Following the Cold War we witnessed a sharp change in the ways that governments used armed force around the world. Many different forms of peacekeeping and intervention became more common, and broadly-supported principles of humanitarian intervention started to emerge. Australia, like other countries, was initially cautious about this trend. However, governments around the world faced strong humanitarian and political pressures to get involved, and for Australia alliance considerations also played a role. The result was a startling increase in the number of expeditionary deployments. In the early 1990s, after years of relative inactivity, the ADF was suddenly very busy in remote places. It undertook substantial deployments to Namibia in 1989, Western Sahara in 1991, Cambodia and Somalia in 1992, and Rwanda in 1994, as well as repeated deployments to the Persian Gulf and many smaller operations and commitments near and far.^[21] Suddenly, Australia’s forces were being deployed globally again.

Nor was this just a global phenomenon. For reasons we will examine shortly, the same trend was also evident in Australia’s nearer region. Starting perhaps with the first tentative deployment to the waters around Fiji at the time of the first coup in 1987, Australia found itself during the 1990s increasingly contemplating or undertaking military deployments in our own backyard—in Vanuatu, Bougainville, Irian Jaya and other parts of Indonesia and PNG—to undertake operations as diverse as famine and disaster relief, peace monitoring, evacuation of Australian citizens, and restoring law and order.

Two particular deployments—at either end of the decade—were especially significant for Australia’s future strategic choices. The first was the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, which was not a peacekeeping operation but a full-scale armed conflict—our first since the Vietnam War. The swift and relatively bloodless victory over Iraq restored the credibility of expeditionary operations in support of allies, and it did much to lift the shadow of Vietnam, and restore the credibility of the United Nations. The second really significant operational deployment of the 1990s was INTERFET in East Timor. INTERFET gave Australians a new level of confidence that we could launch and lead substantial overseas operations ourselves, rather than simply joining as a junior coalition partner. It left an increased sense of our power, and our responsibility, in the immediate neighbourhood.

None of these commitments—even, thankfully, East Timor—turned out to be very demanding military operations, but they raised important issues for our defence policy. The Army naturally bore the brunt of many of these operations and some analysts naturally questioned whether that Service should not be reshaped specifically to handle the tasks it was now being asked so often to perform. Partly this was a question about whether our defence forces should be configured for non-military tasks and, on that question, Service chiefs and Ministers were adamant that the ADF should not be downgraded from a warfighting to a peacekeeping force. Yet many of these commitments involved genuine military operations, which thus raised legitimate questions about whether hypothetical ‘low-level contingencies’ were as important for the Australian Army’s future as these demanding new expeditionary deployments. So even before East Timor, the new pattern of operations had raised doubts that the Army’s future was limited to preparing to repel raids in northern Australia.

While the ADF’s many new deployments grabbed the most attention, the final collapse of the Soviet Union was propelling a second and more profound change in Australia’s strategic circumstances. The end of the Cold War threw into doubt our comfortable assumptions about strategic dynamics in Northeast Asia and their significance for Australia. The Soviet Union’s collapse liberated China’s strategic policy from the Soviet threat and opened new strategic opportunities, just as its economic growth was starting to deliver Beijing real increases in strategic and military clout. It became clear that China might one day surpass Japan and even challenge the United States as an economic power, and ex-Soviet military technology assisted China in accelerating the expansion of its air and naval forces. People started to view China as an emerging strategic power with the potential to disrupt the international system in much the same way that Germany had done in late nineteenth century Europe.

