{"id":5550,"date":"2013-04-17T13:59:34","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T04:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=5550"},"modified":"2013-04-23T10:29:03","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T01:29:03","slug":"vietnam-and-lessons-for-afghanistan-and-the-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/vietnam-and-lessons-for-afghanistan-and-the-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"Vietnam and lessons for Afghanistan and the budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Minister<\/a><\/p>\n

As a budget, a White Paper and an election crowd the calendar, Defence counts down the days to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It\u2019s easier for the Defence Minister to talk about Afghanistan than to say too much about the budget, the Paper or the poll. When coming calendar events make it unsafe to chat in detail about the future, history is an excellent place to turn. And history can always be turned to use in preparing for future arguments. That partly explains why Vietnam featured as a motif of Stephen Smith\u2019s ASPI speech<\/a>. (video available here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Grappling with the hydra that stretches in so many directions from Russell means that any speech by the Minister bears diverse messages. The text must be a mixture of attack and defence that seeks both to explain and argue, to announce and ignore, to reveal and conceal. What\u2019s unsaid offers shape and context to the words that actually emerge.<\/p>\n

The set-piece speeches are markers in an ever-evolving conversation, always shaped by the reality that the problems never travel solo, but always in series. And the big headaches are serials that are seldom finished.<\/p>\n

The speeches, too, are serial. See the ASPI speech as a marker that sits in a direct line from the Ministerial statement on the Afghanistan<\/a> transition of 7 February and the detailed \u2018to do\u2019 list Smith offered in his February 12 paper for the Australian Defence Magazine Congress<\/a>. All these markers are heading towards fixed destinations, with Smith\u2019s announcement that the White Paper will be delivered at the end of June (just meeting the promise that it would be out in the second quarter of this year).<\/p>\n

The calendar rundown thus reads: federal budget in May, Defence White Paper in June and federal election in September. Those dates frame the big decision that haunted this ASPI speech and many that have preceded it. It is, of course, the dollar decision that will drive through the budget, the Paper and the poll. The future spend on Defence didn\u2019t have to be addressed in the speech because the question was, predictably, the first one asked after the address.<\/p>\n

Defence spending is heading south and will keep going south. Last year\u2019s budget cut the Defence share to 1.56 per cent of GDP<\/a>. It\u2019s a fair bet that the budget projection announced next month will lower that share again\u2014and that the White Paper the following month will set a floor of 1.5 per cent of GDP for Defence. The promise will be that spending will be returned to 2 per cent of GDP \u2018as circumstances permit\u2019. The central struggle in such a pledge doesn\u2019t reside in the far-off land of future permission; it\u2019s to see that spending doesn\u2019t fall below the new floor.<\/p>\n

The argument Smith mounted in responding to that funding question is that an average of budgets over the last dozen years shows 1.7 per cent of GDP going to Defence. Members of his expert audience were later scratching their heads at how to achieve that 1.7 per cent figure (subtract operational expenses and non-scheduled purchases, for example?). As it happens, the experts were wrong and the Minister is right\u2014the twelve-year average is 1.76% according to Mark Thomson\u2019s figures (see post below<\/a>). The central criticism, though, was that the trend line over most of that period was pointing up\u2014although the data doesn\u2019t really support that claim either. But, unarguably, this year and next are sharply down.<\/p>\n

All this brings us to the Vietnam motif of the speech. Defence suffered after Vietnam. We\u2019re going to do it again after Afghanistan, but now Smith promises it will be done in a smarter manner and with more planning. With Smith having introduced Vietnam, it kept tolling in the background of his speech. He certainly set the tone with his reference to the 1975 \u2018image of helicopters leaving from the United States\u2019 Embassy roof, again underlining the old adage that people may not remember how you arrived, but they certainly remember how you leave.\u2019<\/p>\n

One Vietnam echo was the Minister\u2019s reference to the need to get \u2018precision\u2019 from the US about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and what it plans after 2014. Precision was the last thing that John Gorton\u2019s government got from Richard Nixon. Instead, Australia was the ally repeatedly blind-sided as Nixon lurched frantically towards the exit door in Vietnam. In South Vietnam, at least, the Australian task force had its own port for a dignified egress. No such luxury this time in Afghanistan. Precision, please.<\/p>\n

Another echo of history came with Smith\u2019s discussion of what needs to be done to help after a withdrawal. The lesson he pointed to was from the Soviet Union\u2019s version of Vietnam:<\/p>\n

Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Afghan authorities were capable of maintaining levels of security with Soviet financial and materiel support.\u00a0However, with the collapse of the USSR and consequent cessation of financial support, government and security in Afghanistan effectively collapsed, leading to insurgency and civil war in Afghanistan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps next time Smith will quote Henry Kissinger\u2019s argument that the ultimate disaster befell South Vietnam not because of the US military pull out but because the US Congress cut of the cash support.<\/p>\n

In confronting the coming calendar, Smith can invoke Vietnam as both a warning but also a precedent for what is about to happen to Defence. The Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy is that after the war it is time to rethink and replan and\u2014oh, yes\u2014spend less. Call it, as Smith does, a \u2018major transition and drawdown\u2019 and the phrase \u2018peace dividend\u2019 doesn\u2019t come into it. This is all about \u2018the new fiscal reality we, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Europe and others face,\u2019 as Smith argued in February<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Drawing lessons from history and coping with new fiscal reality certainly sounds more responsible and measured than a frantic effort to extract dollars from Defence to prop up other more pressing areas of government policy.<\/p>\n

Graeme Dobell is the ASPI journalism fellow. Image courtesy of Luke Wilson, ASPI.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a budget, a White Paper and an election crowd the calendar, Defence counts down the days to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It\u2019s easier for the Defence Minister to talk about Afghanistan than to say …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":5552,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,120],"class_list":["post-5550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-afghanistan","tag-budget"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVietnam and lessons for Afghanistan and the budget | 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\/vietnam-and-lessons-for-afghanistan-and-the-budget\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vietnam and lessons for Afghanistan and the budget | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As a budget, a White Paper and an election crowd the calendar, Defence counts down the days to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 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