Of course, policies had subsequently to be adjusted in response to changing strategic circumstances, yet they did not basically depart from the priority to be given to the defence of Australia. The 1994 Defence White Paper, Defending Australia, expanded the idea of defence self-reliance when it argued that we would have to pay more attention to what it called short-warning conflicts because of potential military developments in our region. However, it continued to give priority to making our sea and air approaches an effective barrier to attack, and to ensuring that our forces were familiar with the northern operating environment and that our equipment was optimised for conditions there.

It was prescient of Defending Australia to observe that deployments in the Persian Gulf, Namibia, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, the South Pacific and elsewhere, as well as our continual defence deployments around the region,

Thus, there was essential continuity in Australia’s defence planning for a full decade. The new government came into power in 1996, and its 1997 defence policy document stressed that defeating attacks against Australia’s territory was our core force structure priority.^[30] But it also stated that the next highest priority was to provide ‘substantial capabilities to defend our regional strategic interests’.^[31] It went on to say that ‘priority will be given to the first of these tasks, but decisions will be influenced by the ability of forces to contribute to both tasks’.^[32] The guidance to the ADF to provide for forces in sufficient number and with the ability to be deployed on both the local and regional level was further hampered by the definition of ‘regional interests’ being expanded from the immediate neighbourhood to include the wider Asia-Pacific region.

Even so, the Howard Government’s Defence 2000 did not herald dramatic change—except in the key area of defence funding. The fact was that the self-reliance idea had been undermined in the late 1980s and early 1990s by poor economic performance and reduced defence budgets. A prolonged period of so-called ‘zero growth’ for the defence budget and the acquisition of important new advanced technologies—particularly for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN)—had meant decreased funding for operating costs and personnel numbers, particularly for the Army.

Defence 2000 represented both strategic continuity and budgetary changes. It was an extremely carefully considered piece of work by the National Security Committee of Cabinet over the best part of a year. It neither walked away from the ‘defence of Australia’ construct nor returned to the ‘forward defence’ policies of previous Coalition Governments. It was different in two key areas: first, it involved unprecedented consultation with the Australian community; second, it introduced a new approach to defence planning by providing Defence with a costed defence capability plan for the development of Australia’s armed forces over the next decade.

The geographical approach, however, was reassuringly familiar. Defence 2000 asserted that Australia’s most important long-term strategic objective ‘is to be able to defend our territory from direct military attack’.^[33] This is described as ‘the bedrock of our security and the most fundamental responsibility of government’.^[34] This was then followed by a series of geographical priorities (the so-called concentric circles):

The statement is made that we have strategic interests and objectives at the global and regional levels. However, it then proceeds to give the highest priority to the interests and objectives closest to Australia because, in general, the closer any crisis is to Australia, the more important it will probably be to our security and the more likely we will be able to assist in confronting and resolving it. This in fact reflected the ADF’s actual experience in East Timor the previous year, in 1999.

The force structure priorities in Defence 2000 are classical ‘defence of Australia’ orthodoxy. Thus, the priority task for the ADF is the defence of Australia and we must: (1) be self-reliant—able to defend Australia without relying on the combat forces of other countries; (2), have a maritime strategy—be able to control the air and sea approaches to our continent; and (3) have proficient land forces—be able to defend Australia and its approaches, and also to contribute substantially to supporting the security of our immediate neighbourhood.

This final task specifically extended the force structure determinants of the ADF to the neighbourhood. It represented an important shift, yet basically at the margin, to the primary drivers of the force structure, and reflected the deterioration in strategic circumstances in our immediate neighbourhood. The Army was no longer to give priority to providing the basis for its rapid expansion to a size required for major continental-scale operations. The government’s aim was to provide available land forces that could respond effectively to any credible armed lodgement on Australian territory and provide forces for more likely types of operations in our immediate neighbourhood.

