Articles by: "Neil James"
Special forces issues have deep historical roots

Media coverage and public discussion of alleged breaches of the laws of war by Australian special forces is heavily focused on individual personalities. Little attention has been paid to longstanding collective, structural and cultural drivers, …

Properly ministering to our defence force

The Australian Defence organisation has an undeserved reputation for supposedly ‘devouring’ its ministers. The generally high throughput has instead had far more to do with the portfolio being frequently allocated to those already in the …

Terrorism, treachery and Australian citizenship

Public debate about reform of our citizenship laws continues to be hampered by a significant categorisation error. Whether Australian citizenship should be held by traitors remains the heart of the matter. The core issue is …

Grand strategy, strategy and Australia

When discussing what ‘strategy’ is—or isn’t—we surely need to distinguish between strategy and grand strategy, not least because of the longer timescales, wider disciplines and deeper understandings involved with the latter. Australian grand strategy stems …

Beyond the once-over analysis and partisan waffle

Defence White Paper 2013 is well written and largely internally coherent, except for the absence of an investment plan to execute its policy and strategy objectives. It often tries making virtues out of necessities politically, …

Percent of GDP spent on Defence is a straw man

Surely the discussion (see yesterday’s posts from Andrew Davies and Graeme Dobell) about average percentage of GDP allocated to defence investment is a straw man floated by the Minister for Defence. Somewhat successfully it seems. Defence …