The current debate in Australia about China’s influence operations is critically important to protect our interests and way of life. However, we need to avoid an overwhelmingly Australia-centric focus in seeking to understand the global …
The report this week that China is in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu has generated consternation in Australia, with Malcolm Turnbull expressing his ‘great concern’ about the potential militarisation of the Pacific …
A notable feature of recent debate about investing in Defence capital equipment projects has been the differing views of stakeholders on how that investment affects the economy—for example here, here, here and here. So, let’s …
This is the third in our series ‘Australia in Space’ leading up to ASPI’s Building Australia’s Strategy for Space conference in June. From the beginning, space has been a contested domain and a warfighting domain. The first …
The current tensions between Washington and Pyongyang aren’t just about history. Nor are they simply the result of personal frictions between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. At their core, they reflect the difficulties that typically …
Sea state Taiwan’s plans to build domestically designed submarines has received a boost following the Trump administration’s approval of the marketing licence required before American companies can sell technology to Taiwan. News of the approval …
International Women’s Day 2018 For the past month, we’ve been running a special series of articles to mark International Women’s Day 2018. The series has featured posts about women, peace and security from a range …
When the Trilateral Commission—a group of political and business leaders, journalists and academics—met in Singapore recently, many expressed concern about the decline of American leadership in Asia. Every Asian country now trades more with China …
In 2016, the Australian government announced that Australia had an offensive cyber capability and was using it against Islamic State. Last June the government announced the creation of an ADF Information Warfare Division responsible for …
At a time when ‘cyber anarchy’ seems to prevail in the international system, the emergence in 2015 of US–China consensus against ‘cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property’ initially appeared to promise progress towards order. The nascent …
The need for Australia to have a navy (indeed an integrated defence force) to protect its supply routes, set out so directly in John Saunders’ excellent article, is worth examining as part of a broader …
The security situation is evolving rapidly in West Africa and the Sahel—and worsening in places. The region has already featured quite prominently in the news in the first quarter of 2018. There has been another …
Australia’s embrace of the Indo-Pacific concept over the past five years drew mild interest from the region and curious discussion. The US adoption of the Indo-Pacific in both its national security strategy and national defence strategy …
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 …
It seems every day brings news of another high-profile cyberattack or intrusion affecting our personal data, national security or the very integrity and availability of the institutions and infrastructure on which we depend. These cyber …
The Australian government’s exclusion of huge Chinese telecom company Huawei from the National Broadband Network in 2012 turns out to have been a little thing hiding a bigger thing. The bigger thing is the implementation …
The world Welcome back after a long Easter weekend that was anything but peaceful. Violence erupted along the troubled border between Israel and Gaza: Israeli forces killed 18 Palestinians and injured hundreds more. Vox presents …
In the European summer of 2014, cyber operators from the Dutch Joint Cyber SIGINT Unit—operated by Dutch intelligence and security services—gained access to APT29, better known as Cozy Bear. This well-known Russian hacker group targets …
This article is the ninth in a series on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ that The Strategist will publish over coming weeks in recognition of International Women’s Day 2018. Eds. In 2015, the UN Security Council published its …
Peter Jennings has set out a disturbing but compelling vision that Leninist autocracies with nuclear weapons pose new risks to global peace. He’s right that common threads among the Chinese, Russian, North Korean and Iranian …