To our national detriment, much of the public discussion on war crimes alleged to have been committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan is focusing on secondary, peripheral or irrelevant issues. Some public confusion has resulted …
Articles by: "Neil James"
Media coverage and public discussion of alleged breaches of the laws of war by Australian special forces is heavily focused on individual personalities. Little attention has been paid to longstanding collective, structural and cultural drivers, …
Given calls to promote General Sir John Monash posthumously to field marshal, and with the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux to be opened on Anzac Day, we need to ensure that his substantial achievements …
The Australian Defence organisation has an undeserved reputation for supposedly ‘devouring’ its ministers. The generally high throughput has instead had far more to do with the portfolio being frequently allocated to those already in the …
Most public discussion and media commentary—and seemingly all the political and bureaucratic dissembling—about the 99-year lease of Darwin’s commercial port continues to miss the point. This isn’t primarily a commercial, foreign investment review or other …
Public debate about reform of our citizenship laws continues to be hampered by a significant categorisation error. Whether Australian citizenship should be held by traitors remains the heart of the matter. The core issue is …
When discussing what ‘strategy’ is—or isn’t—we surely need to distinguish between strategy and grand strategy, not least because of the longer timescales, wider disciplines and deeper understandings involved with the latter. Australian grand strategy stems …
Defence White Paper 2013 is well written and largely internally coherent, except for the absence of an investment plan to execute its policy and strategy objectives. It often tries making virtues out of necessities politically, …
Surely the discussion (see yesterday’s posts from Andrew Davies and Graeme Dobell) about average percentage of GDP allocated to defence investment is a straw man floated by the Minister for Defence. Somewhat successfully it seems. Defence …