Deterring Whom? Michael Pezzullo and Australia’s Missing National Defence Strategy

Rory Medcalf’s presentation to the Williams Foundation seminar on air combat mass and depth described a population that senses danger but cannot say what it is afraid of. The National Security College survey he drew on found widespread unease about Australia’s strategic circumstances. That unease is, in Medcalf’s phrasing, ungrounded and imprecise.

Michael Pezzullo, the former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, took up that gap in his address to the seminar audience.. He spoke for under twenty minutes and set out a harder argument than most of the day’s more technical contributions.

His starting point was that Australia has made deterrence a staple of its official vocabulary while declining to say what it is trying to deter, who it is trying to deter, or what it would take to succeed. His answer to the question was uncomfortable. What we can deter alone is not what we most need to deter. The gap between the two is closed by national preparedness, which the country has barely begun to address.

A Title Change and a Provocation

Pezzullo told the audience that the organisers had first proposed an “arid and dry” topic on the role of deterrence in Australia’s national defence strategy. He asked for a change, and the organisers agreed. The session was retitled “Deterring Whom?”, a title he hoped the audience would appreciate for its grammar as well as its provocation.

The audience, ranging from serving officers to industry executives, had spent the morning on capability. The session before it had worked through what the evolving Indo-Pacific means for Australia’s future combat requirements, and the potential of collaborative combat aircraft to deliver mass, survivability and operational effect.

Pezzullo’s contribution was to ask what all that capability is for.

He began with a blunt proposition: “deterrence, absent a grounding in actuality,” is dangerous. It earns its place in Australian strategic documents because it is agreeable. It is non-threatening and carries a defensive connotation. It implies that someone else might do something to us while we get on with our lives in relative prosperity and ease. Used that way, he argued, the concept goes soft. The official documents that invoke it become passive and abstract, written at a level that most citizens in a democracy lack the time, patience or interest to unpack. Without a defined adversary and a defined set of risks, deterrence becomes a word that signals seriousness without requiring any.

Deterrence Was Born Grounded

To make the point that deterrence has never been an abstraction in the places where it works, Pezzullo offered a compressed history, which he conceded could only be a sketch.

Modern deterrence thinking, he suggested, begins in the late nineteenth century. After Bismarck’s departure from the scene, a newly unified Germany grew colonial ambitions and naval power, and British and European strategists had a concrete problem to grapple with. The Bolshevik Revolution posed a second, as Western governments, in some cases to the point of military intervention, tried to work out what a Soviet form of Russian power would mean for their security. Hitler, initially puzzling and treated by many as an aberration after 1933, quickly became a practical question of whether to appease, prepare for war, or do some combination of both. He noted that the audience had heard John Curtin’s remarks of 1937 earlier in the day.

The Pacific offered a fourth case. Imperial Japan’s naval build-up prompted serious thought, with regrettably little coordination between Washington and Canberra, about how to deter Japanese aggression and, if that failed, how to defeat it. Pezzullo observed that the war plan the United States executed after Pearl Harbor looked much like the Rainbow and Orange series of plans developed through the 1930s. Deterrence did not work, but the plans did, once America harnessed its national will and its industrial power.

For Pezzullo the lesson is that deterrence thinking was always tied to an identifiable threat, and that when deterrence failed the plan still carried weight because it had been worked up in advance. The question that preceded the doctrine was always who, and how.

The classical age arrived after 1945. Stalin’s acquisition of nuclear weapons meant that deterrence, whether by denial, punishment or retaliation, had to be worked through down to force design and operational concepts, with nuclear forces placed on a hair trigger. Practitioners approached the problem through mathematics, game theory and statistical analysis, with Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling the exemplars, or through the historical and philosophical lens of Henry Kissinger. Either way, deterrence became a recognised discipline within strategic studies.

Pezzullo then moved to the present. Deterrence thinking now shapes doctrine, force design and operational concepts in NATO, which is dealing with Russia. The United States, which maintains a bilateral relationship with China, also places China at the centre of its deterrence strategy. Japan is increasingly thinking in deterrence terms, and Israel has had to do so out of necessity since its founding. Then he asked where Australian deterrence thinking sits, and answered with deliberate charity: it is “implied, inferred, and abstract”.

A Strategic Culture That Looks Outward

Pezzullo offered a possible explanation in national strategic culture. Australia has absorbed the idea that distance protects it, and its military culture is largely expeditionary. The country sends forces elsewhere, typically in the service of some larger global objective. The exception was a brief period between 1942 and 1944, when Darwin was bombed and midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour. In 1945 the threat largely passed. Beyond a diffuse fear in the 1950s of annihilation in a Soviet nuclear strike, Australians have never really felt threatened by something they could see.

