Opening Remarks – Dr John Chipman CMG, Director-General and Chief Executive, IISS

 

Welcome to the Opening Dinner for the Fifth IISS Asia Security Summit. This year, at the Shangri-La Dialogue, we host the largest ever gathering of defence and security professionals from participating countries. We have assembled for this weekend a record number of defence ministers, chiefs of defence staff, permanent secretaries in ministries of defence, national security advisers, foreign affairs and intelligence professionals as well as other security officials.  

 

I would like at the outset to recognise, among the many distinguished personalities present here tonight, Air Chief Marshal Djoko Suyanto, Commander-in-Chief, National Defence Forces of Indonesia. On behalf of all the delegates and guests of the Shangri-La Dialogue, allow me to extend to you, and through you to the President and people of Indonesia, our deep condolences following the earthquake that struck your country last Saturday, and our hopes for a speedy and effective rebuilding of the communities that were devastated.

 

The international response to the Indonesian earthquake, in which so many countries represented here have participated, indicates what can be done through political good will, effective intergovernmental coordination, and the application of professional skills to a good cause.

 

When the IISS conceived of the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2001, and hosted the first summit in 2002, we felt that we might serve a useful purpose by gathering together the defence ministers and armed forces professionals of the states belonging to the Asia-Pacific and playing a role in the region’s stability and security.

 

With the success of the first summit, and the expressed desire of all participating states that the event be organised annually, a genuine pan-regional security institution was founded, and has since been nurtured and established.

 

The IISS is proud, as a genuinely international organisation, to have created this security institution. With offices in London, Washington and Singapore, and plans to establish others in Geneva and the Persian Gulf, the IISS is international in its membership, staff, perspective and character. We are proud to have been able to convene government ministers and security professionals in circumstances that they could not so easily have organised for themselves.

 

Over this first half-decade of the Dialogue, 17 countries have sent their defence minister, three countries their deputy or equivalent, and three have sent delegations at other senior levels. Twenty-three countries have participated, and on this fifth anniversary most are represented by their defence minister, as well as the chief of defence staff and other senior officials.

 

Many ministers have met for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue. The private bilateral meetings between defence ministers and CHODS have fostered cooperation between countries in the region without regular links who were able to discover common interests and approaches because of their participation in the summit.

 

Ministers have used the platform of the Dialogue to issue policy statements with important multilateral implications.

 

In the break-out groups, addressed exclusively by ministers, chiefs of defence staff and senior officials, sensitive subjects have been addressed in depth, in a way impossible at other official meetings. Over the years, these have included topics such as: confronting terrorism in South-east Asia; non-proliferation in North-east Asia; missile defence in the Asia-Pacific; regional defence diplomacy; new technologies and the Asia-Pacific; defence white papers, transparency and confidence building; peacekeeping and disaster relief; defence industries in the region; the challenges of force modernisation; and the nature of counterinsurgency tasks. Because the speakers in these sessions have all been senior government officials rather than academics, any agreements reached have had a direct and immediate policy impact.

 

Indeed, to take just one example, the Shangri-La Dialogue has provided a forum to achieve convergence on the outlook and policies of littoral states and other powers with tangible interests in regional maritime security. Our Dialogue, your Dialogue, can claim credit for advancing maritime security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

 

Overall, this security summit has helped to shape the debate on the role of major powers in the Asia-Pacific and the changing shape of their relations with key regional states, at a time when the international security system is in great flux.

 

Because this is an open and transparent Dialogue it brings to the public eye issues that are normally closely held by security institutions, and by doing so has contributed to regional confidence building.

 

Many ministers have said to us that the format of the Dialogue allows for a frankness of expression not possible at most inter-governmental meetings or at other regional institutions, either well established, or nascent.

 

It also has animated greater formal defence cooperation.

 

Indeed, it has even strengthened some other security institutions, notably the Five Power Defence Arrangements, the FPDA, that now meets annually at ministerial level and has modernised itself through the ability to meet coincidentally with the Shangri-La Dialogue.

 

And the success of the Shangri-La Dialogue has inspired the IISS to bring the format to another strategically crucial region. Each December, we now also organise the Gulf Dialogue in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

 

We at the IISS are immensely grateful to the government of Singapore for the tremendous support that it has provided to the Shangri-La Dialogue since its inception. This year I should also like to thank our commercial sponsors Boeing, BAE Systems, EADS, Autonomy, Northrop Grumman, The Asahi Shimbun, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and Singapore Technologies Engineering for their crucial support. We thank Bain, for their sponsorship of this opening dinner, and Singapore’s Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies for its financial and logistic support.

 

Together, all of us represented here have established the Shangri-La Dialogue as an elemental part of the infrastructure of regional defence diplomacy and have helped serve the interests of more effective defence and security cooperation. I look forward to this fifth summit and to refining and strengthening the structure with you over the years.

 

Public debate will always be one of the core elements of the Shangri-La Dialogue. We have a very distinguished speaker tonight to launch that debate this year. To introduce him, I have great pleasure in inviting the Chairman of the IISS, François Heisbourg, to the podium.