Contract worthy of defence
June 04, 2005
WITH the award of the $6 billion contract to build three air warfare destroyers to Adelaide's ASC Pty Ltd, the Howard Government has taken a big step in its methodical, deliberate transformation of the Australian Defence Force and its underpinning strategic doctrine.
This is a huge process, little understood because so many of the commentators are wedded to the old paradigm. They either pretend that nothing much has changed or they scold the Government for departing from orthodox practice.
Prime Minister John Howard, his Defence Minister Robert Hill and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer are the three key cabinet ministers driving strategic policy.
Three very different men, each is a globalist who rejects the "little Australia" outlook and sees the US-Australia partnership as a global alliance, with Australia having global interests.
The AWDs will be big, powerful ships. They will have Aegis missile defence systems and will protect troops or naval battle groups from air or missile attack.
Hill, in an interview with The Weekend Australian, is robust on their strategic rationale: "The AWD is about the safety of deployed personnel. It gives us the capability of deploying a force more safely than we can now. Given the rapidly advancing air power in the region and elsewhere, it's essential.
"We have a small amphibious capability now. We're planning to [increase] that considerably. If you're sending off a ship with 1000 soldiers on board, you want to have all threats covered. Even with air-to-air refuelling it's very difficult to have 24-hour-a-day coverage by your air force. The AWDs can also protect troops on land."
It is easy to imagine scenarios in our region where Australia may need to deploy troops and may want to make sure it has cover for them. But the AWDs are big, tough, leading edge technology. They will be the most complex pieces of machinery constructed in Australia. They will also give us a capability to deploy further afield.
The Government is also planning to acquire two huge amphibious ships, each of them twice the size of many European aircraft carriers.
At the same time, Hill told me that the extension for a further three years of Peter Leahy as Chief of Army is an endorsement of Leahy's "hardening and networking" plans for the army. "General Leahy is very committed to those outcomes and the Government supports him on that," Hill says. "For the past few years we've been trying to strengthen the army. It had been treated as a second fiddle. [Previous governments] had been funding the navy and air force but expecting the army to do the bulk of the work.
"After the Cold War many armies wanted to get lighter and more mobile. People were thinking of Europe's armies. The threats to soldiers were becoming greater, so to protect your army you actually need more. From our point of view we needed a slightly heavier army. We needed to harden the army, that's why we bought the tanks. We weren't thinking of tank battles of the past."
Hill and his department are working on a cabinet submission on the future of the army. It is already planned to expand it by a further 1100 personnel during the next five years and the cabinet submission will likely canvass ongoing growth in its size.
In my view it will still be too small, but it's certainly moving in the right direction. Add 100 Joint Strike Fighters to the equipment and personnel outlined above and the ADF will be a small but highly formidable and deployable force. The ability of our political system to take decisions quickly and the relevant capabilities in the ADF mean that Australia will be able to help, to make a meaningful contribution, in anything from a tsunami-style humanitarian crisis and traditional peacekeeping to aid to the civil power in a collapsing state or plain war fighting.
I asked Hill to clear up definitively where he stands on the great theological debate between Defence of Australia doctrine, which holds that the ADF should be configured narrowly for the continental defence of Australia v a more global view of our responsibilities and interests.
"I don't ever say Defence of Australia these days but Defence of Australia and Australia's interests," he says.
That would be a very useful new name for present doctrine. Abolish DOA and replace it with DOAAI (perhaps pronounced doe-ai). Hill has his staff working on a new defence update, to be published later this year. It would do an enormous service to clarity in the debate, and would help those in the bureaucracy who want to implement rather than frustrate the Government's policy, to have DOAAI become the new official doctrine.
Hill says his policy is not the DOA of "[Paul] Dibb and [Hugh] White".
"It's not the DOA they developed, based on defending Australia behind the moat [to our north] etc," he says. "That's why they oppose the AWDs, because you wouldn't deploy."
In defence of Australia's interests, Hill says the Government decided to deploy in Afghanistan (far away), Iraq (far away) and Solomon Islands (nearby). The Government wants to have the options to make those decisions.
The old DOA doctrine did enormous harm to the ADF because it was configured to do the one thing it would never be called on to do and stripped of the capabilities it needed for the things it had to do. When there was a coup in Fiji, then cabinet ministers Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans wanted to explore the options of military action to restore the constitutional government. But there were no options because Australia had no relevant equipment.
The army was denuded. The Special Air Service was reduced to the idiotic role of counting trucks on roads in the Kimberley because that was where the mythical invaders of Australia were presumed to be most likely to act. Crazy, I know, but there you go.
More seriously, the SAS had trouble getting resources even for language training because it was thought that it would never deploy overseas. Now, language skills are an essential component of the SAS. In terms of securing resources, making the right equipment decisions and getting high-quality performance from the ADF, Hill has been a highly successful Defence Minister. He could now do both his Government and the ADF a further favour by having official doctrine catch up to government policy.
