviously, there was a very strong sense that big wars, old wars, were a thing of the past.
There was a lot of evidence that new wars and small wars were not just a theoretical possibility, but something that was going to keep us very busy.
We had a lot of peculiar reasons. We had a lot of different exposures to various kinds of small wars,
and it seemed very natural to conclude that the principal purpose which countries
like ours developed armed forces in a post-Cold War era was to fight small wars,
new wars, not develop wars. It's worth bearing in mind, if you look back at what actually happened to force development in the 1990 and the 2000,
it didn't actually follow that very few countries. I think New Zealand, perhaps the most striking exception,
really reconceived their armed forces around the idea that in future they're going to be used for small wars rather than big wars.
Well, sometimes this was not often this was, so to speak, presented or managed,
you might even say fudged by the set of ideas that became encapsulated by cruel, I guess, the phrase block war.
That is the idea that actually not that much difference between big and small wars. Could you end up doing the same thing at the same time?
I've got to say, I can't I can't think of hand of a sillier proposition than the three block war.
It might well be true that when you're doing a stabilisation operation, you might be at the same time as the phrase block war suggested,
doing something like having a more intense firefight at the other end of the street or in the next block.
But the idea that in a high intensity, continental scale conflict, you're also doing stabilisation operations.
That's a fantasy that that shows that people are forgetting remarkably quickly what a big war looks like and what a very serious thing it is.
They're very different. Big wars and big wars and small wars are both a new world, a very different concept of human activities,
making very different demands on our countries and on our armed forces,
and with hugely different implications for the kinds of forces we build now with.
As I say, at the end of the Cold War, even up until quite recently,
it seemed very natural for people to argue that the small wars were the wars of the future and the old wars with the wars of the past,
the big water laws of past. I think that is now not so clear for two quite different reasons.
The first is our confidence that armed force could effectively be used in small war type operations to achieve the kind of broad stabilisation
objectives that such wars character characteristic they have has been at least damaged by some of our experience in the last decade or so.
And I think the question about whether armed force actually works as a way of achieving the kinds of
stabilisation objectives which has often been used in some some circumstances clearly does work.
I think historians will judge Libya fairly kindly. For example, Kosovo is campaign possibly as well.
In other circumstances, they clearly don't. I think it's an interesting factor that it works best when it's small.
So small, small war work better than big small wars.
And some of the small wars we've fought in the last decade have been quite big, not by big world standards,
but by the standards of what people had in mind when they talked about small wars.
You know, Afghanistan started as a small war and well, where we are.
So I think there is a question and, you know, it's sort of trite to say it,
but I think Afghanistan is going to an Iraq and it's why they're going to stand as very
significant cautions to people contemplating building armed forces for large scale small wars.
And the trouble with building armed forces for small amounts of small scale small wars because forces end up being very small.
And so the first reason why I think the focus on small was another fear that was
is that small wars maybe don't work as quick as much as we as much as we thought.
The second reason is that the prospect of major conflict of old fashioned wars.
Now seems less remote than it did for most of the nineties and the last decade.
And that's because we're perhaps less confident today that than we were for the first couple of post-Cold War decades about the
durability of the very stable state of relations between the world's strongest states that emerged from the end of the Cold War.
And, of course, it sort of goes without saying, but the thing that drives big wars, bad relations between big states.
You don't get a big war unless you have very big states at war, at war with one another, as it's bad relationship between very big states,
which presents the dangers of big wars and our confidence that we weren't going to have big walls were very strongly
embedded in a set of judgements about the kind of relationships the world's strongest states were going to have.
And I think, though, the lower level of confidence today about the kind of world recovery and defining and future reflect a
lower level of confidence in the long term trajectory of relations between the world's strongest states.
And if you were saying that the future of everyone's defence policy depends on how
we clarify two sets of resolving questions if that set of obligations arrived.
The first is we do have to ask what small wars are we really going to fight in the future?
It's going to be, I think, much more limited than, for example,
Tony Blair's push for good concept back in the late nineties suggested and his questioned about not
just does armed force work to achieve the objectives we're trying to set ourselves in places like,
for example Afghanistan but do our interests in those situations.
Let's leave the values to one side, to our interest in situations warrant the scale of investment required investment in lives as well as in money.
