Up In The Air

Australia’s military preparedness is woeful despite the immediate threat posed by a belligerent China, defence strategist Peter Jennings warned during this recent address to IPA members.

My thanks to the IPA for the invitation to offer some thoughts about Australia’s defence and strategic outlook. I will make 10 brief points. First, right now we are witnessing a wholesale reduction in Australia’s defence capability on a scale I have not seen in my professional career. Just to give you a quick snapshot of what that means I will touch on a number of areas of military capability in decline. For the most part of Australia’s post-war history, the navy has had 11 or 12 major surface ships. We currently have 11. One—the HMAS Anzac—has just been permanently tied up against dock. It is too old to operate again; that is the first of eight Anzac class frigates with potentially two more to be mothballed. We are going to have a navy surface fleet of somewhere between eight and nine major surface combatants as we move into the second half of the 2020s.

Do not believe what anyone tells you about the Collins Class guided missile submarine: it is a great conventional submarine. Probably the most formidable conventional attack submarine in the world. We have six very ageing boats. We are currently operating four. On a good day we can put two to sea, on an average day we can put one to sea. That really does not provide much in the way of sustainable undersea warfare capability.

The Taipan helicopters. Many of you have seen reports about how, bizarrely, we decided to cut their operational life short, and instead of giving them to the Ukrainians, we literally broke them up and are in the process of burying them. Now understand, we do not maintain military helicopters to fight bushfires. The principal reason for those Taipan helicopters was to give us the capacity to lift a company of 120 Australian troops into a hot zone of military conflict and deploy them. Currently we do not have the capacity to lift 120 troops into a hot conflict zone this year or next year or the year after that. We may start to get the capacity to do that again sometime around 2027.

The United States has just abandoned some long-standing helicopter replacement plans because, based on what they have seen in Ukraine, they are saying that uncrewed drone aircraft are the future. Deploying crewed helicopters into conflict zones may no longer be viable. We will start to get 1980s helicopter technology—the Blackhawk, which will replace the Taipan—into full operational service in a few years’ time, to rebuild a capability that we have lost.

In April 2023 the government decided to cut the number of planned infantry fighting vehicles to be used by the Army from 450 to 129 vehicles. That means in an army of 28,300 full-time regulars, we will have the ability to move one battalion—about 450 to 500 people—in armoured vehicles towards a conflict zone. There are more examples, but really what I am saying is that in the last couple of years we have seen a wholesale reduction in the capacity of the Australian Defence Force to fight military operations at the present time.

Taiwan is an affront to Xi Jinping.

My second point is that most of what you hear about defence growth is focused on what is going to be delivered towards the end of the 2030s or later. When Defence Minister Richard Marles announced the future design of the navy’s surface fleet last February—this is the so-called ‘enhanced lethality surface combatant fleet’—he said the surface navy fleet would effectively double in size to around 20 major vessels. Yes, that is true, but this will only be realised in the late 2030s. For the rest of this decade, it will reduce to nine, or even eight, major fleet units.

On nuclear-powered submarines, we will initially get some second-hand Virginia-class boats, if the Americans will let them go, starting in 2027. We will not see the first of the AUKUS class nuclear submarines until the end of the 2030s. And I will be about 103 when we see number eight delivered.

On missile production, two successive Australian governments have said we are interested in producing missiles domestically. Great idea. If we started tomorrow, probably the soonest we could start delivering missiles would be in about five years.

TAIWAN IS THE FLASHPOINT

So, my third point is to say that all of the developments I have just been discussing do not in any way address the biggest strategic risk we face in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the prospect of serious conventional state-on-state war in the relative near term. An informed judgement would say probably in the second half of the 2020s, so in other words maybe two years to four years from now. I am not talking about the late 2030s when we start to see the delivery of all of the anticipated defence projects.

The potential major flashpoint is a Chinese decision to attack Taiwan. Why is Communist China interested in doing it? Well, one reason is that Taiwan is a successful democracy of 23 million people giving lie to the claim that the Chinese people can only be successfully run by the Chinese Communist Party. A stable and prosperous democratic Taiwan is an affront to Xi Jinping. The risk of conflict becomes higher because China, I think, is now a country on the decline. It is failing to meet, and has failed for some time to meet, its economic growth targets. Xi is ageing; he will be 71 in June 2024. He sees a particular historical mission for himself to reunify, as he would describe it, Taiwan under the control of the CCP. In his time in power, he has unleashed an aggressive, almost 19th century type of nationalism, which the Communist Party sees as its last throw of the dice. If you cannot deliver growth, you can at least deliver war, and that is what they are preparing for.

My fourth message is to beware of a declining China. The problem that we are dealing with is not so much the consequences of China’s success, but the consequences of the Communist Party’s failure. Xi, I think, takes the view he is either going to use or lose his capacity to make China the dominant military power in the Indo-Pacific at some time in the next three or four years.

The American defence of Taiwan begins in Australia.

