For Australia, force structure decisions don’t solely revolve around national considerations. The alliance with America has a major influence. In thinking about force structures we have two choices at either end of a continuum: either …
Articles by: "Peter Layton"
The new National Security Strategy has much to commend it in terms of ambition and intent, although its real strength is probably as a comprehensive public information overview document. This is an important matter in …
The next White Paper’s conclusions on the overall force balance will be closely studied. While whether current or future wars receive priority and the numbers of wars to be fought concurrently might be big strategic …
Behind every book, article and blog post about contemporary defence issues, there lurks the author’s view of what is the ADF’s ‘correct’ force structure. This is never more evident than when there’s a White Paper …
There is a tendency by many commentators to see defence as just being all about money. A cut is intrinsically bad, growth naturally good. For some, the size of the defence budget is held as …
Andrew Davies’ graph of the week about the elderly USAF tactical fighter fleet raises several issues. But before that it is worthwhile looking at the big US Defense budget picture below. The two big peaks …
Last week, with the Asian Century White Paper, it was all about Australia’s relationship to Asia. This week it will be all about our security relationship with the US as the 2012 AUSMIN meets in …
As the final post in this series on grand strategy, I’m going to apply the framework developed earlier to one of the day’s biggest challenges (and opportunities)—China’s emergence on the world stage. Ironically, despite the …
The grand strategy framework discussed in previous posts helps structure our thinking but when applying it we need to apply context and judgement in order to produce an actionable plan. The first step is to …
Choosing which grand strategy to use depends on how others can be influenced—however, this is only half of the matter. There is also an internal dimension where the power is developed that the external dimension …
This post is the second on demystifying grand strategy; it looks at how we can influence others. Grand strategy involves interacting with others in a way that will change them to our advantage. Grand strategy …
Hugh White nicely joins the fray in focusing on the key difference between risks and threats: time. That is, a risk can turn into a threat over time, and vice versa. As Hugh says, risk …