AUKUS Politics and Defence Readiness

If one is focused on how the force in being can be a more ready force, one will generally look in vain in the political class for a keen focus on this challenge. And this is true for all of the AUKUS partners.

It is not difficult to see why. A ready force needs supplies, munition stockpiles, reliable energy supplies, food stocks, logistics capability and an ability to mobilize civilian and reserve military manpower. All of which cuts into spending for social programs, envisioned transitions to the green economy and supporting whatever party is in power’s pet rocks on defence projects.

It is also the systemic bias towards short-termism in defence thinking as well as the desire of new governments to craft alternative defence futures with weapons that are not here and now. This is true across the board for the three AUKUS countries.

As Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retd) and Group Captain Anne Borzycki (Retd) wrote in a recent essay:

Short-termism, or ‘quick win’ thinking, is deeply embedded in the Australian political culture; collectively we tend to focus on today and largely on our personal needs, not on future interacting and cascading risks that will impact our whole society.

Thirty years of relative prosperity in Australia, fuelled by lower trade barriers, privatisation, and deregulation, have increased our productivity and wealth, providing the resources necessary to address the challenges we confront today if we choose to act.

However, many of these challenges are themselves a result of globalisation, e.g. our extensive reliance on overseas supply chains for critical goods, leaving our nation vulnerable. Whilst the lower cost of goods has had economic and standard of living benefits, there is a very high price to ‘cheap’ in a crisis.

At the September 26, 2024 Sir Richard Williams seminar, Peter Jennings took on the task of looking at the politics of the AUKUS nations and the impact of those domestic politics on defence spending and preparedness. He focused on looking ahead in the second half of the decade and what politics in AUKUS nations during that period of time might mean for defence.

The core point he made, and a key one it is, was to emphasize that “defence policymaking is a generation of politics by other means.” And quite obviously the priorities of the party in power will decisively affect defence choices and policy making.

Jennings underscored that the 36-month election cycle in Australia clearly impacts on the time-frame for defence decision making.

He reminded the audience that although politics and economics are decisive for defence, too often professional conferences on defence simply ignore this reality.

He underscored: What I find slightly unusual is that in professional defence conferences, there’s a tendency to put that to one side, to pretend that it doesn’t really exist, to make presentations that would argue that the shape of defence policy and spending priorities are things which kind of happen as a result of mutual great minds thinking deep thoughts.

And I want to make the case this morning that in fact, politics has far more influence over the shape of defence policy than such a point of view would consider.

I would like to reinforce this key point of Jennings.

Later this year, I am publishing a book of essays by Dr. Harald Malmgren, one of the most distinguished political economists in our lifetime and who served several Presidents and was a major shaper of U.S. trade policy in government and the private sector.

I would bet most people who attended the seminar never heard of him, but perhaps they might have heard of his dynamic daughter Dr. Pippa Malmgren, who was recently in Australia.

I have worked with Harald off and on since 1980 and our work has been at the intersection of the Venn diagram between defence and economics, each of us helping the other to be up to date on these two domains, because these two domains decisively affect one another.

But this is a struggle because Inside the Beltway makes defence strategic decisions often with no consideration to cost or impact on the American economy, something which has decisively affected American power and accelerated its decline.

Jennings assessed each of the AUKUS partner’s political situations over the next few years and how they might impact on defence. The implications of his assessment were pretty stark: the three countries are not necessarily on a convergent path to strengthen collective defence or to provide the defence spending necessary for the ready force.

When he turned to considering the future of AUKUS he made some hard-hitting judgments.

He argued:

What disturbs me is that there is no federal, no industrial, no state, no union advocacy for AUKUS. There is no clarity around the East Coast port and no further progress on the development of a uranium waste storage facility.

This is a project which, right now, in public, has fewer and fewer friends, and I reflect on how the Shortfin Barracuda project had fewer and fewer friends until it was terminated.

There’s no money, virtually no industry advocacy, no sense of urgent goals, no war fighting priority to get equipment to into the hands of our war fighters on an urgent basis. We have what a friend of mine in industry described as a series of science projects…

The good news is that I think there’s been great progress, useful progress, on regional cooperation, gaining traction on the guided weapons enterprise, on the shipbuilding enterprise in the West of Australia.

The negative side of the story is that the submarine is eating the budget…And that leads me to conclude is that the ADF is less ready, now, less capable now in 2024 than it was in 2022.

That brings me to Phantom Force 40, The Future Force, the Integrated Force.

Let me make the proposition to the integrated force never going to happen. And that’s because there’s not the money for it. It’s because right now, the policy presentation of government is putting is that you can have the SSNs, or you can have the ADF, but you can’t have both.

The integrated force concept also ignores the reality that what’s driving the big movers of strategic thinking in Australia right now are Alliance priorities.

It’s about how we position ourselves to deal with the challenge which China is offering now, rather than over ADF integration.

I think we should say farewell to Phantom Force 2040, because I just don’t think it’s going to happen…

I’m predicting 2026 as a use it or lose it moment. What I mean by that is to say it took about five years to get to the point where we concluded that the French submarine deal was not going to work and we needed to move away from it.

I think it’s going to take about five years to bring government to the point where it is going to say do we really want to do this, once they understand the cost of the complexity involved. Not saying they should walk. I’m just saying that whichever government is in power in 2026, a decision will have to be made about the submarine’s future.