He illustrated the point with a personal story. As a twelve-year-old in 1976, the son of an Italian migrant family in a Sydney street full of First and Second World War diggers, he pestered his neighbours about the Western Front and the Kokoda Track. His neighbours, who could be reluctant, remembered events of thirty years earlier with great clarity. Pezzullo noted that the audience now stands fifty years from 1976, which puts us further from that boyhood conversation than the conversation was from the war itself. The living memory that once gave Australians a tangible sense of threat has largely gone.

That sets up a puzzle. Public awareness and unease are growing. The Deputy Prime Minister says often, and almost alone among his colleagues, that we are living through the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the 1940s.

So what, specifically, is the population uneasy about? Pezzullo acknowledged the many non-military worries, from terrorism and artificial intelligence to the broader polycrisis. He also set aside the homeland risks below the threshold of military conflict, such as cyber sabotage and state terrorism, which he said demand vigilance and are the main reason Home Affairs was created, as a civil defence and homeland security department before anything else. His focus was on the military threshold and on what, at that level, Australia is actually trying to deter.

Three Candidates, Ranked by Probability

Pezzullo approached the question by elimination. He could work through the United Nations roster from A to Z, but briefly confirmed that Australia is not seeking to deter Chile, South Africa or Brunei. Instead he set a forty-year horizon, matching the timescale of the Treasury’s recently released Intergenerational Report, and excluded invasion. Even at the peak of its reach, he noted, Imperial Japan judged an invasion of Australia unviable and unnecessary.

What he included was everything short of that: limited lodgements on Australian territory, air and missile strikes, raiding and sabotage by special and other forces, and naval operations. Those operations might fall short of a full blockade of the sea lanes but could include interdiction, the mining of ports, and the cutting of internet cables. He added attacks on offshore oil and gas, and parallel operations in cyberspace and the cognitive realm. The purpose of such a campaign would be to compel Australia to do an adversary’s will, either by subordinating it to that adversary’s interests in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, or by splitting it from its American ally.

He offered three candidates for deterrence, in ascending order of probability to 2066.

The first is a military dictatorship in Jakarta. Pezzullo was careful to call this the least likely scenario, at well under one per cent. It would involve an Indonesia under a very different political regime, perhaps one that had to accommodate Islamist tendencies, and that had the military power generated by decades of growth. Australia would have warning time, perhaps ten or fifteen years, and Pezzullo had pointed words for those who say warning time has expired. He called that a comfortable way to draw a blind over things the country is not doing, and a distraction from the multi-generational work of building a force.

Many of the exquisite capabilities discussed earlier in the day are multi-decade undertakings. Deterring such an Indonesia would probably rely, he said, on Australia’s own combat power and a highly offensive military strategy designed to deny that regime the capacity to do harm through strike and other operations. The one assumption is that the principal ally is not “turned off”, as the United Kingdom was able to rely on in its war with Argentina. This is a file Defence should keep open and do some work on, he argued, but no more than that.

The second is a hegemonic China in a world where the United States, through military defeat or its own choice, no longer extends security guarantees to any Western Pacific nation. In this world America has retreated behind a defensive line at the third island chain, something Washington think tanks speculate about from time to time, most recently in the past week. There are no U.S. installations or forces in Australia.

Pezzullo called this the hardest deterrence problem of all, but one with a potential solution, because it would be decades in the making. If humanity gets through to 2066 without being undone by AI agents or some other planetary catastrophe, Australia would have around 40 million people. A regular, part-time and militia force of about a million, combined with nuclear weapons, would leave it relatively secure. That is a very different world from the one under discussion, but again worth enough planning to keep a warm fire.

The third is the one that matters now. It is a disruptive China, willing to use growing military power to change the territorial or other status quo in the Western Pacific and the wider Indo-Pacific.

Here, Pezzullo said, there is no warning time left. He pointed out that Scott Morrison, launching the 2020 Defence Strategic Update not far from the seminar venue, declared that warning time had expired. That was six and a half years ago. If the country still had a decade up its sleeve then, it is now six and a half years into that decade, which is cold comfort.

Deterring by Annoying

Pezzullo was clear that Australia cannot meet the third problem alone. His formula was that Australia cannot deter by denial in that fight. At most, “we deter by annoying”. The war he has in mind, in which China uses force to change the order in the Western Pacific, would be in no one’s interest, China’s included, because it could escalate vertically into the unthinkable.

The realistic contribution is as part of a U.S.-led collective defence system. That system is still largely built on the bilateral treaties Washington created in 1951, but it is increasingly working through trilateral and quadrilateral constructs at sub-ministerial levels, such as Australia, Japan and the United States.

In that fight, Pezzullo said, Australia would “regrettably” bring too little weight and too little national preparedness to make much of a difference. Its likely role, notwithstanding all the good work by people in the room and elsewhere, would be to secure a bastion at the southern end of the third island chain from which counteroffensives could be launched.

