{"id":81780,"date":"2023-08-17T14:30:40","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T04:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=81780"},"modified":"2023-08-17T14:40:12","modified_gmt":"2023-08-17T04:40:12","slug":"distance-is-australias-best-defence-asset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/distance-is-australias-best-defence-asset\/","title":{"rendered":"Distance is Australia\u2019s best defence asset"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Paul Dibb\u2019s critique<\/a> of my Australian Foreign Affairs<\/em> essay, \u2018Target Australia: Is the alliance making us less safe?\u2019<\/a>, falls into three broad categories: the first is about China\u2019s plans to strike Australia, the second about Australia\u2019s plans to hit China, and the third about Australia\u2019s broader willingness to deter military aggression. He identifies the last point as the \u2018main problem\u2019, so let\u2019s begin there.<\/p>\n

It is certainly true that the weight of emphasis in my piece was on the risks of Australia\u2019s approach\u2014AUKUS and the decision to host US bombers and nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) at Australian bases\u2014rather than its benefits. But to conclude that the essay \u2018focuses entirely on the dangers of resisting and deterring China without comparing that approach with the dangers of not<\/em> resisting and not<\/em> deterring China\u2019 is to imply that questioning one method of deterrence is to oppose all forms of deterrence.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a curious feature of Australia\u2019s national security debate that the radical changes made by this government and its predecessor have immediately become the unquestioned status quo. Acquisition of SSNs was once a fringe position, yet after AUKUS was announced, it suddenly became the conventional wisdom. Now we\u2019re told that the decision to station American combat forces on Australian shores is uncontentious, and that to question it is to be soft on China. I don\u2019t accept that framing.<\/p>\n

Dibb says it is not in Australia\u2019s interests \u2018to see Taiwan\u2019s vibrant democracy crushed by the brutal military occupation of the People\u2019s Liberation Army\u2019. That\u2019s true, but protecting democracy abroad is not Australia\u2019s only interest, or even its principal one\u2014the Afghans who saw their nascent democracy crushed by the Taliban just months after Australian forces withdrew can attest to this. Politics is almost always about choosing the lesser evil, so being pro-democracy doesn\u2019t get us very far in deciding whether we should go to war on Taiwan\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m baffled by Dibb\u2019s attempt to downplay the status of the upgraded northern Australian Tindal airbase on China\u2019s targeting list. Even if Tindal-based bombers never flew missions against China\u2019s nuclear forces, they would certainly participate in a conventional war, and that alone surely makes Tindal a prime Chinese target. The same will be true of HMAS Stirling, where US SSNs will be rearmed and resupplied for wartime missions. And China wouldn\u2019t know what targets the B-52s were aiming for until the missiles they carry were well on their way. So no, China would not get \u2018plenty of warning\u2019 of a strike against its nuclear forces.<\/p>\n

Dibb and I agree it would be \u2018extremely provocative and dangerous\u2019 for Australia to strike Chinese territory. If the Australian government also agrees, then it would be the work of an instant to renounce any such an objective. It has not done so.<\/p>\n

What few hints we have about the strategic reasoning behind AUKUS (to this day, no senior minister has given a speech saying why we need SSNs) suggest the government certainly wants to strike targets at very long range, and that could include mainland China.<\/p>\n

I noted a couple of examples of this rhetoric in my essay, but it\u2019s worth adding two more. In 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia \u2018must be able to hold potential adversaries\u2019 forces and infrastructure<\/em> at risk from greater distance\u2019 (my emphasis). And journalist Peter Hartcher wrote of the 2021 Washington meeting at which Australian officials first pitched the AUKUS idea to their White House counterparts: \u2018My sources didn\u2019t put it quite this bluntly, but everyone in the room understood that this was about Australia acquiring the power to pose a direct threat to China\u2019s forces and the Chinese mainland.\u2019<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I thank Dibb for an important correction. I erred when I said the only<\/em> reason for Australia to put Tomahawk cruise missiles on SSNs was to strike Chinese territory. There are indeed other use cases; it\u2019s just that firing Tomahawks from SSNs would be a wildly profligate way to strike Chinese bases in the Pacific islands region, should they ever materialise. There are much cheaper ways to do it.<\/p>\n

As for hitting China\u2019s new bases built on reclaimed maritime features in the South China Sea, Beijing clearly believes these facilities are Chinese territory. Australia may disagree, but in China\u2019s eyes, hitting them would be no less provocative and dangerous than bombing the mainland.<\/p>\n

At the heart of this debate is a disagreement about the value of distance for Australia\u2019s defence. Dibb writes at one point that \u2018Holding a potential adversary\u2019s forces at risk from a greater distance would influence the calculus of enemy costs involved in threatening Australian interests directly.\u2019 But a few sentences later he says, \u2018Any credible future enemy operating directly against us will have highly vulnerable lines of logistics support back to its home base in North Asia. The closer it comes to our strategic approaches the more vulnerable its logistic support will become.\u2019<\/p>\n

I agree with the latter sentiment. As I argue in my forthcoming book, The Echidna Strategy: Australia\u2019s search for power and peace<\/a><\/em>, Australia\u2019s single biggest defence asset is distance. For all the dramatic progress China has made in its military modernisation, it has not overcome the basic problem of all military technology (except cyber): the further away your target, the harder and more costly it is to hit. The strange thing about Australia\u2019s current emphasis on long-range weaponry, in particular the SSNs, is that it implies Australia\u2019s chief military challenge is to overcome the huge distance that separates us from China, when what we should really be doing is exploiting that distance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Dibb\u2019s critique of my Australian Foreign Affairs essay, \u2018Target Australia: Is the alliance making us less safe?\u2019, falls into three broad categories: the first is about China\u2019s plans to strike Australia, the second about …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1095,"featured_media":81781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3111,416,52,338,3468],"class_list":["post-81780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-aukus","tag-australian-government","tag-china","tag-defence-policy","tag-ssn-aukus"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDistance is Australia\u2019s best defence asset | 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\" 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