And the second set of questions is how do we balance the probability of major war and a collapse in
the order amongst the world's strongest states against the cost of preparing to fight such wars?
And does is the probability of old fashioned conflicts of that kind high enough to justify us in spending what would presumably
be the immense amounts of money building very different kinds of defence forces to fight those kinds of wars again.
Now I think both those challenges, I say this was a person from the other side of the world.
Seems to me when I look at UK defence policy, I think both of those challenges are very live in the questions that confront British
strategic policymakers today when I think about the future of the UK armed forces.
The question about whether or not the UK is going to fight more Afghanistans seems very pertinent one.
But it also seems to me the question as to whether the United Kingdom or what place in UK defence policy should
be taken by the possibility that they state the order between the strongest states in Europe breaks down.
How that should be addressed and approach seems to me to be a really critical question.
I'm not sure about Europe, but it seems to me that the likelihood of the relationships between the states of Western Europe,
the strong states and Western Europe breaking down is vanishingly low. I personally, if I was a defence policymaker,
I'd dismiss it not with worrying about I think myself that the risks of Russia at some stage
choosing to contest the post-Cold War order on its western borders is not nearly as low.
I don't think it's very high,
but not nearly as low as the possibility of going back to the bad old days of Western Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
And it does seem to me to be an interesting question for British defence policy and for that matter, for other European defence policy.
What Pike Place in Britain's defence policy is taken by the question What do we need to do?
Do we want to be in a position to do anything in the event that Russia contests the present order on its on its borders?
That I seem to me to be a very difficult question. But let me focus on what it means for Australia,
because both of these questions about small wars and big wars hit home for Australia in a particularly acute way.
The question about small wars hits home for Australia because although I've said of small wars ten characteristically more wars of choice,
one of the reasons for that, as I touched on, is that small wars, characteristically for Western countries have been fought to distance.
They involve weak or failing or dysfunctional or rogue states.
And although Libya is quite close, obviously lost some members of the EU.
Australia is the only always see the country other than the United States.
It has what you might call a weakened, failing state as its closest neighbours.
And we do have weaker phone states that close neighbours take what they're for weak and failing states.
They're relatively benign, but they do cause us a great deal of trouble and heartache.
And when Australians think about stabilisation operations, we don't think first and foremost of going to Afghanistan or to Africa.
We think of going to East Timor or Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea.
And so for us, the small wars are less wars of choice.
If something badly goes wrong in Papua New Guinea, then it's, it's,
it's not clear how much choice Australia has as to whether it's going to intervene when something went wrong in East Timor.
Most people in Australia felt this was not a war of choice for us,
which didn't turn into a war, but there was a certain compulsion for us to be about this.
Now the good news about about that aspect of it is that if we decide to the point that we decide that small wars are central to it,
particularly in our immediate neighbourhood, I don't find it very hard to say what we need to do,
at least so far as armed forces concerns are very be questioned about what you do in broader national policy,
because the extent to which countries like Australia can effectively mobilise efforts, aid, trade,
the whole gamut to really make a difference to weak and failing states does seem to me to be, after a couple of decades of trying, still very unclear.
I don't think we're very good at this. One thing we know is that it's not a story for armed forces alone.
One thing we know is it needs to be all sorts of other elements we haven't yet worked out a good formula for.
Hey, we're like the other elements and we haven't worked out a very good formula for what
exactly the armed forces are meant to do and how they relate to policing and so on.
But I think nonetheless, I reckon I can tell you what have needs to happen to the ADF to the extent that we prioritise
fighting those small wars in our immediate neighbourhood as a core focus for our defence policy,
and that is we end up with a substantially bigger and lighter army and more people in it,
and more of the money spent on those people and less the money spent on firepower, protection and mobility,
the sort of things that you'd spend much more money on if you were preparing to fight a major continental war.
You've put much more effort into what you might broadly call training and policing type functions.
You put a large amount of effort into language training in local languages rather than
Pushtun or Arabic or some of the other languages we've been trying to pick up recently.
And you spend money,
but not very much money on the air and naval capabilities required to deploy and sustain those forces around the archipelagos in Australia's region,
essentially in uncontested air and sea space.
That is, you don't need to spend money trying to deploy forces to Papua New Guinea or
or the Solomon Islands or East Timor against an a capable naval adversary.
