{"id":71081,"date":"2022-03-10T06:00:33","date_gmt":"2022-03-09T19:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=71081"},"modified":"2022-03-10T05:44:17","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T18:44:17","slug":"floods-fires-regional-disasters-and-war-australia-needs-a-bigger-defence-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/floods-fires-regional-disasters-and-war-australia-needs-a-bigger-defence-force\/","title":{"rendered":"Floods, fires, regional disasters and war: Australia needs a bigger defence force"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Can I let you in on a guilty little secret? The Australian Defence Force is too small. It must grow, which will cost money, political will and a sea change in thinking. That change will not come from within Defence but is a matter of political leadership.<\/p>\n

There are 61,468 uniformed personnel in the permanent ADF, and they work with 16,695 civilian public servants in the defence organisation. That\u2019s 78,063 in a population of 26,068,792\u2014a rounding error in statistical terms. Reservists add another 21,390, the equivalent of about 5,000 full-time personnel. Most have other jobs and duties, many of which are essential during times of national need (think rural firefighting or medical personnel).<\/p>\n

But the range of things this small number of Australians has been doing domestically, regionally and globally in the past three years has been extraordinary: support to the 2019\u201320 bushfire crisis, mask production, quarantine hotel management, house-to-house Covid checks, aged care home cleaning, Tongan volcano recovery work, Covid vaccination assistance with Australian colleagues in the South Pacific and a return to the Solomons to help with security and stability there. Prime Minister Scott Morrison appointed Lieutenant General John Frewen to turn around a flailing vaccination rollout. Most recently, ADF men and women have been deployed to help with the flood crisis in New South Wales and Queensland. I\u2019ll have missed a few things here; it\u2019s just the highlights that have been in the public eye.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the logistical and materiel assistance Australia is part of with our US and NATO partners in the heat of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all in addition to Defence\u2019s \u2018day job\u2019: growing Australia\u2019s military power with the rising budget successive governments have entrusted it with since 2014, running the business enterprise that acquires and operates complex systems and weapons, and doing all the training and exercising that being able to use lethal force in our more dangerous world requires. It\u2019s also been doing demanding and challenging daily work with our regional security partners to demonstrate presence, power and resolve in the face of an increasingly belligerent and overconfident People\u2019s Liberation Army directed by Xi Jinping. (The Chinese guided missile destroyer that used an offensive military laser<\/a> against a Royal Australian Air Force patrol aircraft off our coast last month is just the most recent, closest, graphic demonstration of this new normal.)<\/p>\n

The problem is obvious. The ADF is too small to meet these rolling, simultaneous and growing demands on its skilled people and on the expensive, complex machines and systems that it buys and operates while doing what it must to succeed in war. It\u2019s being corroded and torn apart by overuse of small groups of valuable skilled people, many for tasks their highly developed military abilities aren\u2019t really relevant to.<\/p>\n

Defence leaders are making this even more acute by the structural position they take to doing anything other than preparing for and conducting military operations involving lethal force\u2014war. Defence\u2019s mantra for decades has been that \u2018Defence structures for war and adapts for peace\u2019. National and regional \u2018assistance\u2019 is to be provided with the people and machines acquired for the \u2018core task\u2019 of warfighting. To do anything differently, the mantra goes, is to distract the military from its core mission and dilute the force.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a compelling logic, except that it pretends the military can be an island to itself, funded by the Australian people and elegantly preparing for or doing the single most critical thing it is needed for\u2014deterring or prevailing in war\u2014while politely refusing other demands that get in the way. Even amid the horrific physical demonstration by Putin that wars are not historical anachronisms, our military simply cannot just structure for war and adapt to do anything else that a government and our nation requires.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because rolling national and regional disasters and events\u2014pandemics, fires, floods and regional instability\u2014are growing in intensity and frequency. And when a crisis strikes, any Australian prime minister (and more and more often multiple premiers, chief ministers and governments in our region) see a role for the ADF\u2014regardless of Defence\u2019s desires to protect its \u2018preparedness and readiness\u2019 for core military operations. The government made clear in its 2020 defence strategic update that it sees these tasks as core Defence business. Whatever internal pressures and preferences there may be inside the Russell Hill complex, Defence doesn\u2019t say \u2018no\u2019 when the prime minister asks.<\/p>\n

