National Observer Home > No. 46 - Spring 2000 > Articles

New Imperatives for Australian Defence

Bill Hayden

The subjects of defence and foreign relations assume high importance in the wake of the East Timor experience, for that undertaking emphatically illustrated glaring deficiencies in policies behind the Australian Defence Force force structure.

The faults behind those policy shortcomings rest with governments of all political stripes. It has been too much a case of live by the short term and hope that the long term will be a long way off. Well, that long term can no longer be deferred. It is with us now and it is in a vengeful mood because of the policy slacknesses of the past.

One of the major influences leading to the formation of the Council for the National Interest was concern about what it saw as the demise of the A.N.Z.U.S. alliance and the consequences of that. My feeling is that we have to start thinking past A.N.Z.U.S., to a present where the global outreach of the United States has become more selective. This will become increasingly apparent into the future. The cost of being the world's policeman, as it were, imposes limits on what even a country as rich and powerful as the United States can do.

In particular, there is a need for us to consider the East Timor experience in this context and in relation to our regional interests in a sober, prudent manner.

There was, in Australia, understandable elation at the success of the largely Australian Interfet operation in East Timor. The leadership of Major-General Cosgrove was an inspiration to our community at a time when national heroes, outside of our sporting idols, are difficult to identify. And he deserves that community approbation, as do his troops and the members of Civpol and other supporting units who served with him. They conducted a very professional and throughly successful operation. It was quite an achievement.

The United Nations regards Australia's prompt and full response to its requirements as one of the best - probably the best - it has experienced.

The United Nations is far from free of flaws in its operations. But instances of slackness of purpose among member countries on the Security Council; political manoeuvring among those members; reluctance of certain developed countries to commit themselves to peace keeping operations; developing countries offering troops but providing no arms, transport or other ordinance or logistical self-support; pledges of human and material resources, including money, not honoured until late, or sometimes not at all; force level requests from the Secretary-General being substantially reduced by the Security Council and/or donor countries, sometimes with dreadful consequences - these are just some of the impediments for which the United Nations as an operational institution is not responsible but for which it is blamed. Similarly, accountability and performance criteria imposed on it by member States certainly ensure detailed supervision of undertakings but at the cost of delaying start up times for reconstruction projects.

East Timor's reconstruction was delayed in this way because planning procedures, ordering and tendering measures unavoidably took time. However, encouraging movement is now reported as imports of building materials arrive and building construction commences, schooling is back on track (in a country with 60 per cent illiteracy), and an indigenous police force and court system are being developed, but authorities are sensibly resisting pressures for a bloated public sector to be created as a short term palliative for unemployment problems; this would be a long term disaster. East Timor has to be almost completely rebuilt.

It is always handy to have someone else to blame for one's own shortcomings as happened in Somalia when the United States blamed the United Nations for its failings, failings for which it was entirely responsible.¹ The previous Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali captured the nature of such set-backs and frustrations when he observed, "There is, sadly, a history of tasking the United Nations to undertake peacekeeping missions without providing it with the requisite mandates, troops, and equipment."²

In comparison to experiences of these sorts, Australia's response in East Timor was exemplary in every respect. That goes to the credit of the government for its decisive actions, to the national par

liament where it attracted multi-party support and to the people of Australia without whose full support the operation would have had, at least, some difficulties.

We should also recall that we were helped by some heavyweight support from the United States and the International Monetary Fund. President Clinton and Ambassador Holbrooke, in public statements, were unambiguous about the fiscal consequences for Indonesia of non-compliance with the U.N. Security council resolution on East Timor. This was backed by the I.M.F linking Indonesian government access to funding to such compliance. That was effective and welcome.

Together, these matters represented a huge restraining factor on Indonesian authorities, especially their military. We should bear that in mind, for our task in East Timor would, most probably, have been much more difficult in their absence.

But the United States' physical presence was quite limited. The fact is, being policeman for the world is imposing an increasingly difficult economic and military burden on the United States. Her engagement in Kosovo, through the N.A.T.O. organisation, rather extended her resources, and I think that should Milosevic have stubbornly held out much longer than he did, the nature of that conflict would have changed in ways which the American public would have regarded as unacceptable. After the unfortunate loss of eighteen United States Rangers and Delta Force lives in Mogadishu in 1993 there appears to be a zero tolerance in the United States of American body bags returning from overseas engagements.

So the global reach of the United States is becoming more selective and this will be much more noticeable in the years ahead. That reach will be more specific in regard to regions covered: Europe, oil rich areas like the Middle-East, North-East Asia, the Americas; and there the puff starts to run out.

