{"id":32738,"date":"2017-07-06T14:30:14","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T04:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=32738"},"modified":"2018-09-19T16:36:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T06:36:42","slug":"reflections-defence-australia-1987-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reflections-defence-australia-1987-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the Defence of Australia, 1987 (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/figure>\n

The 1987 defence white paper, The defence of Australia<\/a><\/em>, didn\u2019t represent new thinking. Some observers may have thought that was the case, given the anxious critiques of it by advocates of \u2018forward defence\u2019, particularly those politically devoted to identifying gaps between Australia under a Labor government and our principal ally, the United States.<\/p>\n

Those commentators portrayed a retreat to \u2018fortress Australia\u2019, with the implication that we were establishing a fault line in the Western alliance. What DWP\u00a0\u201987 did was render coherent, for the purposes of our defence force structure planning, years of careful thinking by departmental officials, and, to a lesser but important degree, by governments and the burgeoning national security academic community.<\/p>\n

DWP \u201987 has to be considered in conjunction with a\u00a0report<\/a> written by the minister for defence\u2019s consultant, Paul Dibb, published a year earlier. Terminologies were different then. Dibb had recommended a military strategy of denial that rapidly drew criticism from \u2018forward defence\u2019 advocates. \u2018Denial\u2019 in the Dibb report was replaced in DWP\u00a0\u201987 by a strategy of \u2018layered defence\u2019 and \u2018defence in depth\u2019.<\/p>\n

DWP \u201987 placed the key concepts in the Dibb report within regional and global security structures and commitments\u2014matters Dibb was instructed not to comment on. Doing so blunted, to some degree, the critics. The continuities, however, were vastly greater than the discontinuities. The Dibb document illuminated the rationale behind the white paper. For the first time, and in an era in which national security issues enjoyed political saliency, the Australian public had before them the product of nearly three decades\u2019 worth of official cogitation on the defence of Australia.<\/p>\n

The genesis of that thinking can be dated back to the\u00a01959 Strategic basis<\/em> paper<\/a>, which, though set aside by the government of the day, reflected widespread internal official views. The paper asserted:<\/p>\n

As our forces could be re-shaped only over a long period of years they should be designed primarily with the ability to act independently of Allies. Such forces could act conjointly with Allies in regional defence arrangements. On the other hand forces shaped solely to act in concert with major Allies would not necessarily be capable of an independent role.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though the Menzies government did not explicitly act on that assumption, ironically it ordered the substance of such a force. That was in response to doubts about the British sustaining their regional presence for the long term, fears about\u00a0Konfrontasi<\/em>\u00a0in Sukarno-era Indonesia, and concerns about whether the US would judge political developments in Southeast Asia as vital to Western security interests. The 1967 British decision to withdraw from \u2018East of Suez\u2019 ended any hopes for a return to the old ways. Then came President Richard Nixon\u2019s 1969 Guam doctrine, which assigned Southeast Asia secondary status and enjoined allies and friends to look to their own defences in the first instance.<\/p>\n

The key chapter in DWP \u201987 for giving coherence to official thinking was chapter 3, \u2018Priorities for force development\u2019. Here, I would argue, both for its primary relevance then and its enduring relevance today, was the notion of \u2018escalated low level conflict\u2019. It judged that within our region of primary strategic interest the capability existed to mount difficult conventional but still limited military operations against Australia: \u2018These could take the form of increased levels of air and sea harassment, extending to air attacks on northern settlements and off-shore installations and territories, attacks on shipping in proximate areas, mining of northern ports, and more frequent and more intensive raids by land forces.\u2019 It was not assumed then that anyone had such intentions, but capabilities in the region were beginning to show the potential for such activities should intentions change.<\/p>\n

The carefully calculated dimensions of an \u2018escalated low level threat\u2019 drove the defence force structure. The Dibb report and DWP\u00a0\u201987 overthrew the previous driver, the \u2018core force concept\u2019. Despite 20\u00a0years of revised thinking, we had not moved away essentially from timely replacement of existing capability.<\/p>\n

Two concepts supplanted it. The first was the \u2018force in being\u2019\u2014the air, naval and army requirements that would be structured and equipped to deal with threat scenarios on the immediate horizon. The second was the \u2018expansion base\u2019\u2014the vital capabilities that needed to be kept in service should the worst occur. The basic equipment and skills would be there for an expansion in equipment numbers and personnel. For the navy this dictated, for example, 17 anti-submarine warfare\/air-defence capable Tier\u00a01 and Tier\u00a02 ships for the \u2018force in being\u2019 based on credible scenarios in the choke points of our northern approaches. This was not a \u2018think of a number\u2019 exercise.<\/p>\n

As the Cold War ended and we claimed a \u2018peace dividend\u2019, those calculations fell into disuse. Faced with extensive out-of-area deployments and the difficulties shown up by the 1999 East Timor commitment, the 1987 rationale disappeared along with the calculations. The excellent performance of our military in the Middle East, Timor and the South Pacific reinforced a sense that nothing was amiss.<\/p>\n

That confidence has persisted through the recent white papers. DWP\u00a02016<\/a> gave equal prominence to our global and regional commitments as force structure determinants with the defence of our approaches. The \u2018core force\u2019 has returned unannounced. It has done so just when our strategic environment has taken a turn for the worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1987 defence white paper, The defence of Australia, didn\u2019t represent new thinking. Some observers may have thought that was the case, given the anxious critiques of it by advocates of \u2018forward defence\u2019, particularly those …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":481,"featured_media":32739,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,235,606,279],"class_list":["post-32738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-capability","tag-defence-of-australia","tag-defence-white-paper","tag-force-structure"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReflections on the Defence of Australia, 1987 (part 1) | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reflections-defence-australia-1987-part-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reflections on the Defence of Australia, 1987 (part 1) | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The 1987 defence white paper, The defence of Australia, didn\u2019t represent new thinking. 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