The end of the Cold War had dissolved the glue in the US–China relationship, and raised the prospect of increasing strategic competition between them. At the same time, America’s own role in Asia was thrown into doubt. Many believed that the United States had neither the reasons nor the resources to sustain its old Cold War posture in Asia now the Soviet Union had vanished, and that America’s instinctive isolationism would re-assert itself. When Bill Clinton became President in 1993 with the slogan ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, such fears seemed reasonable. And the US–Japan relationship, also now without the Soviet threat to hold it together, was under strain from differences over trade and strategic burden-sharing. No one could assume that it would last forever. Suddenly the major power balance in Asia, which had seemed so stable, looked very uncertain. By mid-decade, the question being asked was: Would Europe’s past be Asia’s future?^[22]

All this posed a major challenge to the judgements underlying ‘defence of Australia’ that had more or less completely excluded Northeast Asia from Australia’s strategic policy calculations. It quickly became clear that strategic competition between the great powers of Asia could in future—as in the past—intrude into and destabilise Australia’s nearer region, and potentially pose threats to Australia itself. Quite suddenly Northeast Asia was restored to the traditional place it held before 1970, namely as a key focus of Australia strategic attention and concern.

Two crises around mid-decade reinforced the change. In 1994, tension over North Korea’s nuclear program found Australian policymakers facing the possibility that we might have to send forces to another Korean War. Two years later, when the United States deployed carriers to the waters round Taiwan, Australia had to consider whether we would join the United States to fight China if the crisis flared into combat. In both cases the forces we had been developing for the ‘defence of Australia’—especially our air and naval forces—provided a range of military options for government if needed. But the precepts that guided Australian defence planning during the 1980s were already starting to look badly outdated.

The third big change in Australia’s strategic situation in the decade after the end of the Cold War was a growing concern over the stability of our nearer neighbourhood. By 1990 it was already evident that Indonesia’s future after Suharto remained unclear, and possibly unstable. When he fell after the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, an era of comparative certainty in Australia’s relations with Indonesia seemed to have passed, to be replaced by an uncertain future. And, more broadly, the financial crisis shook our confidence in Southeast Asia as a region of growth and stability, deepened the sense that ASEAN was a ‘spent force’, and raised doubts about the dynamics of Southeast Asia as a whole. What all this meant for Australia’s future defence remained uncertain, but it was clear that the comfortable assumptions about Southeast Asian stability that underpinned the ‘defence of Australia’ were no longer valid.

Further east, the situation seemed in some ways to be even more of a concern. By the early 1990s it was becoming clear that the newly-independent states of the Southwest Pacific faced systemic problems that threatened their viability. The Bougainville crisis, which dragged on throughout the 1990s, both demonstrated and exacerbated these problems in our largest Pacific neighbour. It deepened Canberra’s pessimism about the ability of PNG to manage its own problems and steer towards a stable and sustainable national future, and raised the spectre of further fragmentation. These concerns, and their implications for the ADF, came to a head in the Sandline crisis of 1997, when the possibility arose that the ADF might need to be deployed to Port Moresby to deter or reverse a coup by the PNG Defence Force against the legitimate though incompetent government of Sir Julius Chan. That crisis was averted, but the lesson was plain: there was a high likelihood that the ADF would probably soon be deployed on relatively major independent operations to preserve stability in our immediate neighbourhood.

In the event, of course, that happened not in PNG or elsewhere in the South Pacific, but in East Timor. INTERFET sounded the tocsin for the idea that the Australian Army should be organised, trained and equipped primarily for operations on Australian soil. It became clear that the security of Australia’s immediate neighbourhood was going to be an increasing priority for the ADF, especially the Army. What Paul Dibb had labelled in 1998 ‘the arc of instability’ was moving back to a central position in Australian defence concerns.

Fourth, over the 1990s the levels of military capability in the Western Pacific increased significantly. In the 1970s and early 1980s it was reasonable for Australia to assert with some confidence that our forces would retain a decisive advantage in military technology over credible regional adversaries. Over the 1990s this became ever less credible. Critical military technologies such as Beyond Visual Range air-to-air combat had become commonplace by the mid-1990s. It became clear that Australia would need to rethink both the way it developed its forces and the way it planned to use them, if it was to remain strategically competitive in this more demanding military environment. As the economies of our neighbours grew, the long-term trends were going against us, despite the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. Some confident assumptions about our ability to defend the continent unaided were coming under pressure, and so was the assumption that the forces we developed for that task would provide all the options we needed for more distant contingencies. If we wanted to be able to compete in Asia’s more competitive military environment, we would have to plan more carefully for it.