You just need to build to build the force that can get them there unopposed.
And in some ways if you look at the ADF capability development today, there are some elements of that can be seen.
The question about what you do in relation to big wars is much bigger and much harder and that's what I
want to touch on now because to the extent that the question for Australia as to how much effort we put
into developing capabilities to be closed obviously depends very heavily on our judgements about the
future of the Asian order and in particular the future of the relationship between Asia strongest states.
It's a very big subject. I'm just going to touch on it very briefly.
But suffice to say that the most important characteristic of Asia is that for the last 40 years we have enjoyed the most stable era in Asia's history,
and that that has been based on a remarkably stable period of relations between Asia,
strongest states and the foundation of that stability has been a really remarkable thing.
That is an era in which American primacy in Asia has not been contested by any of the other major powers in Asia, in particular by China and Japan,
the two great powers that are contested, American primacy in Asia before and which because so much of the strategic drama in the Western Pacific,
successively in the 20th century, in 1972, in different ways, both China and Japan and Japan, having initially initially done it from 1945,
decided to accept American primacy as a foundation for the Asian order,
and that has produced the stability which has made Asia the story it is today for Australia.
This has been returned to the 19th century.
19th century was a very stable and peaceful era for Australia and actually in a way quite a stable and peaceful era for Asia because
UK British maritime primacy in the Western Pacific was essentially uncontested until the intrusion of some other European powers,
the rise of Japan, of course, and the intrusion of the United States, but further.
But that only happened right at the end of the century though Australia sort of characteristic first century experience over its first century after
settlement and not a century was of uncontested Anglo-Saxon primacy in the Western
Pacific and for a little Anglo-Saxon outpost that was just perfect for us.
And the restoration of uncontested Anglo-Saxon primacy in the Western Pacific after 1972 has been just perfect for us.
Now, it's a kind of long story short that era is passing. A slightly provocative title of my talk into the Anglo-Saxon era.
I and I'm going to cover a lot of ground very quickly here.
I think China's rise constitutes a fundamental shift in the distribution of economic, white and strategic power in Asia.
As that occurs, I think China is now again contesting US primacy as the foundation of the Asian order.
I think that challenge is a very serious one.
I think it's a challenge which the United States is unlikely to be able to resist.
I'll talk later about how I might respond to it. But if that is true,
then the order which we have enjoyed in Asia for the last 40 years and which very strongly shapes
our thinking about the way I should work and which has absolutely shaped Australian defence policy.
Today won't last. There will be a new order.
And what that order will look like will depend primarily on the choices made by Asia stronger states.
And I would say, particularly though Japan has to be part of this, particularly the choice of the US and China.
And I think the best way to capture what those choices are is to focus on a US aspect.
You could tell the same story in relation to China if you wanted to. The US has really only three choices.
It can withdraw from Asia.
That is, you can concede China's challenge or that completely not, I think very likely, but particularly over the longer term.
We should never rule it out. We actually cannot take for granted that the United States continues to play a primary
or substantial role in the strategic affairs of the Western Pacific in the longer term.
Second possibility is that America doesn't concede completely to China's challenge,
but can shoot a little bit and aims to establish a kind of a sharing arrangement with China whereby America exercises less power,
China exercises more power, but until it continues to exercise a great deal of power and in the amount of power that China exercises,
there's a very strong limited by the fact that America is still there. This is, I think, an extremely difficult outcome to achieve.
I've written elsewhere.
That's what the book's really about as to why I think it's by far and away the best outcome for Asia and the best outcome for America.
And by a long way, the best outcome for Australia.
But it's extremely hard to achieve and the only reason to think that there might be a chance of achieving it is that the alternatives look so lousy.
There's a third option. The one I think is by far and away.
The most likely outcome is that the US doesn't concede to China at all, that it resists China's challenge to its primacy,
seeks to preserve strategic primacy as the as the organising principle for the Asian order and a foundation of its role in Asia.
And I think if that occurs,
the probability of escalating strategic rivalry between the US and China is very high because I think the chances of China accepting America's side,
of conceding America's contest and saying, okay, if you're not going to peacefully allow us to to take a get bigger role in Asia,
we'll forget about the whole idea and get back into our posture. I think the chance of that happening a very low.
