Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them … easy to imitate.
George Orwell, 1984
A pattern is evident in the last four decades of Australian strategic policy, one as persistent as the debate about the percentage of GDP spent on Defence.
It looks like this: cyclically, a major policy paper is released – a white paper, review, report, or strategy – and Defence and the wider national security policy community embrace it. The new policy artefact is enthusiastically scrutinised, analysed, debated, critiqued and costed.
Inevitably, a new lexicon emerges from the paper, informing a range of concepts that become the mantra of the strategic policy community. Sometimes the new policy directions are followed through, capabilities are delivered, and some outcomes are achieved. And then the cycle repeats, as surely as the perennial Australian defence policy debate between advocates of continental and forward defence. This year’s Defence Strategic Review (DSR) is no different.
The pattern is repeating. The DSR has been scrutinised, analysed, debated, critiqued, and its costs investigated. New terms have entered the strategic policy lexicon with impactful projection, accelerated preparedness and deterrence by denial the new ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ mantra among the staff and policy officers on Russell Hill. And another term, ‘national defence’, emerges from the DSR as newly significant.
The term ‘national defence’ is used in two ways in the DSR. It appears conceptually, as a replacement for ‘the defence of Australia’. It is also used in a declaratory sense, as the title of a proposed biennial strategic policy document: the National Defence Strategy. The conceptual sense of national defence is (arguably) a largely semantic change from the framework of objectives evident in 2020’s Defence Strategic Update. It is in the idea of a regular national defence strategy that we see a radical and possibly enduring change to Australia’s strategic policy pattern.
Regardless of its ultimate longevity, getting the new strategy right will be important. Just like the DSR, for public diplomacy and operational security reasons, the strategy will necessarily need to be bifurcated into a public declaratory document and a sensitive classified version. Across the public and classified version of the strategy, five elements are assessed as key to its success and utility. The national defence strategy must be practical, iterative, acknowledge the latent violence it foreshadows, and be collectively developed and properly assured.
Strategy is necessarily a practical activity. At the core of good strategy is a system of connected, resourced and expedient measures, temporally aligned to seek to achieve change within the environment to meet a political objective. It follows that the strategy must establish a clear, simple, and compelling line of logic between the problem identified, the ways and means employed to go after the problem, and the desired resultant change in strategic or operational conditions.
This sounds obvious. But even the most cursory review of Defence strategic policy documents since 1987’s Defence of Australia White Paper establishes misalignment in each between problem identification, plans (ways and means) and objectives.
Australian strategy can not, should not and must not be an esoteric study in theoretical international relations and statecraft. Practicality must be foremost in the strategy’s design and implementation. The national defence strategy needs to provide a clear, logical, resourced and executable path for the right Australians to ‘get out there’ and achieve the changes sought.
Such practicality would be evident through a simple, clear-eyed and obvious exposition within the strategy as to how the application of the chosen method over time will meet the desired end state.
Further complicating the strategist’s task is that a strategy’s path is rarely a journey to a singular objective at a point in time. It necessarily must be as iterative as it is practical. This is because a national defence strategy is enacted in an international environment that invariably has the traits of a complex adaptive system.
In such a system, emergence immediately becomes an issue. As soon as strategy ‘treats’ a problem, the nature of the problem changes – and so do the actions required to address it.
Herein lies the difficulty with the ‘ends-ways-means’ approach to strategy common within Australia’s strategic policy community. It leads to the development of singular linear paths, unaligned with the reality of the environmental context in which they are meant to function.
It follows that to address this problem, the national defence strategy must be iterative – not merely in its biennial publication, but in the ways established to go after problems. In practical terms, this means the strategy’s ways need to be inherently flexible and suitable for adaptation on the fly as the environment changes within a biennial cycle.
Traditionally, the expedient measures employed in strategy involve the planned use and deliberate application (or threat) of organised violence. This approach will still be necessary to treat many of the threats described in the DSR. The writers of the national defence strategy should not resile from this. The strategy should be deliberate and explicit about how Australia will, as necessary, organise and sustain the ADF to deliver proportionate, appropriate and effective violence in response to certain threats.
This will aid the development of suitable capabilities by the ADF. It will also reassure allies and partners of Australian resolve and will add to the deterrence effect sought within the DSR.
Not all the contemporary security challenges that Australia faces are amenable to the application of violence as a suitable treatment. There is no number of nuclear-powered submarines that will address the human insecurity within our region arising from climate change.
The DSR recognises this when it states: “Our nation and its leaders must take a much more whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach to security.” The review goes on: “This approach requires much more active Australian statecraft that works to support the maintenance of a regional balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.”
Within these assertions lies a critical issue for the direction and development of the strategy – Defence alone cannot, and should not, solely ‘own’ or develop it.
The DSR states the national defence strategy will need to address national defence and security in the broadest sense – across all the portfolios of government and national enterprise. This will require the collective development of the strategy across the whole-of-government.
Defence’s record, as well as the structure, capabilities and focus of the enterprise, suggest it is ill-equipped to do this task alone. Neither diplomacy and statecraft, or economic, industrial and social mobilisation are noted strengths of Defence – nor need they be. It follows that the development of the national defence strategy should be best conceived of as a collective interdepartmental endeavour. This should be led by a central agency, such as the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, or delegated to an appropriately constituted interagency task force.
The final requirement for the development of the national defence strategy is that it must be assured. Just like the truism “vision without resources is mere hallucination”, strategy without assurance is mere rhetoric.
Assurance in this sense is about reporting the achievement and (or otherwise) of the outcomes sought. An assurance focus on outcome is critical.
All too often defence reporting and assessments look only at the achievement of inputs to capability – indicatively these are things such as acquisitions, inventory, workforce and infrastructure. These are interesting to the strategist, and they inform important assessments of programmatic governance and diligence. But they tell us virtually nothing useful about what has been achieved (qualitatively and quantitatively) with respect to strategic or operational objectives.
Assurance, based on the planned reporting and assessment of the practical outcomes set, is the only way we can be sure, short of fighting a war, that strategy is and remains fit for purpose. It is imperative then that the national defence strategy incorporates and drives a practical assurance plan.
We can see a predictable pattern in the seasonal life of Australian strategic policy artefacts. The DSR seems to be conforming to that familiar path. Yet in the creation of the national defence strategy, we might see an imminent and perhaps radical departure from the status quo.
Whether this is the case, or we see a return to a “…familiar [1984] style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them…easy to imitate” will depend on the development path of the new strategy.
The national defence strategy will require practicality, iterative ability, acknowledgement of the latent violence it foreshadows, collective development and sound assurance to have the utility and longevity Australia needs.