We should be aware of this as we explore some of the sobering lessons from our East Timor engagement. In terms of defence matters, we are very good at doing many important things for which we have prepared ourselves adequately, prudently arranged the resources with which to do those things, and fitting them into a realistic conceptualisation of the limits to our capacities. We are a small power, with all the restrictions that this inevitably implies, in respect of what we can do on the regional stage, let alone on the broad global canvas.

We are not a big power; we are not a middle power, nor even a small middle power, as I have seen it euphemistically put. We are a small power. Wealthy, certainly; but small. And that smallness limits us in many ways, in particular as to what we can do about our external security.

We must be aware of the limitations which our engagement in East Timor exposed. Cobbling together three army battalions, providing logistics and equipment - we had to borrow some of the latter from other sources including several thousand flak jackets from the United States - fully extended us. (Incidentally, something similar happened with our small naval detachment to the Gulf War.) At the end of six months engagement our troops were showing signs of fatigue, and little wonder. The task imposed sustained hard working conditions, hard living conditions and potentially dangerous circumstances.

Imagine if East Timor had been a Somalia where a restricted mandate imposed on the United Nations by the security council resulted in the humiliating and insulting treatment of peacekeepers by local gangs of thugs, not to mention deaths among the peacekeepers. Or a Rwanda where 800,000 men, women and children were killed over 100 days between April and July of 1994, characterised by the United Nations "as one of the most abhorrent events of the twentieth century"³ and in which ten Belgian peacekeepers were tortured, murdered, then mutilated. Or a Serbia or a Kosovo characterised by displays of sickening human barbarity. Or a Sierra Leone where the rate of slaughter of innocent people exceeded that of Kosovo,⁴ and where peace keepers were humiliated by the government from the time of their arrival. The unhappy events there are still playing themselves out.

In any event, from the case histories of recent peace keeping, the guiding principle should be caution - caution about Security Council-determined mandates, rules of engagement, the provision of other forces and materiel, the quality of overall command and the kinds of exposure to which our personnel might be subjected.

Further, are our forces in a condition to sustain potentially difficult, drawn out combat conditions? This is where I fret greatly, given what we would expect of them at times of a national security threat or, say, crises like that of East Timor opening up concurrently on more than one front and our national interest being engaged in a major way. And, bear in mind there can be a capacity for events to skid into the irrational. Then we could be seriously tested. The Minister for political and security affairs at the time, General Feizal Tanjung, has recorded that Dr. Habibe was talking of going to war with Australia at an early stage of those unfolding events.

One cannot see any more East Timors in the region? Possibly - I hope that is correct, but I suspect that that approach is risky. Remember Fiji, and the Solomon Islands?

Do we really feel confident about the unfolding future of Papua-New Guinea? Pressures for regional autonomy from several regions, following the Bougainville agreement, may lead to fragmentation of the country. Its administration is floundering. Corruption and cronyism are rife. The Raskal gang problem worsens. (Next perhaps gang representatives may turn up as elected members of parliament through rather roughly fixed elections.) The Papua-New Guinea Defence Force is badly run down and demoralised. It and the police are reportedly on a collision course. The enforcement of law and order is a mockery. "The implications of that for Australia, which has 10,000 nationals there, are profound", according to our Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr. Downer.⁵ In the event of turmoil on the border of Papua-New Guinea and Irian Jaya spilling into Papua-New Guinea, where would that go? Mr Downer has stated, "The world regards P.N.G., its development and the security problems it poses, as an Australian problem".⁶

And I harbour great fears of the problems which clearly lie ahead for the A.D.F. as it struggles to maintain an appropriate level of preparedness for the defence of Australian interests. The worst of those problems is now crowd ing in on us.

Professor Paul Dibb, head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the A.N.U., and a former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence, declared recently that if personnel and operating costs keep increasing according to their well established rate, with a defence budget in which there have not been any real increases for twelve years, "By the year 2014, the Australian Defence Force will be able to afford personnel and operating costs and nothing else - end of day, close down."⁷

Mr. Derek Woolner, a research officer specialising in defence matters in the parliamentary library, has pungently observed that if this trend is not reversed, "the A.D.F. would come to resemble areas of the Papua-New Guinea public service, where wages are paid but little is done because adequate operational funding is available for only short periods of the financial year."⁸

A comprehensive defence force review has been undertaken, following the weaknesses in our defence force arrangements disclosed by the East Timor engagement. Unfortunately, the record of real action following defence force reviews and white papers is anything but reassuring. There has been nothing wrong with the reports. Nor with government's formal endorsement of the conclusions of those reports. It has been the lack of will, or perhaps, more fairly, sacrifice of opportunity to the imperatives, as government saw it, of short-term economic forces, that has been the back-breaker.

