Table of Contents
The serious academic study of Australian defence policy can be said to have begun with the publication of a book by the SDSC’s founder, Tom Millar, in 1965. The dust jacket of that book, Australia’s Defence, posed the following question: ‘Can Australia Defend Itself?’ Millar thus placed the defence of Australia at the centre of his (and the SDSC’s) work from the outset. Much of the SDSC’s effort over the intervening 40 years, and I would venture to say most of what has been of value in that effort, has been directed toward questions about the defence of the continent. This has also been the case for most of the work by Australian defence policymakers over the same period. In this chapter I want to reflect on that work by exploring how the idea of the ‘defence of Australia’ has evolved over that time, and especially how its role in policy has changed, from the mid-1960s up to and including the most recent comprehensive statement of defence policy, Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force.
This is no dry academic question. The key question for Australian defence policy today is how we balance priority for the defence of Australia against priority for the defence of wider strategic interests. The starting point for that debate is the policies of the 1970s and 1980s, which placed major emphasis on the defence of the continent. Over the 1990s our policy slowly but steadily evolved to put more weight back on the ability of the ADF to conduct operations beyond the defence of the continent. This evolution is still incomplete. We have not yet worked out the implications of this new emphasis for the way we plan our forces. This is the heart of today’s defence-policy challenge. To understand these questions, we need to ensure we understand Australia’s motivations. In this chapter therefore, I want to contribute to our current debates by looking back; first at how and why we came to adopt the ‘defence of Australia’ policies in the 1970s and 1980s, then at the changes in our strategic environment in the 1990s, and finally at the way our strategic policy has evolved in response. All these issues have been quite seriously misunderstood in much of our recent defence debate. Getting them straight will help us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of today’s policy, and hence to grasp more clearly where it should go from here.
It may help to start with a definition. By ‘defence of Australia’ I mean the idea that the principal function of the ADF, and the core basis for choosing its capabilities, is the defence of the Australian continent from direct military attack, and in particular the ability to do so against any credible level of attack without relying on the combat forces of our allies—the self-reliant ‘defence of Australia’. This idea began to evolve at the time of the SDSC’s foundation in the mid to late 1960s, and was further developed during the 1970s and 1980s, finding its most complete expressions in the policies of the 1986 Dibb Review and the 1987 Defence of Australia. But there was nothing new in the idea that the defence of the continent was one of the key questions for Australian defence policy, or that our defence policy would hinge around choices between a narrow continental view of Australian strategic interests and objectives and a broader view. The Commonwealth’s first governments thought that Australia’s naval and military forces should be able to defend the continent, at least from limited attacks, and they designed the early Army and Navy accordingly.[1] Still, this emphasis faded after 1914, and the idea of defending Australia did not return to the centre of Australian defence thinking until the collapse of the ‘forward defence’ posture in the 1960s.
‘Forward defence’ is often seen as a product of the imperial or global tendency in Australian defence policy, rather than the regional or continental tendency, but in fact it was a response to local security concerns in Asia. Australia faced new and totally unfamiliar regional security challenges after the Second World War. Decolonisation and the real threat of communism made the region suddenly much more complex and rather threatening. ‘Forward defence’ focused Australia’s defence policy on encouraging and supporting the United States and the United Kingdom to stay engaged in our region and to deal with these new local security concerns for us. It made a lot of sense while it lasted, but it did not endure. By the early 1960s it was clear that the United States and the United Kingdom did not share Australia’s views on key regional issues like Indonesia, and by the end of the decade both allies had decided, for different reasons, that their strategic postures in our region were unsustainable.
Australia’s contemporary conception of ‘defence of Australia’ emerged as a response to these cracks in ‘forward defence’. The demise of ‘forward defence’ began, much earlier than many people think, in the early 1960s, when the United States would not assure Australia of military support against a disruptive and increasingly well-armed Indonesia. Without declaring a change in policy, the Robert Menzies Government set about transforming the ADF into a force that could defend Australia unaided. It purchased new capabilities, including F-111, Mirage III, C-130 Hercules, and DHC-4 Caribou aircraft, UH-1H Iroquois ‘Huey’ helicopters, Oberon-class submarines, Guided Missile Destroyers, M-113 Armoured Personnel Carriers, and it also introduced conscription. By 1965 Menzies had, almost by stealth, laid the foundations of a defence force able to protect Australia and its regional interests without relying on allies.
