Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 173–184
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Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030
Commonwealth of Australia. Canberra, Department of Defence, 2009. Http://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/defence_white_paper_2009.pdf. 140 pp.
Australia and World Crisis 1914–1923
Neville Meaney. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009. A$80.00. 548 pp.
The Howard Legacy: Australian Military Strategy, 1996–2007
Benjamin Schreer. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Institutionaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2008. €48.10/£36.10/$74.95. 303 pp.
Defence-policy debates in many countries over the past two decades have revolved around the choice between new and old wars. Should we build forces suited to the small wars of the post-Cold War era, especially expeditionary interventions of various sorts against non-state adversaries or relatively weak rogue states? Or should we keep on spending money to build forces suited to the kind of large-scale, conventional wars which characterised the last century? Australia has been no exception to this. Indeed the contest between ‘new’ and ‘old’ visions of defence priorities among Australia’s small strategic-policy community has been unusually intense in the last 15 years. But that debate has taken a rather different form, and reached a very different conclusion, from those in most other countries. While Australia’s closest allies and defence partners – America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and many other NATO countries – have all in different ways plumped for ‘new wars’, at least so far as declaratory policy is concerned, Australia has not. Instead, it has stuck to a much more traditional view, maintaining clear strategic priority for old wars, and especially the defence of Australia’s island continent from conventional attack.
The resilience of these old-fashioned strategic priorities has been starkly reaffirmed in Australia’s new Defence White Paper, Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030, released in May 2009 by Australia’s new Labor government. Force 2030, as it has come to be known, defiantly asserts that ‘the main role of the [Australian Defence Force] should continue to be an ability to engage in conventional combat against other armed forces’ (para. 2.19). Other roles, such as stabilisation operations, are distinctly secondary. This is not a new perspective; indeed, it closely follows the views set out in the previous White Paper published in 2000.
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But its persistence is striking, especially as Australia has been so preoccupied by terrorism and stabilisation operations since then. Why this should have happened can be better understood by looking at Force 2030 itself, as well as two recent books about the history of Australian strategic and defence policy.
It may help to set the scene by sketching some peculiarities of Australia’s strategic situation. The most durable strategic facts are to be found by looking at the map, and Australia’s map shows two things. Firstly, the continent is surrounded by an arc of weak states, many of them very weak indeed. This, more than anything else, has shaped Australia’s engagement in stabilisation interventions since the end of the Cold War. Over the past 20 years Australia has sent small military contingents to many parts of the world, and since 11 September 2001 especially to support the United...
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Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.
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