I think China will push back against America's resistance to the Chinese challenge and strategic, rather, would escalate.
This is not a prediction. This is a description of what's going on at the moment.
I think the Burma speech about Barack Obama's speech about China in Canberra a year ago, almost a year ago in November last year,
was a very clear statement of of America's determination to preserve promises, a foundation for the Asian order, its primacy.
And I think the Chinese a lot of Chinese conduct since then has been a clear indication of its determination to push back to that.
So I think escalating strategic rivalry between the US and China is a clear current phenomenon and I think the risk of
it continuing and escalating further is quite high and that therefore poses very big questions to everyone in Asia,
including to Australia, about what it means for the future of, of, of a stable Asian order,
and therefore the risks that Australia might find itself drawn into a make a big war.
But it's worth bearing in mind the defence policy that Australia has today, based on the self-reliant defence of the continent,
absolutely derives from that era of uncontested primacy that was initiated in 1972.
That set of ideas started coming into Australian defence policy at the end of our Vietnam commitment, which was in 1972.
It was a subject of vigorous debate in in Canberra and around Australia for the following
few years in 1976 and the then Fraser government introduced the Defence White Paper,
which which articulated the self-reliant defence of the continent. As the foundation of the Australian as Australian defence policy.
That remains the case today and the principal judgement that underpinned that reformulation of
Australian defence policy was a judgement spelled out quite explicitly and in the 76 white paper,
and that is, and this is not a quote, is a very close paraphrase, no more than the former great powers of Europe.
I don't know whether what the draft is meant by former that seemed a little bit shaky to me,
but no more than the former great powers of Europe, comma.
What will will Australia's strategic risks over coming decades be be directly determined by the actions of the Asian great powers?
76 Australia excluded Asia's great powers from thinking about a strategic situation,
and that's because of the impact of that era of uncontested primacy that emerged in 1972.
We've we to afford to do that. And it worked for us for the last 40 years, at 40 years to come to an end.
One other dynamic that I just need to touch on, and that is that although China's rise is in a sense,
the biggest story in Asia, it's not the only story in Asia. India's rise is another very interesting story in Asia.
I won't go there for sake of brevity, but in considering Australian defence policy, another part of the story is very important and that is Indonesia.
One of the things that makes Australia rather gives Australia's strategic situation a rather
distinctive flavour is that all of our neighbours are much smaller than weaker and weaker than we are.
We're a big country geographically and relatively large economically surrounded by states which with one exception, a much smaller market.
And we where an exception of course is Indonesia, which is much bigger than us demographically,
but has always been and remains in our minds, a poor, weak state.
Well, it's not anymore particularly richer than Australia is and on present trends.
And that means this is not a promise. But serious economists will tell you that Indonesia has a chance of being, according to one estimate,
the fourth largest economy in the world in 2014, the fourth largest in the world based on phenomenal demographics.
It's got the fourth biggest population, actually. That's simple as that.
Now, that might not make that, but it's got a good chance of being the sixth or seventh or eighth.
It's got a very good chance of having an economy twice or three times or on some estimates, four times.
The size of Australia is within the timeframes that are relevant to the decisions that
Australian governments must now make about Australia's future defence capabilities.
That doesn't mean these are going to be a threat, it might mean it's going to be a big asset.
It's got to be very different that we're going to have. We can have a great power next door for the first time in our history.
Okay, so what does that mean about Australia's choices? Australia faces a very profound set of choices.
I would argue about the way in which our defence policy and for that matter our
broader strategic and foreign policy respond to the shift in the Asian order,
which I've sketched with almost impertinent brevity.
The first is do we urge the United States to go for the second of the two options I mentioned that is sharing
power with China for all the dangers and allays and complications and uncertainties that that entails?
Or do we do what Australia has traditionally done? And that is urge the United States and before that the United Kingdom to preserve primacy.
Or you could say 234 years since the Philippine issue or in 1788,
the necessary and sufficient condition for Australian security, in our view and Australia's view,
has been the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon maritime primacy in the Western Pacific,
and I hesitate to say this in front of such a distinguished historian of the First World War, but at least from my reading of it,
the reason Australia was at Gallipoli and there on the Western Front was very,
very clearly framed by the fact that if Britain had been defeated in Europe, its capacity to preserve,
to preserve its dominant position in the Western Pacific already then under great
pressure of course would have been devastated and Australia would have been,
I felt honourable to Japan and that argument is there all through the whole, through the Australian record.