It was as well that he did so, because over the following decade Australia’s strategic circumstances underwent a revolution, with both positive and negative aspects. In 1965 Suharto replaced Sukarno as Indonesia’s President and the country began to change from a strategic liability into a net asset for Australia. Partly as a result, Southeast Asia as a whole began to emerge from decades of crisis and evolve into a region of peace and development. In the early 1970s the opening to China dispelled for a while one of Australia’s major security concerns, and détente promised a safer global strategic balance. All these developments made Australia feel safer. On the other hand, the Vietnam War undermined America’s role in our region and prompted, via the Guam Doctrine, a major reduction of America’s commitments to Asian allies, including Australia. At the same time, though for different reasons, Britain withdrew strategically from our region too. By the end of the 1960s, the era of ‘forward defence’ was clearly over. The good news was that our region looked much less threatening than it had for many decades. The bad news was that our allies had made it clear that we would have to deal ourselves with whatever problem might remain.
Well before 1970 it was clear that Australia needed a new defence policy to deal with this new reality. Fortunately, the new challenges stimulated perhaps the most active and informed defence debate we have ever had—in the universities, the press and within government. Coalition Defence Ministers including John Gorton and Malcolm Fraser started airing new ideas in the late 1960s. The debate could not help but echo the founding fathers’ debates about imperial versus local defence priorities, but the circumstances were very different, and so were Australia’s options. Both the nature of our regional security concerns, and the capacity and willingness of our allies to support us had changed profoundly. In March 1972, the McMahon Government produced a policy discussion paper which confirmed that Australia’s strategic policy had to change. It made a blunt assessment: ‘Australia would be prudent not to rest its security as directly or as heavily, as in its previous peacetime history, on the military power of a Western ally in Asia.’[2] And it drew the inescapable conclusion: ‘Australia requires to have the military means to offset physical threats to its territory and to its maritime and other rights and interests in peacetime, and should there ever be an actual attack, to respond suitably and effectively, preferably in association with others, but, if need be, alone.’[3]
These ideas were conclusively established as the foundations of a new defence policy in Australian Defence, the 1976 Defence White Paper, published by the government of Malcolm Fraser. It is a remarkable document. The first chapter explained in a few lines the revolutionary changes of the preceding decade, and concluded: ‘The changes mentioned above … constitute a fundamental transformation of the strategic circumstances that governed Australia’s security throughout most of its history.’[4]
A few pages later, under the heading ‘Self-Reliance’, Australian Defence explained the implications of this transformation:
A primary requirement arising from our findings is for increased self-reliance. In our contemporary circumstances we can no longer base our policy on the expectation that Australia’s Navy or Army or Air Force will be sent abroad to fight as part of some other nation’s forces and supported by it. We do not rule out an Australian contribution to operations elsewhere, if the requirement arose and we felt that our presence would be effective, and if our forces could be spared from their national tasks. But we believe that any operations are much more likely to be in our own neighbourhood than in some distant or forward theatre, and that our Armed Services would be conducting operations together as the Australian Defence Force.[5]
While Sir Arthur Tange forged the unified Defence organisation needed to implement this vision, the implications of these bold new ideas for the ADF were painstakingly worked out. Progress was slow, and many logjams remained when Kim Beazley became Defence Minister in 1984. To break these, Beazley commissioned Paul Dibb to review Australia’s defence capabilities, and then write a new Defence White Paper, Defence of Australia, released in 1987. Neither Beazley nor Dibb invented ‘defence of Australia’: their contribution was to work out how to implement it. They converted the bold new ideas of Australian Defence into a robust approach to force planning. Their work was very successful. It won popular support by appealing to a sense of national self-confidence. It reassured our neighbours about our strategic objectives. It provided a clear basis for disciplined decisions about capability priorities. And it stepped around the electorate’s deep post-Vietnam War allergy to expeditionary operations.
One measure of this success was the willingness of governments and electorates to fund the policy. Defence spending averaged 2.3 per cent of GDP during the 1980s, compared with an average of 2.1 per cent (of an admittedly larger GDP) during the 1990s.[6] This appears surprisingly high in a period when threats seemed remote and deployments were rare. Perhaps it showed that that public understood there was no alternative to a policy of self-reliance, so we needed to make long-term investments in the necessary capabilities. Certainly the 1980s saw big investments in major capabilities, including the F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, Collins class submarine, guided missile frigate, ANZAC ship, air-to-air refuelling tankers, and a major expansion of our basing infrastructure in Australia’s north and west.