All this was compatible with an essentially bipartisan approach to defence policy principles that had existed for more than 25 years. Having the defence of Australia and our neighbourhood requirements as the primary drivers of the ADF’s force structure is eminently sensible. That still leaves niche capabilities for deployments much further afield in support of our alliances and our global interests.

But the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 threatened to change all that. Some immediately proclaimed the end of the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine, which they described as ‘discredited’. The previous Defence Minister, Senator Robert Hill, never uttered the words ‘defence of Australia’ in public, except in a perfunctory manner. He seemed to be much more interested in the foreign policy aspects of the Defence portfolio. For example, it is said that he argued in Cabinet in December 2005 that Australia’s most important strategic priority was the Middle East—an argument that he lost.

Certainly, Hill’s two Defence Updates in 2003 and 2005 were strong on declaratory policy and thin on strategic logic. In my view, Hill was responsible (during his four-year term as Minister for Defence) for seriously undermining the logical strategic priorities of our force structure. The 2003 document was keen to get into product differentiation by showing that the prospect of military attack on Australia had diminished. Yet that was simply raising a ‘straw man’, because previous Defence White Papers never counted on the likelihood of attack but, rather, on its seriousness were it to occur. Rather lamely, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2003 went on to say that although ADF involvement in coalition operations further afield was somewhat more probable than in the recent past, it was likely to be ‘limited to the provision of important niche capabilities’.^[35]

Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2005 emphasised the need for a bigger Army (but only by an additional 1485 regulars) and concluded, correctly, that Defence remains the primary instrument of the Australian Government in building warfighting capacity to respond to possible future threats.^[36] But it failed spectacularly to explain the strategic reasoning for the acquisition of tanks, the region’s largest amphibious ships, the air warfare destroyers (other than to defend the amphibious ships), and the C-17 Globemaster III heavy transport aircraft. Substantial parts of Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2005 read more like a foreign policy document, perhaps also reflecting the leanings of the then Secretary of Defence Ric Smith who was a former senior Foreign Affairs officer.

My colleague, Professor Hugh White, has sought to move beyond the ‘defence of Australia’ as the central organising principle of defence policy, and focus instead on maximising Australia’s military capacity to protect its interests in the stability of the Asia-Pacific region in the face of conventional strategic threats. He believes that the ability to defend the continent will still be important, but the primary focus should be maximising capabilities to protect interests offshore. He claims that, if we choose well, forces designed primarily to defend Australia’s wider strategic interests will provide Australia with a robust capacity to defend the continent.^[37] White recognises that this will require great clarity and discipline in force planning. In my view this will be particularly the case, as he proposes that we should have forces ‘maintained at a level able to operate effectively against the forces maintained by major Asian powers, and in sufficient numbers’.^[38]

Hugh White’s own force structure proposals concentrate on the need for high-level air and naval forces—primarily submarines and combat aircraft—and he considers that we should not be putting our money into air warfare destroyers and large amphibious ships (although he does envisage a lighter constabulary army of 12 battalions or even more).^[39] With regard to what forces Australia needs for expeditionary operations, his question is whether there may be some future expeditionary operations in which we would wish to exercise ‘substantive strategic weight’, or whether they will all be merely diplomatic gestures?^[40] His conclusion is that Australia should aim to build and sustain military capabilities that will give it ‘real strategic weight in Asia’ as a regional power.^[41] But, significantly, he concludes his paper by recognising that Australia’s relative strategic potential in Asia is ‘in long-term decline’.^[42]

My concern here is that these proposals are too ambitious, even unrealistic, both in terms of the resources that Australia will have available for our national defence effort, and compared with the likely economic and military growth of major Asian powers. Furthermore, the concept is potentially open-ended in its scope and could well lead to equally open-ended force structure proposals. And in my experience of the force structure development process, the ADF could be expected to focus on their expeditionary capability, leaving the defence of Australia a very poor second, irrespective of what the government of the day might claim as its policies. There would be a severe risk that the ‘discipline in force planning’ required by these policies might be most conspicuous by its absence.