At the Sea Power Conference in Sydney I set out a number of steps that the new Government should take in developing the promised 2015 defence white paper. In my last post, I discussed what …
Speaking at the Sea Power Conference earlier this week, an apology was necessary to Shakespeare when I mangled his line in Julius Caesar: ‘I come to bury the 2013 White Paper, not to praise it.’ …
This post is part two of an extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released later today. As I explained in yesterday’s post, the world came uncomfortably …
This post is part one of a two part extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released tomorrow. The last crisis of 1983 was one of …
Arsenals of Folly: the making of the nuclear arms race (2007) and The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), by Richard Rhodes. Tomorrow ASPI will publish a short paper by Professor Paul Dibb which describes …
Well, she certainly doesn’t look a hundred. Indeed, it’s rather more as if the Navy’s developed something of the sophisticated allure of an older woman; after all, she was painting her ships 50 shades of …
I was in Malaysia last week at the 2nd Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum, and on Friday I reported on the outcomes of the Conference on Maritime Confidence Building Measures (MCBMs) in the South China Sea that …
The South China Sea is ‘probably the world’s single most complex, and intractable, international relations problem’. Gareth Evans, in proclaiming the South China Sea as the biggest and most complex headache, didn’t mention any of …
It’s another public holiday here in sunny Canberra, but we thought these posts from our archives would be topical to revisit. First up, submarines: last week saw Cameron Stewart publish articles on the prospects for life …
The US and Japan agreed to expand defence cooperation during Secretaries Kerry and Hagel’s visit to Tokyo this week. Hagel said: Our bilateral defense cooperation, including America’s commitment to the security of Japan, is a …
Online security firm Symantec has released a report detailing the activities of an online ‘hackers-for hire’ group it has dubbed ‘Hidden Lynx’. The company claims the group possesses levels of capability and sophistication not seen …
The attacks on Westgate mall in Nairobi provide a number of insights into the decision making cycle of a terrorist organisation, some of which we tend to pay insufficient attention to. The targeting of a …
At a time when Australian attention obsesses with China to the dangerous exclusion of much else, one of the quiet success stories in growing bilateral relations has been between the United States and India. In …
Today marks the 20th anniversary of recent history’s best known small-scale battle, immortalised in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down. An attempt by a small US special operations force to apprehend two of Somali warlord …
At a seminar in the Stimson Center in late August, Brad Roberts, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, canvassed the future of US extended deterrence and strategic stability in Northeast Asia. In an …
This morning Professor Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University, launched a new National Security College publication on the South China Sea and Australia’s regional security environment, Occasional Paper No 5, Crawford School of …
Speaking to Marines who’ve borne the brunt of combat in Afghanistan, President Obama said last month that the core of al-Qaeda (AQ) is on the way to defeat. But after the appalling terrorist violence we’ve …
RAND has just released Paths to Victory: lessons from modern insurgencies, a report that uses case studies of the 71 insurgencies completed since World War II to (among other things) identify the approaches that give a …
China’s the great question mark, but its power isn’t in question. Pose this central conundrum of the Asia Essentials in the succinct terms of the question that Hillary Clinton put to PM Rudd in 2009: …
Three-dimensional printing, also known as positive prototyping, represents a way to overcome the resource waste associated with manufacturing where items are cut to fit: it prints objects directly to specification. While the Australian debate about …