So this is a very, very old idea for Australia.
If in doubt, Australia supports the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon primacy in the Western Pacific that we've never faced in the Western Pacific,
a non Anglo-Saxon power as powerful as China, Japan, imperial Japan at its height,
probably didn't have an economy bigger than about a fifth or sixth the size of America.
But a lot of it could be a lesson that even the Soviet Union was never much more than a half on very
generous interpretation two thirds which China's economy will most probably overtake the United States.
I'm an ex couple of years and could be double the size of America's on plausible economic
estimates within the time frames that are relevant to the sorts of choices we're making.
So we don't have to ask whether it's better for us if the United States does what it's doing at the moment, then contests China's challenge.
Absolutely. Or whether it tries to negotiate with China. It's a very big it's a very big call for Australia.
I think we should urge America to share power. I think I'm the only person in Australia who thinks that and I'm not even in Australia at the moment.
So nobody in Australia thinks that at the moment. When I get home, the number will go up again by one.
But what I want to talk about now is this is the second question that is okay, irrespective of what Australia urges America to do.
What how does Australia respond? How should Australia's defence thinking respond to what we do to the phenomena I'm talking about?
And my argument there is pretty plain that although I think we should strongly argue for a power sharing arrangement, what I call a concert of Asia.
I don't predict it will occur. I predict we'll see escalating strategic, strategic rivalry.
And the key question for Australia then is what should we do in the face of that?
I think we've roughly speaking got four options if strategic road between the US and China escalates.
Australia has four choices. It could continue to support the United States as the United States has drawn more
and more deeply into a more and more intensely contested relationship with China.
And too many people and many people in Australia, that looks like continuity. We've always supported the United States and support them in the future.
But it's not continuity. It's very different because China is a very different kind of adversary,
a very different kind of adversary from the ones we've faced in the last 40 years.
In fact, in the last 40 years. And the United States has in place in adversary.
So it be a very different kind of relationship, a very different kind of alliance with the United States,
one that was, again, strongly oriented around an Asian major power adversary.
And this time the major power adversary will be much, much stronger and also much more important to Australia.
This country is, after all, our major trading partner. And I think what we'd see as an alliance became much, much more demanding of Australia,
and it would increasingly drive Australia to make a significant choices about the
extent to which we're prepared to support the United States on these sorts of things.
And the decision announced in November last year to base Marines at Darwin is, I think, the very clearly the first down payment of that process.
We should expect more of those sorts of demands.
An alliance with the United States in escalating strategic robbery with China would be a very different alliance from the one
we've known and which cost Australia a great deal and would also of course have very big effects on our relationships with China.
So the second option for Australia is to forego the alliance and to adopt one much second of neutrality.
In some ways you look at Australia, a big continent, fairly isolated, big trading country,
and neutrality might actually be a, you know, relatively plausible for Australia.
In some ways you might say we have some of the essential requirements, the geographical requirements for it.
Well, for reasons I'll touch on in a minute, the neutrality bid can look quite attractive.
The armed bid look very hard. But if I am neutrality, you mean a kind of Swiss or Swedish model?
As you prepare yourself to be able to defend your own, you don't align with anybody else, but you're prepared.
You should be able to defend your own country. Absolutely.
If you can make it work, that could be an attractive model and it had a kind of resonance for Australia,
which I think is, well, it's near on their right now.
The third possibility is to seek allies in Asia, just not the United States.
And I think although there's a there's a longer argument to be made here, I think this is where Indonesia comes back into the picture.
Indonesia is potentially in an era in which Australia no longer feels allied with the United States.
Indonesia is potentially the most important strategic partner for Australia because our geographical proximity gives us,
as well as an inherently competitive relationship or relationship, we will always have elements of unease about them.
It also gives us an unusually close alignment of strategic interests in relation to powers further away.
And I think that there is a prospect for Australia to build a strong strategic alliance with Indonesia,
which will become a stronger and stronger the more threatening the rest of the region seemed.
