The Coalition went to the 2013 election with the promise of ‘no further cuts to Defence spending under a Coalition government’. That lasted until the 2014 Budget, when Defence was hit with a 0.25% increase …
Despite last week’s cruise missile attack in Syria, the outlook for the strategic policy of the Trump administration is still deeply uncertain. After all, one missile strike doesn’t make a strategic policy. And US declaratory …
My first exposure to defence economics came from a wonderful book called The Cost of Sea Power by Phillip Pugh. Among its many insights was a clever way of displaying the relative defence efforts of …
Numerous commentators have criticised the government’s promise to raise defence expenditure to 2% of GDP within a decade. Given the seeming arbitrariness of such a figure, and strategists’ desire for precision-guided policy prescriptions, the sceptics …
In a recent post, Neil James made some interesting points about defence spending metrics and the political economy of defence in a democracy. With the federal budget due in three weeks’ time, I thought I …