For instance, the 1976 parliamentary paper, Australian Defence, gave an impressive analysis of Australia's security role and laid down a coherent five year equipment acquisitions programme. The government endorsed the F.Y.D.P., committing itself to a F.Y.D.P. spending programme from 1976-77 to 1980-81 of $12 billion.

I recall responding to the paper on behalf of the Opposition, commending the paper and the Minister for the lucid exposition of the issues by both, but pointing out that the financial outlay figures were unachievable.⁹ Indeed, tight economic management the following year resulted in no growth in the defence budget, instead of the committed five per cent, and the following year saw cuts in operating expenditures, while equipment programmes slipped back.

In 1979, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Fraser,¹⁰ in a statement to Parliament, committed his government to a F.Y.D.P. which would reach three per cent of G.D.P. by 1984-85. This implied an annual real increase in defence spending of seven per cent. But the next year economic stringency saw a real decrease in defence spending.

The 1987 paper, The Defence of Australia, presaged a reduction of one per cent in defence expenditure the following year, announced by the Treasurer, instead of the proposed real increase of three per cent.

Let me be quite emphatic about this; all of the people who presented these reports to the Parliament and gave commitments about future spending programmes were capable, honourable people. Their promises were casualties of economic exigencies.

So much for the slippage on promises made in the past - my melancholy task is to announce now that the recently announced white paper to be prepared for the Government on defence is likely to be coshed in exactly the same way as in the past. The succession of interest rate hikes, very properly announced by the Reserve Bank recently, will slow the economy. The extent is more in the hands of decision makers in Washington than here. If the U.S. economy loses as much puff as some commentators feel it will, and I believe it should for the bubble is getting rather fragile, then the slowdown there, which will feed through to here, could be marked. And we will be back into one of those economic cycles which head butt government spending. Let us hope it will not happen that way.

In any case, that white paper will be very stark in its presentation if it candidly addresses the major problem of paying the accumulated existing debts owed on capital equipment: a bill of some $20 billion, to which $5 billion was added with approvals in the 1999-2000 budget. On that basis, the $20 - $25 billion capital equipment "hangover" of debt represents more than ten years capital outlays, leaving space to cover little that is new in future budgets.

Then when that is sorted out - if it can be realistically - there is massive block obsolesence to be addressed from the middle of this decade, to well into the succeeding decade. Some examples are -

· D.D.G. Air Warfare Destroyers

· F.F.G. - 7 Frigates

· F.A.18 Aircraft

· P3C Maritime Patrol Aircraft

· C - 130 H Transport Aircraft

· Amphibious and Afloat Support Ships

· Army transport vehicle fleet

· Army small arms

· F111 Strike Aircraft for which there is no replacement prospect in sight

- and the costs of replacements will be much higher than the purchase price of the items they replace. For instance, if we consider the F22 as a replacement for the FA18, a highly dubious proposition, we can expect, I am advised, a cost of $11 billion for four. To replace the FA18, one for one, we would be looking at an outlay of just on $200 billion. Obviously, the implications of that are that we cannot afford to even pretend that we can hold a place in the "big boys" defence club in future.
Even at present, we are underweight for the competition to which we pretend to belong. For instance, even with the advanced equipment we have in many areas, our readiness is alarmingly deficient. According to Professor Dibb, "the Navy would struggle to deploy four or five capable surface combatants and one or two submarines, and the Air Force has fewer than half the qualified pilots it needs for more than 100 combat aircraft".¹¹

The new Secretary of the Defence Department, Dr. Allan Hawke, presumably a master of droll understatement, has said, "The current state of Defence's financial situation against the forward estimates might best be described as parlous." And, "The plain fact is that defence has not been able to match the ends it is trying to achieve with the means it has been given to do so."¹² He estimates the cost of major asset replacement and refurbishment through to 2020 to lie between $80 billion and $106 billion. This "exceeds guidance for new investment by 20 per cent to 40 per cent", he says.