He did not dismiss what is under way. He was careful to say that excellent work is going on inside Defence with limited resources, though not enough to achieve the strategic effects required. He was particularly pleased by the Air Force’s publication on the National Defence Strategy, More Options, More Places, More Often, and by its cover. As he described it, the image shows Royal Australian Air Force and US Air Force aircraft flying in formation, including B-2 bombers, what looked to him (he is not a plane spotter) like an F-22 Raptor, Super Hornets or Growlers, and a Wedgetail. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is our deterrent solution to the actual deterrence problem that we are currently facing.”

The remark was delivered lightly, but its content was the argument of the whole address. The credible Australian contribution to deterring China is a combined force, integrated with American airpower and other allied capability, that makes more options available in more places more often. For a seminar organised around air combat mass and depth, it was a pointed reminder that the Australian contribution is judged as part of a coalition’s weight and persistence.

We Have a Defence Strategy, Not a National One

Pezzullo’s most pointed criticism was reserved for the whole-of-government picture. He praised the quality of the discussion within Defence, which he sees from time to time through contact with former colleagues. But almost nothing is being done materially and effectively at the whole-of-government level, which “puts a lie to the idea that we have a national defence strategy”.

What exists, he said, through no fault of anyone in the room, is a defence strategy. A national defence strategy would show things like a partnership between Defence and Home Affairs on a civil defence mobilisation model. “Civil defence and mobilisation,” he observed, are “two terms that dare not speak their names.”

He welcomed the decision of a joint parliamentary committee to undertake an inquiry into national preparedness and civil defence, and hoped it would expose the issue. But he made clear that the country is a long way from a whole-of-nation conversation about mobilising all the elements of power that the near-term deterrence challenge would require.

His closing argument was that an abstract discourse on deterrence “serves no purpose at all”, and that it fails three audiences at once. It leaves the public uninformed. It denies practitioners within Defence the cover and legitimacy they need to reach across the rest of the Commonwealth government, the states and territories, municipal governments and critical infrastructure providers.

And it does not bother the adversary, which he named without hedging as the planners of the People’s Liberation Army. Because of the lack of weight Australia puts behind the Australian Defence Force, those planners would at most treat it as an annoyance. Pezzullo hoped they are wrong, and that Australia could hit back harder than they anticipate. For now, he said, “I dare say they’re not exactly quaking in their boots.”

What the Argument Asks of Air Power

Pezzullo’s address sits well alongside the rest of the seminar, and it sharpens some of its themes.

First, it reframes the mass-and-depth question. A seminar on air combat mass and depth tends to treat the problem as one of platforms, sensors and munitions, and of how many of each the Air Force can field. Pezzullo’s argument is that mass and depth are national attributes before they are service attributes.

A force can only sustain combat power in a contested environment if the surrounding nation can generate, protect and regenerate it. That depends on industrial capacity, critical infrastructure resilience, fuel and logistics, a civil defence posture, and a population that understands why any of it matters. His call for a Defence and Home Affairs partnership on civil defence mobilisation is a call to build the enterprise around the force.

Second, his reading of the third scenario fits an emerging view of how Australia contributes to coalition deterrence. If the country’s realistic role is to secure the southern end of the third island chain as a bastion from which counteroffensives are launched, then the requirement is for a resilient, dispersed and regenerative base, rather than a standalone war-fighting force. The bastion’s value depends on how quickly it can absorb strikes, recover and keep sortieing. That requirement is as much about hardened infrastructure, repair capacity, stockpiles and an integrated civil-military effort as it is about aircraft.

Third, his candour about warning time is a corrective to a familiar and comfortable debate. Some argue that Australia has time to build capability gradually. Others argue that the window has already closed. Pezzullo’s approach was more discriminating. For the Indonesian and hegemonic-China problems, warning time is real, and use of the term “expired” can be an excuse for neglecting the long-term work of building a multi-generational force. For the disruptive-China problem, warning time has gone, and the response must be built from what exists now, along with whatever national mobilisation can be generated at speed.

Fourth, there is a point about democratic consent that is easy to overlook in a room of practitioners. Medcalf’s survey data describes a public that feels unease without direction. Pezzullo’s remedy is more specific than telling the public to be more worried. It is to tell them who, what and how: which adversary, which kinds of coercion, and what Australia would be asked to contribute and to endure. Without that, practitioners lack the mandate to ask other parts of government for what the defence effort needs, and the public has no way to judge whether the effort is proportionate.

Pezzullo’s wording was dry, but his conclusion should not be missed. Australia has an excellent discussion happening in Defence, a fine Air Force document and an alliance of real value. What it does not yet have is a national defence strategy, and without one the aircraft on the Air Force’s cover will be asked to carry a weight that no air force can carry alone.