If you talk to our intelligence community, if you talk to military strategists in key allied countries, no one is really pushing back against the thesis that war in three years is a growing risk—except perhaps our own government. They just do not want to know. Everything they do seems to kick the can further down the road in terms of building military capability or addressing the sorts of things that you would think an Australian government would want to do, faced with the type of China which I have described. We should be diversifying our relations. We should be finding other ways to reduce the economic risk of being too dependent on China. We should be doing all of the things we can to strengthen the Australian Defence Force, not in a generation, but next year and the year after that. Frankly, that is just not happening right now.

My fifth point is to say that we do not have an opt-out clause when it comes to war in the Indo-Pacific. Our government might think it is possible to let China wholesale invade and take over a democracy of 23 million people in Taiwan. We may think we can opt out of that, but Japan does not think that. Japan sees a Chinese takeover of Taiwan as being an existential threat to their security. A takeover of Taiwan would also mean, to all intents and purposes, the Americans have given up on being the dominant provider of security in this region.

In my judgement I think Australia is a critical part in how the US thinks it can mount the defence of Taiwan, should Communist China attack. The minute that conflict seems probable, America’s air force is going to leave Guam, its Fifth Fleet is going to leave Yokosuka in Japan, the Marines are going to leave Okinawa, and the American 25th Division is going to leave Hawaii. This is part of the American publicly articulated strategy of dispersal. Do you know where they are going to come? They are going to come to Australia. They are going to come to Northern Australia. So, the American defence of Taiwan begins in Australia. If that seems strategically puzzling to you, I suggest you read World War II history, in particular the strategic planning of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy. Read about what Japan thought it needed to do to become the dominant military power in the Indo-Pacific and about what the US did to prevent that from happening.

WHAT WE NEED TO DO

Point six is that we need to significantly revamp domestic defence production. Our capacity to do that in the 2020s is significantly less than it was in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1942 it was possible for Australia to develop a perfectly capable ground attack multi-role combat aircraft—the Boomerang—in the space of just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on the Port of Darwin.

The Boomerang was maybe not the best combat aircraft that ever flew in WWII but 249 were made and it performed invaluable service in home defence and in New Guinea. The Boomerang is the only Australian designed and built fighter aircraft to see production, and I regret to say at this stage in the 2020s we are well out of the aircraft design and construction business.

However, we need to do what we can to increase industrial production capability in many areas because we cannot expect to rely on overseas sources of supply for missiles, for all of the consumables of war, for ammunition, you name it, in terms of military operations. A major revamp of domestic defence production is needed.

Point seven: we need to add combat power to the Australian Defence Force as quickly as we possibly can. This primarily means things like drones, it means missiles to give longer range, making it much more complicated for an opponent to come close to Australia. On drones, right now Ukraine is using about 10,000 drones a month in its fight against the Russians; everything from shop-bought quadcopters flying grenades onto Russian tank turrets, through to much more sophisticated long-range drones. Australia is the only front-ranked military force in the world not to have an armed drone.

Sad to say it was the previous Coalition government, in its dying days, which took a decision to cancel the acquisition of an uncrewed armed drone in order to spend more money on cyber security. We do not have that capability and we are going to have to change that very quickly because a lesson from the Ukraine conflict is that it is becoming too dangerous to put crewed aircraft into high-risk combat zones.

Point number eight is that we need to strengthen northern security. Our geography does not change: the north remains the area, to use (ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre emeritus professor) Paul Dibb’s phrase, “from or through” which an aggressor may attack us. We have seen over the years an erosion of Australia’s military presence in the north and a reduction in our capacity to move forces up into the north and to be able to draw on the industrial infrastructure, the electricity grid, and other infrastructure essential to support military operations.

We need to bring the Port of Darwin back into the control of Australian hands, not in the ownership of a Chinese company, which it currently is. There are only about 93 years left on the lease. We need also to have our defence force out there maintaining a greater presence in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia, demonstrating to those countries that they have a choice other than simply accepting overwhelming Chinese power.

My next point is we need to strengthen national resilience. I give many versions of this talk, and what I would say is I usually end up with an extremely depressed and slightly stunned looking audience. Are you serious, Peter? Do you really think the risk of conflict is there? We are simply not mentally prepared for it. There is not a single defence facility in the country which is defended? I am not talking about private security guards on the front gate. There is no defence capability against any form of internal subversion or attack, yet we know that surprise attack and subversion is rule one in the playbook of how Communist China plans military conflicts.

We have been riding on the USA’s security coat-tails.

We have very little in the way of capacity to protect our critical infrastructure; our electricity grid, our hospital infrastructure, the computing and industrial control systems they rely on, water, dams, gas, road transport. All of these things have now become integrated to an extremely finely tuned level of operational control through the Internet of Things.

All of these areas can be attacked by hostile cyber actors wanting to shut down the grid or other critical infrastructure. ASIO Director-General of Security Mike Burgess made this point in his annual threat assessment speech in February. His comments were overshadowed by his reference to an unnamed politician betraying the country. (The surprising point there is not that there has been one former politician that has done it, I can think of at least half a dozen that fall into that category.) That aside, strengthening national resilience is key.