Defence has caught itself in a dangerous spiral of denying that its structure, size, equipment and training are insufficient to meet its growing military and non-military tasks while being unable to convince political leaders it can\u2019t do what the nation requires\u2014whether that\u2019s a public health emergency, bushfire, flood or regional disaster.<\/p>\n

Defence would prefer that \u2018somebody else\u2019 do these things. And that\u2019s absolutely right\u2014Australia needs to invest in greater resilience in multiple parts of government and private sector operations to deal with the disrupted future we know is already here.<\/p>\n

But the empirical fact is that even if other agencies, organisations and people step up in crises, there\u2019s still a growing gap the military will need to plug. Because the essential value that \u2018sending in the ADF\u2019 brings to any prime minister\u2014and the Australian public\u2014is that it is a disciplined and trained body of men and women who can be ordered to do things rapidly and relied upon to do new tasks intelligently and well. Turning up fast and getting to work effectively has a value all of its own when it comes to reassurance, resilience and recovery. There are few other levers and tools available to our national leaders that have these attributes.<\/p>\n

A new \u2018civil disaster assistance organisation\u2019 would need to build a separate support system and enterprise\u2014including training, contracting, sustainment, facilities and logistics arrangements\u2014instead of just blistering onto Defence\u2019s larger business enterprise. That would be expensive, duplicative and slow, and the result would not be an immediately deployable, disciplined group of people able to be ordered to do what is required like the ADF.<\/p>\n

So, the answer is a sea change in assumptions about what Defence is resourced, scaled and structured to do\u2014and what it buys and trains to operate. Radical shifts in mindset come from an openness to admit that key assumptions behind what you\u2019re doing have changed. Failure comes from doing the same thing when the environment you\u2019re operating in has changed.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s Chancellor Olaf Scholz is an example of someone who has realised this in a big way over a matter of days, not years. He announced radical changes to decades-long policy and budgeting directions for Germany\u2019s military days after Putin began his war in Ukraine. Scholz understood that \u2018we are living in a new era, and the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before\u2019. We should be encouraged by his and others\u2019 willingness to change when the times demand it.<\/p>\n

The time is right for an Australian political leader\u2014the prime minister or defence minister\u2014to make the case to give Defence new funding, to be used only to grow a new part of its organisation with a core mission of helping Australia cope with the increasing number of domestic and regional crises our disrupted future environment has in store for us.<\/p>\n

That will mean recruiting people for this new mission, acquiring different (cheaper, less complex, commercial-standard) equipment like helicopters and even ships (along the lines of the Pacific support vessel already planned), all while recognising the sense of purpose that people recruited for these essential tasks will feel.<\/p>\n

The result will be a defence force that can provide options for assistance in times of national and regional need to this and future governments, without corroding the increasingly urgent efforts to have a more powerful military able to both deter others from war and, with our partner and allies, to prevail in war should deterrence fail.<\/p>\n

I doubt there would be anything but celebration and relief from the broad Australian public if funding for a new \u2018national and regional assistance command\u2019 is provided in the next budget. Once it starts to operate, those officials and military personnel who\u2019ve defended the now broken \u2018structure for war, adapt for peace\u2019 mantra might be thankful. Because they\u2019ll be able to do what the nation demands without being torn in two, or failing, while doing so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can I let you in on a guilty little secret? The Australian Defence Force is too small. It must grow, which will cost money, political will and a sea change in thinking. That change will …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":71084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[44,283,63,1178],"class_list":["post-71081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australian-defence-force","tag-climate-change","tag-hadr","tag-natural-disaster"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFloods, fires, regional disasters and war: Australia needs a bigger defence force | 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\/floods-fires-regional-disasters-and-war-australia-needs-a-bigger-defence-force\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Floods, fires, regional disasters and war: Australia needs a bigger defence force | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Can I let you in on a guilty little secret? 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