Today’s asymmetric national security environment, characterised by what Foreign Minister Wong recently referred to as ‘grey zone threats’, requires far more than the acquisition of neoteric naval, air, ground, and cyber weapon systems by Australia. …
Have you ever heard of Combined Joint Headquarters (CJHQ) Top End? Before you go racing to Google, it doesn’t exist! Yet Australia and its partners need such an arrangement. It’s time to leverage our strategic …
In November 2016, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced an independent review of Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC) to evaluate its operations and determine if it was effectively serving our national interests. A central aim of …
A strategist provides the decision-maker with at least three options: the most likely option, the least likely option and the most dangerous option. This methodology applies to all strategists, regardless of their discipline—national security, diplomacy, …
A Few Good Men is a fictional film about two marines on trial for murder while serving on the US Marine Corps base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The most celebrated exchange in the film occurs …
When you order ham and eggs, you can be sure the pig is committed. The chook, well, it’s interested, but not like that pig. The same could be said about the Pacific region. Some nations …
As a migrant who has lived and worked with Australians for over 25 years, I’ve mused for quite some time over the fuss Aussies make about the ‘tall poppy’. I fully appreciate that even among …
There are crucial lessons for Australia in the way Republican and Democrat members of the US congressional committee that oversees the intelligence agencies have played politics with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential …
Deep in our Australian collective psyche is a fundamental belief that we’re ‘the lucky country’. You can’t blame us because even our national anthem says ‘our land abounds in nature’s gifts, of beauty rich and …