Toby Feakin’s post the other day brought up the topic of oversight of government security operations. He’s right that a liberal democracy requires checks and balances to prevent excesses from government agencies. But it got …
Articles by: "Andrew Davies"
I liked Phil Radford’s piece on cyber security and the cloud this morning. In particular, I liked the parallel between cyber security and anti-submarine warfare (ASW), having spent a fair chunk of time in Russell …
I’m not surprised that Jim Molan took issue with my recent post on amphibious operations. It’s clear by now that Jim is far less comfortable with the current resourcing of the ADF than I am. …
Every year I get to watch Mark Thomson pull off a remarkable feat of ‘extreme analysis’, as he cranks out 260 pages of the annual Cost of Defence report in the couple of weeks after …
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen some impressive photographs and the naming ceremony of the first of the 27,000 tonne Canberra class landing helicopter docks (LHDs) coming together in the BAE shipyards in Williamstown. …
I’m in New Zealand at the moment, attending a public symposium on future security issues. It’s an interesting model for this sort of discussion. We have a room full—and I mean full as the forum …
Since the Defence White Paper 2013 emphasises the Defence of Australia, it’s useful to look at where we would be able to project force under the cover of our own airbases by having a standing fighter …
The Australian and Swedish Defence Ministers produced a joint communique today on the subject of intellectual property rights for submarine design and technology. That mightn’t sound like a ‘tear down the front page’ story, but …
Mark Thomson is squirreled away producing his usual tour de force budget analysis (on the streets May 30) so readers of The Strategist will have to make do with my first take on the Defence budget. Let’s …
You can do a lot with a coral atoll. The US uses the leased UK territory of Diego Garcia ‘To provide forward support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf…’. …
I’ve been plotting the gross measures of the progress of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program pretty much since the day I joined ASPI back in 2006. It hasn’t always been a pretty story. It …
The new White Paper was accompanied by the release of the DMO’s Future Submarine Industry Skills Plan—a substantial piece of work in its own right that deserves (and will get) a much deeper analysis on …