My tenth and final point is about defence spending. We have been significantly underspending on defence for decades, riding on the USA’s security coat-tails. We spend about two per cent of gross national product on defence, $52.5 billion a year, and that gives us the defence force we have today with about 57,000 regulars and 32,000 reservists in service. In dollar terms we have never spent more on defence, and we have never had less of an available, fully operational military capability than we have right now.

What if we lifted that spending to three per cent of GNP, that is another $25 billion? That level of spending would deliver the AUKUS nuclear submarines, the weapons for them, the new base we need on the east coast to house them, the training infrastructure, the personnel and the range of other new and emerging military technology anticipated under what is called AUKUS Pillar Two; which includes defence applications of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, autonomous systems, undersea technology, and hypersonic platforms. Delivering on AUKUS in a serious and sustained way, in my view will add about one per cent of gross national product like it or not. With AUKUS we ordered the degustation menu without realising the real cost.

Four per cent of gross national product would start to take us to spending levels where we were at the height of the Vietnam War. That level of spending would enable development of a stronger, more sustainable defence industry base for missile production, for example. It would deliver a capability to grow the Australian Defence Force from something like 65,000 regulars to maybe 85,000 or 90,000. That is still a small military by the standards of some of our Indo-Pacific neighbours.

CONCLUSION

In many respects the last 20 years of defence thinking and planning—that is, when we were not thinking about fighting Islamist terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been decades of drift. We have lost the capacity to think strategically and realistically about the defence capabilities we need to look after our security in the 2020s, the second half of this decade.

We need to rethink the foundations of national security and put a focus on building combat capability in the short term, in order to give any potential enemy pause for thought. The real task is to make sure that every day, when Xi wakes up, he thinks to himself, “Not today. Today’s not a good day to attack Taiwan”. That is the thing we need to achieve every day for the next five years. Beyond the defence forces, we need to build greater national resilience in Australia so we will be able to withstand the pressure which I fear we will come under in coming years from China.

In response to a question from the audience regarding what fuel should be used to propel our defence machinery:

It seems to me gas is the obvious solution for the next century of Australian fuel requirements. In terms of the military, you are absolutely right, they are entirely reliant on the same supply of jet fuel and other forms of fuel which the civilian economy requires. And on jet fuel, on a good day, including vessels which are actually inbound to Australia on the high seas right now, we have something less than three weeks of supply. In the event of a strategic crisis, in the event of tensions around Taiwan, I can tell you without any doubt, one of the first things that will happen is maritime shipping will cease, tankers will cease delivering fuel to Australia. Defence will reach out to the government and say, “We have the first requirement for access to that fuel usage”. Whether or not our government will agree with that point, I do not know.

Read Jim Molan’s book, Danger on Our Doorstep.

Interestingly, the US is now building the largest fuel storage facility near Darwin that we have had since the end of WWII. It will increase by a substantial factor the volume of jet fuel that is stored in the Northern Territory. Why do you think the Americans are doing that? It is not to be nice to Australia. They are pre-positioning for a conflict we are only dimly aware of at this point.

In response to a question about the late Jim Molan’s book, Danger on our Doorstep (2022):

To those of you who have not read Jim Molan’s book, Danger on Our Doorstep, I would recommend you do. It is a very good analysis of what a conflict with China would look like in the early stages. Jim was absolutely right to point out that China’s highest priority for defence spending has been on developing and fielding long-range missiles. China is fielding hundreds of missiles which have the capacity to reach pretty much every part of mainland Australia. Not necessarily with nuclear weapons, but they could hit any Australian base in the north, they could hit Parliament House. There is really no limit to what they could do without Australia having even the most rudimentary anti-missile defence capability in place.

Perhaps even more concerning are the weapons China is putting on their ships, including hypersonic cruise missiles. That is to say, cruise missiles that fly a few metres off the surface of the ocean at over Mach 5: five times the speed of sound. That is a very difficult weapon to defeat if you are on a ship. China has invested heavily in a military capability which is designed to keep the Americans as far away from the Chinese mainland as possible.

Another point which Jim writes about is that all of this creates a logic where pre-emption is the best way to use these military capabilities—use it or lose it. Pre-emption has for thousands of years been an element in Chinese strategic thinking. Hit the enemy before they really expect the attack.

The American strategy in response is called dispersal—leaving their bases before China has the chance to take those forces out. Northern Australia is the back-up plan for the Americans in that context, just as World War II demonstrated.

Peter Jennings is a former senior Defence Department official. He served as the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute from 2012 to 2022, and is now a director of Strategic Analysis Australia and principal of Peter Jennings Strategy Consultants. He gave this address to the IPA in Sydney on 20 March 2024.

This article from the Winter 2024 edition of the IPA Review is written by defence strategist Peter Jennings.