Australians took a while to accept the new policy. Most thought we did not have the weight to look after ourselves—a sentiment Jim Killen alluded to in 1977 when saying we couldn’t defend Botany Bay on a sunny Sunday afternoon. But once we got used to it, Australians warmed to the idea that we could defend our own continent without having to call on the help of our allies. When Gareth Evans, soon after taking over as Foreign Minister in 1989, said that Australia’s self-reliant defence policy had ‘liberated’ Australia’s foreign policy, he was perhaps indulging in a little of his own characteristic flamboyance.[7] But there was something to his statement. As General John Baker often remarked, taking responsibility for our own defence provided Australians with a new sense of confidence in their engagement with Asia. It also made a subtle but important difference to the way we viewed our alliance with the United States. Self-reliance helped ease the stigma of dependency in the relationship, and made it much easier to construct an account of the alliance which enjoyed broad support across the political spectrum in Australia. We were no longer seen to support the United States in the hope that one day in the future it would come to our defence, but because the alliance directly served specifically Australian strategic interests.[8]
In recent times, however, the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine of the 1970s and 1980s has received a bad press. It has been criticised as isolationist and reactive. These criticisms derive primarily from the view that ‘defence of Australia’ totally precluded Australian military operations beyond the narrow defence of the continent. This is, at least in part, a misunderstanding, and it is important to clear it up. A more accurate view of how ‘defence of Australia’ balanced continental defence with wider strategic interests, and of the consequent strengths and weaknesses of the policy, will help us understand better how policy on this central question has evolved since then, and where we need to go from here.
The policy revolution that resulted in ‘defence of Australia’ was not driven by a deep ideological predisposition against military operations beyond Australia’s shores. There was an element of that in some of Gough Whitlam’s statements,[9] but the idea that really drove the new policy was self-reliance. Australia abandoned ‘forward defence’ primarily because our allies were no longer strategically committed to our region. Without them, our new defence policy imperative was to maximise Australia’s military capacity to protect our security unaided. This is clear from the passages quoted above from the 1972 Discussion Paper and Australian Defence. The main message in both papers was that, in future, Australia’s forces would need to operate independently of allies. The ADF might need to operate not just in defence of the continent but also ‘in operations elsewhere’. The Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities (or Dibb Review) and the 1987 Defence of Australia took the same view. For example, Defence of Australia said:
A requirement has also been identified for Australia’s defence policy to take account both of developments in the South-West Pacific and South-East Asia—our region of primary strategic interest—and to be capable of reacting positively to calls for military support further afield from our allies and friends, should we judge that our interests require it.[10]
This language was not just for show. In private, the government of the day was very focused on a number of scenarios in which Australian forces might be deployed on expeditionary operations—such as the then much-feared contingency of a clash on the Indonesia–PNG border. It vigorously maintained Australia’s forward commitments in Asia through the Five Power Defence Arrangements[11] and in other ways, and when crises arose (for example in Fiji and in the Persian Gulf in 1987), it was quick to deploy forces.
So expeditionary deployments were in no sense precluded by the ‘defence of Australia’ policies of the 1980s. Nonetheless, they did place much less emphasis than previous policies on operations to defend Australian interests beyond the continent, and it is worth asking why. The explanation has several elements. First, these were years in which public support for expeditionary operations suffered a deep nadir, which certainly provided strong incentives to present policy in other terms. It can be hard now to recall just how strongly Vietnam turned Australians against expeditionary operations. As Millar wrote in 1979: ‘No political party is interested in deploying the Defence Force overseas.’[12] Some people, such as Robert O’Neill,[13] had the foresight to suggest that this feeling might not endure, but it did last through the 1980s. As late as 1991, fears of ‘another Vietnam’ shaped public, political and policy responses to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
These reservations were backed by a sense—perhaps, in retrospect, rather exaggerated—of our own weakness. Following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom and the United States from the region, it was likely that Australia would have to mount any future regional operations alone. Few Australians at this time thought we had the capacity to do that. And governments were also cautious: Australian Defence downplayed Australia’s ability to shape our region with military power,[14] and the Dibb Review said: ‘There are clear limits to our defence capacity and influence.’[15] These limits were real. When most Australians doubted we could defend the continent, few indeed thought we could do much to stabilise the region.
But perhaps more than any of these factors, the relatively low priority given to offshore operations in the policies of the 1970s and 1980s reflected the unusual strategic circumstances of the time, which did much to shape those policies. At the time, it made sense to focus Australia’s defence efforts on the continent rather than on defending wider interests, because in those last two decades of the Cold War our wider strategic environment looked unusually benign. By the mid-1970s, the Cold War was largely over in our part of the world. At the global level, after easing with détente in the 1970s, Cold War tensions intensified again in the early 1980s. The global balance between the United States and the Soviet Union was important to Australia’s security,[16] but it did not seem to have much bearing on Australia’s own defence. We felt no need to build forces to help fight the Soviet Union (with the possible partial and special exception of submarines), and the United States did not press us to do so. It seemed clear that any Australian military contribution to a global superpower war would be too small and come too late to count. We hosted important US–Australian Joint Facilities instead.