But to realise it would require Australia to reconceive its relationship with Indonesia very fundamentally.
And the last option is what I somewhat unkindly call the New Zealand option,
and that is the option of saying, okay, well we're going to worry about this,
we'll be a good international citizen, we'll get a seat on the Security Council, for example, that will make us a global power.
In our own right, along with Luxembourg and now like the Security Council, really?
This is a perfectly credible possibility for Australia. Australia is very strongly think of themselves as a middle power.
It's very, you know, very much part of our national identity.
But we don't really have much experience of acting as a middle power that is really functioning independently of a great power on the world stage.
But we've always had a great and powerful friend and Anglo-Saxon power to help frame the debate around us in our favour.
And it might well be that being a middle power is not something that Australia is
going to manage in the Asian century and we'll find ourselves without wanting to,
going the New Zealand route.
Now actually I am one of the few people in our Australian defence community who thinks New Zealand's defence policy is quite good for New Zealand.
So I don't what I call the New Zealand option. I don't mean it necessarily as a term of abuse.
But I do make what would be very different for Australia to decide that it was not going to try
and shape the world around it and particularly defend its own security with its own armed forces.
And if you look at that list, being a US ally in a more contested Asia, being on a neutral, being a regional ally,
any of those first three require us to build what you might broadly call the armed force of middle power.
The beauty of the New Zealand options, that's the only one that doesn't require us to do anything to be a substantial allies of the United States.
To stand by ourselves or to be a significant ally to to a regional partner like Indonesia would require us to have substantial armed forces.
And the big question for Australia as well, are we up for that? What would it cost and how would we do it?
Well, let me just offer you very quickly a sketch for how I think those questions could be answered.
But again, I'm going to cover I'm going to be impertinent, brief here.
But I think in military terms, a middle power has to be able to both defend its own territory,
including against a major power, at least up to a point,
raise the costs and risks to a major power to the point where it significantly affects the major powers judgement about attacking it.
And it also needs to make a significant contribution to regional coalitions like the Canada middle playing ability.
Both of those things. Yeah, let me look at it separately.
What's required for Australia to be able to defend its own territory independently against a major Asian power I think just
becomes a kind of a test case for Australia's defence policy in the Asian century if we're going to be a middle power or not.
Most Australians, when they look at our circumstances, see the continents very big.
We're very few. We can't defend ourselves. We have to rely on our allies.
But actually the geography works to our advantage in many ways.
We're remote. It's a big continent. That's actually make it quite a difficult place to take on.
And we have long air and sea approaches.
Now, it does seem to me that using those long air and sea approaches, taking advantage of the scale of our geography,
taking advantage of the way that modern surveillance technologies turns all of that space from being
an operational liability to being an operational asset gives you a huge amount of strategic depth.
If you're transparent, Australia is very well placed,
relatively well placed to build to build a posture to deny our air and sea approaches to potential adversaries.
And so you can frame that broader question I asked a minute ago in more specific terms what will be required for
Australia to build armed forces that would be able to deny our maritime approaches to a major power adversary,
or rather to be a bit more precise than they are in maritime approaches to the
forces that a major power adversary could deploy and sustain in our approaches.
And what that means depends a lot on how close the major power is and what
sort of basing I have available and to the point not say the student to them,
but to the point we raise the costs and risks to a major power, obviously, of trying to penetrate our area.
Maritime pressure to the point that it's not worth their while. You don't have to win this war.
You just have to raise the customers to the point where it's where the adversary is point of view.
It's no longer worth pursuing. That's how it's how middle powers succeed against great powers strategically that don't win.
They just prevent the other guy from achieving their objectives. Now that's that's a fairly traditional idea for Australia.
The idea of us, of a strategy of essentially maritime denial, of foundation, of Australian defence policy goes back a long way.
The second part of it though is much more contentious and that is how do we think
about the kind of contribution we should make to coalition operations in Asia?
Traditionally, Australia's approach to coalition operation has been very straightforward.
We deploy land forces to.
Join coalition operations, coalition law enforcement run by other people, and that's the whole sort of story of Australian military history.
But of course traditionally our great and powerful friends have been dominant military powers in the western Pacific.
So traditionally we've been able to use the CIA to deploy our forces overseas to sustain them, to recover them and so on.
