{"id":64229,"date":"2021-05-03T06:00:25","date_gmt":"2021-05-02T20:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=64229"},"modified":"2021-06-04T15:24:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T05:24:27","slug":"aspis-decades-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/aspis-decades-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"ASPI\u2019s decades: Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ASPI will celebrate its 20th anniversary later this year. This series looks at ASPI\u2019s work since its creation in August 2001.<\/em><\/p>\n

The name is the game: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.<\/p>\n

ASPI thinks about strategy. And the alchemy of dollars, deeds and dreams that turn strategy into policy.<\/p>\n

To the threshold question\u2014posed by wit or cynic\u2014of whether Australia has a strategy, turn to the response 45 years ago of Professor T.B. Millar, prefacing\u00a0 his book Australia in peace and war<\/em><\/a>: \u2018Having written all these words, I would reply: if a policy has so much history, who can doubt that the policy exists!\u2019<\/p>\n

On the Millar measure, ASPI\u2019s wordage over two decades proves Australia\u2019s effort to do strategy.<\/p>\n

The institute\u2019s discussion of what Australian strategy should be<\/em> is spiced by argument about what strategy is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

ASPI ignited at a line from former Foreign Minister Bob Carr in his memoir<\/a>: \u2018All foreign policy is a series of improvisations.\u2019 In response, eight writers debated Strategy and its discontents<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

What was strategy\u2019s core business? Who should practise it? Is enough strategy being done in Canberra by Foreign Affairs, Defence or other parts of government?<\/p>\n

Peter Jennings pondered the difference between good crisis managers and poor long-term planners: \u2018Countries that invest in strategic thinking and planning have more capacity to deliver better quality policy. Countries that don\u2019t take strategy seriously risk policy drift and ultimately losing national advantage.\u2019<\/p>\n

Robert Ayson responded that strategy and planning aren\u2019t synonymous, and strategy can be more a state of mind than a formal process.<\/p>\n

Rod Lyon thought Canberra\u2019s grand strategy was Australia\u2019s project for the world: \u2018No-one writes it down for the simple reason that it isn\u2019t the property of one person. Nor, I suppose, is it ever fulfilled, so there\u2019s no sense of the objective\u2019s being reached.\u2019<\/p>\n

Starting from the Greek noun\u00a0strategos<\/em>\u00a0meaning \u2018general\u2019 (hence \u2018strategy\u2019, or the \u2018art of generalship\u2019), Nic Stuart lamented the weight modern strategy has to carry: \u2018\u201cStrategy\u201d now covers everything from the work of a commanding general right through to\u00a0culture\u00a0(making us all think correctly) and\u00a0business\u00a0(so we\u2019ll buy more widgets). It\u2019s now being expected to define the thinking work of politicians, too.\u2019<\/p>\n

Anthony Bergin was less dismissive of business insights, saying that much could be gleaned from the best management gurus: good strategy is an educated judgement about what will work, while bad strategy is vacuous and superficial, tripping over its internal contradictions.<\/p>\n

Strategy\u2019s future, according to Jennings, depends on the capacity to vanquish the four horseman of policy eclipse: \u2018short-termism; risk aversion; groupthink; and failures of imagination\u2019.<\/p>\n

A later offering from Peter Layton<\/a> quoted the dictum that strategy is about ends, ways and means. The optimism of strategy, Layton wrote, is not a realist spiral into \u2018nightmares of forever wars\u2019, but the effort and imagination of better ends: \u2018[T]he trade of the strategist is to focus on how to make better futures rather than map the descent routes into bad ones.\u2019<\/p>\n

Strategy is an attempt to think long term amid the noise and improvisation of events, and ASPI arrived on the scene at a momentous moment.<\/p>\n

The institute was registered as a government-owned company on 22 August 2001<\/a>. Three weeks later, the 9\/11 decade was born as the planes struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. As the institute was finalising its first strategic assessment<\/a> in October 2002, jihadist bombers struck in Bali. Thus, the title of the assessment became Beyond Bali<\/em>, identifying three core challenges for the new decade:<\/p>\n