These are all big numbers, but, given that the great magnitude of costs involved in replacing all items subject to obsolesence is much greater than the total he mentions above, the implication is that decisions have already been made about a number of non-replacement items. The D.D.G. destroyers and the F111's have already been written off.¹³

Dr. Hawke signals that non-replacement is a definite part of what will be the forward defence policy.¹⁴ What this means, in the words of one defence analyst, is: "There will be some military roles which the A.D.F. will cease to be able to perform".¹⁵

Well, what is to be done about this unsatisfactory state of affairs? The first thing is to acknowledge that the easy options of defence budget cuts, efficiency dividends, and trying to do as much as in the past with much less has exhausted itself. The second thing is to face what was acknowledged in the F.Y.D.P.'s of 1976, 1979 and 1987; that is, that more resources have to be provided for our defence. But, this time, we have to ensure that the resources follow the posturing. These resources cannot be obtained at the expense of other key areas such as higher education and hospitals, for instance. In those spheres, as with defence, much flim flam has gone on about leaner and more efficient results - and there has been some truth in that hitherto, but scarcely any longer. The cost of long term decay has been well and truly embedded in all of these systems so that short term political band aids could hold together an unsatisfactory present. The process is called political expediency.

There is only one solution to our defence dilemma: Raise defence spending to about 2.5 per cent of G.D.P. over about three years and keep it at that level for several more until the A.D.F. is in a credible condition to meet the expectations set for it by leaders of government and defence chiefs: and the only practical way to do that is to raise taxes. It cannot be done with magician's trick mirrors.

If, as a community, we are not prepared to commit ourselves to that then let us quietly forget the steady martial drum rolls we beat earlier. For our default would exemplify one simple fact; when the real test came for paying our way we defaulted.

In establishing our equipment acquisition policies, our force structures, and the nature of our training we must first consider the roles in which we might engage.

No country is going to embark on a large scale attack against Australia. Only the United States has the capacity to do that and she has other preoccupations at the moment. We are not large enough to equip ourselves to fight a war of high intensity, and that notion should be dropped. We could be required to take part in comparatively lower level engagements to defend our sovereign territory, and, in our immediate region, to protect Australian interests. These could range from the extraction of Australian citizens from perilous security conditions, to asymmetrical conflict affecting Australia, or to peacekeeping forces (but not just for peacekeeping - that would be an easy but thoroughly unwise option to adopt). If the government of the day determined to do so, it might want to assist a friendly and legitimate government in our region in circumstances where the legitimacy and proper government of that country's affairs is being forcefully subverted. But, to the extent we respond to such a development the response should be based upon force structures we have in place for the defence of our more immediate interests. (I should add, when I contemplate this concept, I find some very difficult implications).

The Ready Reserve, sunk without trace in 1996 as a cost cutting measure, should be reinstated. Its worth has been warmly endorsed by senior military figures.¹⁶ Lieutenant-General Sanderson has stated, "It is difficult to see how Defence will ever meet its regular recruiting objectives, let alone its reserve numbers, without such a scheme [as the Ready Reserve]."¹⁷

Equipment choices must be made according to the needs established in the strategic programme for the defence of Australia and her interests in the proximate area. That rules out, as an illustration of the equipment selectiveness we shall have to apply, Apache helicopters for the Army with their hard target and five kilometre stand off missile capacity more appropriate for battlefields in Korea or Iraq than for our immediate region of interest.¹⁸ The cost for the 25 aircraft the Army sought was $1.5 billion. Furthermore, there needs to be a considerable turn around on the present ratio of two support, training and enabling personnel to every one combat person.

But the first line of action, promoting the security of Australia, must be our diplomacy. I accept Prime Minister Howard's statement that he was not in a rush to fully re-engage with Indonesia (but I applaud his entry into dialogue with President Wahid). There have been times, in the past, when we appeared too eager to reassure governments in our region and where, the record shows, some of our diplomats had been infected by a decent dose of localitis; but my experience both as Foreign Affairs Minister and as a parliamentary observer reminds me these were few and far between. All with whom I worked were deeply dedicated to putting Australia first and doing so with clarity of expression and professional skill.

But we will have to re-engage fully with our nearest and most populous neighbour in the region some time, and not too far off I trust. There is a wide range of reasons why we should. In particular, we should not squander our opportunities to seek to use good influences in respect of bad incidents. Aceh, Ambon, and Irian Jaya are nasty centres of human conflict. Now that East Timor is out of the way the Catholic Church seems to have lost interest in the wider region of Indonesia. So, it seems, have most journalists, who once agonised over a past and regrettable wrong to late members of their profession in East Timor, now that issue has been resolved to their satisfaction. And the national cohesion of Indonesia has its fragile elements. The pressures I mentioned could easily erupt into full scale separatist pressures with fissionable effects. That would have profound consequences for Australia.

