The Lowy Institute’s excellent Interpreter blog is running a series in advance of the release of the Government’s white paper. So far there have been six contributions: one, two, three, four, five, and six. The effect of much of this debate is to make you feel queasy. Most of these guys live in something akin to a parallel universe. Their world is a scary place. We were lucky in the last world war because when our big friend Britain failed to protect us our new big friend, the dreaded yank, stepped up to the plate and covered up for the fact that we were ill-prepared (i.e. hadn’t spent vast buckets of money on defence) to defend ourselves in the event of a global conflagration. We won’t be that lucky again, warns the latest contributor:
We got lucky on that occasion, but should a similar situation arise in a few decades time, without a more self-reliant strategic posture — something at least approximating Hugh’s proposal (i.e. spend vast buckets of money on defence)— there is little reason to expect an equally serendipitous result.
Yes, folks. Another Asian power is on the rise and is challenging the West once again. Of course, it’s not certain that China will attack Australia (or our vital strategic interests in the region) but, hey, it’s possible and we need to be prepared (i.e. spend vast buckets of money on defence). Of course, in this argumant every qualification, caveat etc is granted. Sure, it’s unlikely (but it did happen before), sure it’s improbable, sure it’s hard to imagine why China would want to destroy its main export markets and key sources of minerals and energy and so on. But great powers do what great powers must and that is turn economic power into military power and use both to exert their influence. That’s the way of it. So just in case we need to be prepared this time (i.e. spend vast buckets of money on defence).
It’s all a bit self-serving. And basing your whole strategy on a just-in-case proposition is not a rigorous intellectual or strategic approach.
I bet the government will stick with the old maritime denial strategy (navy patrols of our northern waters) and a good dose of expeditionary activity. It’s more of the same, and it’s not exciting policy.
But it is sane. Planning for a world war is madness.
Update: Lowy’s blogger has condemned me, my response is here.
2 Comments
It concerns me that governments spend billions of dollars on armaments. The airplanes can be taken down by a chicken, the tanks by a wire fence. The ships seem to take forever to get anywhere and can be sunk by a single missile or torpedo. The poor soldiers constantly run out of supplies. The spacefighters oh wait, we don’t even have a space navy. The nuclear weapons were impractical and unusable. After all of the fighting, destruction and death, the war is stopped by politicians and diplomats. Did the military have any effect? War is about making money for the industrialists, not about ideology or self-preservation.
Meanwhile, how much money is the government spending on the information war? This is happening right now, all over the world. How secure is your information? Does your firewall really work? Exactly how clever does a teenager have to be, to hack through government firewall software? In which country is our military hardware actually manufactured? Is it true that they can stop our targeting computers by just sending a kill signal? If a business computer malfunctions, how do you know if it was a genuine malfunction or if it was hacked and crashed by by a hostile country?
So the proposal is to borrow money from China to build a military to stop China.