We have had sea control. We've not Australia where our allies have had sea control.
That seems to me to be one of the things that's shifting very fast.
One of the reasons why I think China's challenge to American primacy in Asia is so significant
is that I think notwithstanding this overall superiority of the American armed forces,
China has, as I think, already acquired a capacity to raise the custom issue,
the United States of projecting power policy in the Western Pacific very significantly and will continue to do so.
In other words, it has deprived the United States of the sea control,
which has been the foundation of its position in the Western Pacific, and it's achieved a significant level of sea denial itself.
I think the same is true of Australia in spades. I think Australia's chance of being able to deploy and sustain forces by sea in the face of
opposition from major power adversary over the next few decades are low and are going to get lower.
And so our traditional model of deploying forces by sea is landfall.
By sea is, I think, very suspect. The second argument, second reason why I think that traditional model doesn't work is that, well,
it would it would presuppose that Australia would raise and sustain land forces on a scale which it's never done before,
or at least not since the First World War. The West actually has never been a big land player in Asia.
Western Western strategic power in the Western Pacific has always been primarily maritime.
I think the chances of there being significant Western land campaigns in Asia in the future are very low.
And so the chances of Australia being able to make much of a contribution to
coalition operations in Asia with with large continental forces are very low.
If Australia is going to achieve its strategic objectives, I think it's going to achieve them at sea.
Both of those things make me think that the approach Australia needs to take is not to think about doing actually what we're doing right now.
That is building for the first time in quite a few decades an attempt at a a relatively high end amphibious operation and operational capability
in the form of two very big amphibious ships and a reshaping of the army around them to make it into a kind of Marine Corps rather than do that.
I think we need to think about what CEDA now can do for us.
And in broad terms, I think we, if we can, the kind of state and our forces which you can use for the defence of the continent,
can also give us options to prevent others projecting power by sea and in the broader Western Pacific.
And that's probably all we can achieve, contributing to coalition operations for sea fishing denial operations in the Western Pacific.
And that's a feature, of course, of the geography of Asia with its very strong maritime focus.
So if that's right, Australia, if Australia can could be a middle power in the Asian century, I think it'll do it.
It can only do it or can do find a way at most cost, effectively using a seat in our posture.
Now that kind of seat in our posture would be very different from what we prepare for at
the moment and require a very different kind of defence force that has eight in our works,
a very big and complex subject in itself. But just to give you a sense of the scale, at the moment Australia has a fleet of six submarines.
It's planned to expand that from 6 to 12 over the next 30 years in order to provide the kind of
seat in our capabilities which are implied by the operational construct I've just talked about.
We'd be talking about 24 or 36 or more.
This is a much, much bigger demand of submarines than we've had hitherto.
And it will be looking at front line combat aircraft capability, not at 100, which is roughly speaking,
what we're looking at at the moment, but of 200 or more, we'll be looking at a much bigger investment in surveillance and so on.
This is a very different ADF than the one Australia has today and a very
different idea from the one that's had well really ever before in our history.
But that's because I would argue our strategic circumstances are very different from anything before we've seen and we've seen before in our history.
It would also cost a lot more. I don't know how much it would cost precisely would depend how much we prepared to do without.
But I'd be. I'm sure it couldn't be done for less than 3% of GDP.
At the moment we're spending about 1.8. I suspect it couldn't be done for less than 4% of GDP.
So we'd be talking about a.
Much bigger share of Australia's national wealth being spent on defence and is at the moment not much bigger than we've seen in the past,
nor for that matter, much bigger than the UK has spent in recent memory.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Australia's defence spending averaged about 3.7% of GDP.
That was the last time we saw ourselves functioning in an Asia in which major power relations was contested.
And it didn't stop our economy growing pretty briskly. Three or 4% is doable, but it's very different.
Now these are the questions that the 2009 White Paper, which as you mentioned, of which you've mentioned, I'm not a great fan,
walked up to and then stepped away from the questions to the 2013 White Paper, which is the government has commissioned will need to address.
I've got to say, I think that I think it probably won't. I think we probably will miss the opportunity to do much about it.
So I think the likelihood is Australia will end up not as a middle power but as a small power in the Asian century.
I hope New Zealand will be kind to us when we join them. Thank you very much.