In the wider region we must be energetically engaged with our diplomacy. A.P.E.C., on which so much was pinned by Australia, is running out of puff, but as it deflates, Prime Minister Mahathir's Asian caucus is finally getting under way. It is A.S.E.A.N. plus Japan, China and South Korea and has been formed up and has been meeting. It is largely a response to the recent Asian financial break down. Japan had major problems of its own which prevented it from giving any leadership, and in any case it is probably past its peak years of economic performance. A.S.E.A.N. proved itself thoroughly ineffective. Not surprisingly, though, for it unfortunately converted itself into a talk-shop for good intentions sans action. Only China showed strength and leadership. There was much self-interest in its not devaluing its currency but South-East Asian countries were grateful for its firmness on that matter, just as Thailand and Malaysia welcomed financial relief through the International Monetary Fund.

Conversely, there is suspicion in the region about the good offices of the United States, which is regarded as hegemonic and insufficiently caring.¹⁹ The I.M.F, which was unreasonably fierce in the financial adjustment policies inflicted on several South-East Asian countries, following that financial crisis, is seen as a tool of the United States. Are we seen as a United States catspaw? Our diplomacy on this is tricky. We want good relations with our extremely important ally - the Clinton-Holbrooke intervention I mentioned earlier proved how important and good the United States can be as an ally - but we would pay a high price if we were seen, locally, as a catspaw for our ally. Similarly, we have to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of China and the United States over Taiwan issues. It is not easy for our diplomats.

Our difficulties in the region were once summed up with great pertinacity by the wise elder statesman of the region, Lee Kwan Yew, while in Australia. The problem for Australia, he advised, is that if rich, white America is giving offence to some country in the region, what can it do? She's too big and too far away to kick in the pants. Australia is rich and white, she's quite handy and she's just the right size to give a kick in the pants to and get away with it. Former Fijian Prime Minister, General Sitiveni Rabuka also put it neatly earlier this year: Australia and New Zealand, while part of the Pacific, were really "dislocated European societies."²⁰ This is not easy to swallow, especially when we all know how sweet and lovable we are.

And finally, we must stick with the United Nations processes in our own best interests. Big, powerful countries can move about in the community of nations as it suits them, working through institutional structures or going it alone. But small countries like Australia need those structures. They give us some leverage with others, which we would otherwise be denied. They allow us a greater influence in world affairs than would be available to us on our own resources.

1. William Shawcross, "Deliver Us From Evil", page 119 (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000).

2. Ibid., page 222.

3. Report of the Independent Inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide of Rwanda, 15 December 1999, page 1, prepared for the United Nations.

4. Shawcross, op. cit., at page 388.

5. "The Age," 9 March 2000.

6. Ibid.

7. Professor Paul Dibb, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, A.N.U., Evidence before Commonwealth Parliament Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence & Trade, 23 February 2000, page 193, Hansard Draft.

8. Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, I.S.R. research paper no. 20, 1999-2000, "Pressures on Defence Policy: The Defence Budget Crisis", by Derek Woolner, at page 28.

9. Hansard, House of Representatives, 4 November 1976, pages 2344-2347.

10. "Afghanistan - Australia's Assessment and Response", 19 February 1979, page 18.

11. "The Australian," 8 October 1999.

12. Address to Defence Watch Seminar, 17 February 2000, "What's the Matter - A Due Diligence Report", and address to U.S.I., 2 February 2000, "Defence - The State of the Nation".

13. Interview with C.D.F., Admiral C. Barrie, Asian Defence Journal, 5/99, page 31, on D.D.G.'s.

14. U.S.I. address, op. cit., page 23.

15. Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, I.S.R., research paper no. 20 of 1999-2000 by Derek Woolner.

16. Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (Defence Sub-committee) hearings, Lt.-Gen. J. Sanderson, 18 February 2000, pages 148-150; Maj.-Gen. W. Glenny, 23 February 2000, pages 207-214.

17. Sanderson, op. cit., page 148.

18. Ball D., Strategic Planning for the Defence of Australia in 2015, page 13 in "Maintaining the Strategic Edge", edited Ball, published by the A.N.U., 1999.

19. Contemporary South-East Asia, volume 21, no. 1, April 1999: "Realism, Institutionalism, and the Asian Economic Crisis", by Amitav Acharya, page 8.

20. "The Australian", 12 February 2000.

National Observer No. 46 - Spring 2000