THE defence white paper will be published before the end of this month. It will plan for Australia to build up, through several decades, to a force of 12 submarines, up from the existing six. It also will plan to acquire 100fifth-generation joint strike fighters. And it will continue building the regular army to eight battalions, and hardening and networking the army. It also will continue with the ship acquisitions, the air warfare destroyers and the giant amphibious ships.
The white paper will endorse a balanced force, including an army that can be deployed in combat. Most important, the Government will continue a real annual increase of 3 per cent in defence expenditure. The way this has gone in the past, it is possible that one year it may be a little more than 3 per cent, another year a little less.
In the white paper, the Rudd Government keeps faith with its vision for Australia's security, even amid the financial tsunami. It is the maximum any government, Labor or Coalition, could do.
As The Australian has revealed in recent days, there was some significant disagreement within the Government over the nature of China's military expansion. The former head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, Maurie McNarn, and the head of the Office of National Assessments, Peter Varghese, were inclined to see China's military expansion as essentially benign and not necessarily disturbing the regional order.
The Defence Department, led by the white paper's primary author, deputy secretary Mike Pezzullo, saw China's military efforts as more challenging and mandating, therefore, a need for heavier high-end war-fighting capabilities in the Australian Defence Force.
The Pezzullo view sits closely with the most important view of all, which is held by Kevin Rudd. In his Townsville RSL speech last September and the follow-up press conference, Rudd said: "Militarily ... the Asia-Pacific will become a much more contested region" and "Australia is in a region where there is an explosion in defence expenditure".
The only explosion in defence expenditure in our region is by China. Rudd and the white paper are right to focus on it. However, it would be extremely dumb to regard the possibility of China-centric conflict as the only big strategic factor that the ADF should be structured for. This is what former defence bureaucrat Hugh White does in his Lowy Institute paper, A Focused Force.
White is a very faithful lover. Many decades ago he fell in love with the idea of maritime denial as Australia's strategic lodestar and from that he deduced that the force structure for the ADF should focus overwhelmingly on submarines and fighter aircraft.
In his preposterous paper, which so far has escaped critical scrutiny, White calls for 200 JSFs and 18 submarines, and an enlarged but lightweight army, deliberately not equipped to fight even in medium-intensity theatres such as Afghanistan, configured as a gendarmerie for use in policing roles in the South Pacific.
There is not the slightest chance that Australia could afford or crew such force levels, and White offers only the most token arguments to the effect that we could.
My guess is that these deliberately ridiculous suggestions are made solely to emphasise his abiding love of the all-subs-and-fighters force structure he has been advocating for many years.
The Australian strategic debate has suffered a stultifying narrowness and orthodoxy in part because of its domination by White and his mentor Paul Dibb, also a former defence bureaucrat.
Moving between the Defence Department, ministers' offices and the Australian National University, where most strategic studies masters degrees are done, they have effectively imposed a narrow and witheringly ineffective paradigm on Australian defence planning. For 30 years they gave us a defence force designed to defeat Indonesia invading in conventional sea and aircraft across the Arafura Sea. When we were called on to undertake some politically explosive but militarily quite small responsibilities in East Timor, the savage inadequacies of the force they had designed were laid bare. Our soldiers performed magnificently but there were too few of them, they were grievously under-equipped, we needed all manner of international assistance and we weren't even talking about combat operations.
Now White has decided that China can provide the new justification for the very old force structure designed for the discredited defence-of-Australia doctrine. Whatever the circumstances, White's favoured force structure never changes, except for the addition of an army of gendarmes. You get the impression of Dibb and White that for them it is forever 1986, they've just discovered defence self-reliance and they are always going to fight the battle against expeditionary instincts in Australian defence.
The purpose of the ADF is to provide the Government with useable options to protect Australian security. The Dibb-White legacy has not done that.
That's why quite a lot of the forthcoming white paper will be about the very unsexy business of ++remediation. The Government will need to spend a lot of money to fix Australia's existing defence platforms and make them deployable in combat.
It's a big job. At the moment we cannot deploy our Black Hawk helicopters into Afghanistan because they cannot defend themselves against shoulder-fired rockets. We have six submarines but we can crew only three of them, and even that requires the Americans lending us key crew members. We have about 100 front-line combat aircraft but we can never produce more than 60 pilots, and the real figure is probably fewer than that.
In the Iraq war of 2003, we had to upgrade our F/A-18s to send them at all, but even with upgrades they could not be sent into the most dangerous parts of Iraq because they did not have electronic warfare self-protection capabilities. The Anzac frigates lack defensive weaponry. The FFGs are still not back from their upgrade.
We spend $22 billion a year on defence and the only forces we can actually send into anything resembling combat are a couple of hundred of our special forces, the SAS and thecommandos.
There is an inter-locked budgetary and political dynamic at the heart of this ridiculous situation. Defence traditionally gets approval for new weapons platforms on the basis of their acquisition cost but tends to grossly underestimate, or not provide at all, for their operational costs. The politicians don't necessarily dislike this because it is infinitely sexier to announce new platforms -- 18 new subs! -- on a kind of Hollowmen never-never basis, than it is to make existing platforms work.
The most dreaded words in Australian defence history are these: "equipped for but not with ...". That means a platform that is designed to have a certain weapons system but does not actually have it. The Australian capability then serves a sort of symbolic, not a combat, purpose.
This is a direct consequence of the Dibb-White heritage because under their defence planning only symbolic and militarily meaningless deployments were everto be made at any distance from Australia's shores.
Much has been made of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates's call for the US defence force to go a bit lighter, to emphasise boots on the ground for counterinsurgent purposes rather than ultra-hi-tech weapons systems such as the F22 aircraft.
This has no application to Australia at all because the US forces are infinitely heavier and bigger than Australia's.
Gates is recalibrating an American balance that still sees an increase in its base defence budget of nearly $US550 billion ($763 billion), plus a couple of hundred billion for Iraq andAfghanistan.
Australia needs to be heavier and have more boots on the ground.
The recent debate also has ignored the strategic consequence of terrorism. If the Taliban takes back Afghanistan, and the Islamists come to power in Pakistan, thus acquiring 100 nuclear weapons or so, this would be the biggest single transformation in Australia's strategic outlook since World WarII.
It won't look so smart then to have stinted on a commitment to Afghanistan.
Former army chief Peter Leahy recently commented: "Today the ADF is at war. The army bears the brunt of that war. It is a war among the people conducting stabilisation missions and dealing with terrorism.
"It is a lethal, complex and ever-changing environment."
Here's a tip for defence planners. Win the wars you're in before you dream of the wars that may come in 40 years
