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Hugh White, in his new book 'How to defend Australia', calls for a complete revision of Australia’s grand strategy and the force structure we maintain for our defence. His basic premise is simple.

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Hugh White: 'How To Defend Australia'
Hugh White, in his new book 'How to defend Australia', calls for a complete revision of Australia’s grand strategy and the force structure we maintain for our defence. His basic premise is simple.

Hugh White's basic premise is simple. China is now so powerful that its domination of the East Asian and Southeast Asian periphery is inevitable, if not an accomplished fact.

The era of America’s primacy has ended, and the result can only be the weakening and likely collapse of the alliance and security arrangements that have prevailed largely unchallenged for many decades.

In this situation, middle powers like Australia must look after their own security without the expectation—or even hope—of great-power support.

White doesn’t believe that there are either sufficiently aligned interests or enough collective resolve for Australia to rely on any of the other actors in the region. Indeed, he suggests that there are enough possible sources of contention with India, Indonesia and even Japan that these nations need to be factored into Australia’s risk assessments.

White’s solution is to fall back on the defence of the Australian continent (which includes Tasmania but not our Indian Ocean islands) through what he terms a strategy of ‘Maritime denial’ in which a combination of submarines, strike aircraft and long-range precision weaponry will constitute so formidable a proposition for any would-be aggressor that Australia can be sure of maintaining its territorial integrity.

He recognises that a force powerful enough to be an effective deterrent will involve much greater expenditure on defence than in the recent past.

The money and the people will be found by the ruthless disposal of unsuitable capabilities (most notably, most of the current and planned surface combatants and amphibious units) in combination with increased taxation.

White has employed his unique place in the nation’s ‘strategic mafia’ to make a loud call for a different approach to grand strategy and to national defence.

He is right to do so at a time when our strategic environment is becoming both more complex and more threatening.

Above all, he’s right to urge that we take a dispassionate and coherent approach to Australia’s national security, one that truly reflects Australia’s independent national interests. But whether his proposals are right for Australia is another matter.

There are several problems with his basic thesis.

The first is the way the argument is made.

White is one of the best writers in contemporary public life. His prose is eloquent and he has a remarkable ability to mount and sustain a debate.

Yet there are rhetorical tricks which, once recognised, must create doubt in the mind of the public, while loaded language is employed to describe decisions or events he doesn’t approve of.

The truth is there’s a certain amount of White’s own past as a senior defence bureaucrat infused in the text. Old policy and acquisition battles lost and won are reflected in the analysis, perhaps with residual bitterness about the ones lost.

Criticism sometimes appears to be for its own sake—as in strictures against the navy’s new offshore patrol vessels, despite their appearing to fit almost exactly the form and function of the residual surface fleet which White proposes.

Another problem is that the thesis not only focuses on classical state-on-state conflicts but rests upon a belief that nations must act solely to protect their own interests.

White even cites Britain’s 19th-century prime minister and foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, to that effect. The result is that White largely rejects the value of alliances in our new strategic environment.

The fact that the British were always prepared to involve themselves in alliances when and where needed is given little recognition.

White is right not to minimise the challenges of our relationships with India, Indonesia and Japan, but he is wrong to be so dismissive of our potential to work together to mutual benefit.

Much more should have been said about why he thinks partnerships can’t work in the 21st-century Indo-Pacific.

The fixation with traditional state-on-state rivalries creates another concern.

Our strategic environment is becoming increasingly complex not just because of changing power balances, but because of other developments in the world around us, of which climate change is perhaps the most important.

No future grand strategy can ignore this reality, either in the requirement to manage these problems directly or to cope with the knock-on effects, which may well result in new sources of interstate conflict.

White says very little about this and hid dialogue seems curiously old-fashioned as a result.

Nor is much thought given to the ways in which a potential adversary could seek to apply strategic pressure on Australia indirectly—for example, by fomenting instability in Australia’s environs.

Lower- and higher-order threats are not easily separable as White’s thesis implies. Indeed, his prescription for investing so narrowly in high-end military capabilities reads like a virtual invitation for potential adversaries to think of innumerable ways to make life difficult for an isolated Australia, against which White’s highly specialised, high-end force structure would be ill-equipped to respond.

Despite his lucid exposition of the concepts of sea control and sea denial, White fails to grasp that not all strategy is about territory.

This has long been a fundamental problem with his approach to Australia’s defence.

In part, White’s constant failure to recognise how vital the continued passage of shipping is to our existence can be excused by his conviction that the protection of merchant ships is now an impossibility.

He believes not only that attacks on shipping will come only as part of a major, unlimited conflict but that any threat to one’s own sea lanes can best be met by threatening the adversary’s sea communications in turn.

 Most critically, White gives very little time to Australia’s energy dependence and how it would affect his strategy.

He has proposed stockpiling fuel and looking at our refining capability, but doesn’t say much about how supplies could be managed in the long term, whether to operate our military assets or to keep the nation itself at work.

In this aspect above all, White’s proposals are analogous to designing the fortifications and defensive weapons for a castle without ensuring provision of its water supply.

Without the latter, no matter how sophisticated the catapults, it will only be a matter of time before the fortress must fall—and without the need for much action by the besieging force.

Hugh White AO, is an Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, long-time defence and intelligence analyst, and author who has published works on military strategy and international relations.

He was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Australian Department of Defence from 1995 until 2000 and was the inaugural Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Original Story By | James Goldrick and Euan Graham


'From Remote LNN Site' | Video Story By : Staff-Editor-02

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