This sense of detachment from the conventional military competition between the superpowers induced a similarly detached view of strategic developments in Northeast Asia. Strategic relations between Asia’s major powers seemed permanently frozen by the Cold War into a stable and, for Australia, relatively benign pattern. After the US opening to China, both Japan and China were, in their different ways, aligned with the United States. The Soviet threat guaranteed that the United States would remain strategically engaged in Northeast Asia, which would preserve the resulting strategic balance. So, short of the threat of global war itself, Australia seemed to have nothing to fear from Northeast Asia. Australian Defence made this point very starkly when it said: ‘No more than the former great powers of Europe can we expect these powers [India, China and Japan] individually to play a large military role in strategic developments directly affecting Australia’s security in the foreseeable future.’[17]
The paper went on to dismiss the risk that these ‘large external powers’ would acquire strategic influence in Australia’s nearer region.[18] As a result, the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine gave little or no thought to military contingencies in Northeast Asia.
This is why the policies of 1976 and 1987 focused Australia’s defence policy on Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific—what the 1987 Defence of Australia called our ‘Region of Primary Strategic Interest’. Australian Defence and 1987 Defence of Australia clearly emphasised Australia’s direct strategic interests in this region. They both explicitly acknowledged that Australia might need to undertake military operations to protect these interests.[19] However, threats to those interests seemed much less likely in these years than at any other time before or since. As we have seen, by the mid-1970s many of our most pressing concerns about Southeast Asia had dissipated, as the region was transformed from an area of crisis to a model of political stability, economic growth and regional cooperation. In the South Pacific, as independence came to PNG and other Southwest Pacific neighbours, Australia’s strategic commitments seemed to be shrinking as well. Our newly independent neighbours were expected to be stable. There seemed few circumstances in which Australia would need to intervene in our backyard. And so it proved. The ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine evolved during a period in which remarkably few demands were made on our defence forces. In these years the ADF was deployed on only a handful of relatively minor and benign peacekeeping operations. Our neighbourhood generally enjoyed peace and prosperity, and the wider strategic balance in Asia did indeed remain fixed in the grip of the late Cold War. In retrospect, it was a fortunate time to overhaul Australia’s defence policy.
In these circumstances, it made sense to focus Australia’s military capabilities on the defence of the continent. This was a new task for the ADF, and it raised important and complex questions. Yet the old issue remained: how to balance the new priority for continental defence with the enduring need to be able to defend wider interests? What did the demands of military tasks beyond continental defence mean for Australia’s capability priorities in the age of ‘defence of Australia’? There was a simple answer: the forces we built for the defence of Australia could do all we needed to protect our wider interests, so there was no need to build forces specifically for this purpose. As the 1987 Defence of Australia noted: ‘Should the Government wish to respond to developments in areas other than our own, the capabilities being developed for our national defence will, subject to national requirements at the time, give a range of practical options.’[20]
This has been one of the core principles of Australian defence policy for several decades, and the question of its future is at the heart of our current policy debate. The idea is simple enough, but it has been more disputed than analysed. To supporters, it has been a kind of self-evident truth, while critics have dismissed it as a sophistic sleight of hand. I can understand the critics’ suspicions. It seems almost too good to be true that we can simply dissolve the traditional dilemma at the heart of Australian defence policy by asserting that forces developed solely for the defence of the continent could do everything else as well. Indeed, the critics might fairly say that this has always been more an assertion than a careful conclusion based on detailed argument. So far as I am aware, there was never any attempt to analyse in detail what kind of interests Australia might have beyond the defence of the continent, and what forces we might need to protect them. Moreover, in retrospect, one can see that the constraints imposed on the Australian Army’s planning by the ‘defence of Australia’ discipline were counterproductive, and failed to provide a credible basis for force development. On the other hand, supporters of the ‘defence of Australia’ approach can fairly argue that it has been proved true in practice. Over the 30 years since the 1976 Defence White Paper Australian Defence, Australian Governments have always been able to send forces sufficient to meet their strategic objectives whenever the need for overseas commitments arose. So the policy worked. That is a significant vindication of the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine. The question, or course, is whether it would keep working.