Paul Dibb’s account of the 1983 Able Archer incident (and blog posts here and here) is disturbing—as much for the questions it doesn’t raise as for the details of the misperceptions that nearly led to a …
Debate: "General"
At the Sea Power Conference in Sydney I set out a number of steps that the new Government should take in developing the promised 2015 defence white paper. In my last post, I discussed what …
Speaking at the Sea Power Conference earlier this week, an apology was necessary to Shakespeare when I mangled his line in Julius Caesar: ‘I come to bury the 2013 White Paper, not to praise it.’ …
This post is part two of an extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released later today. As I explained in yesterday’s post, the world came uncomfortably …
This post is part one of a two part extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released tomorrow. The last crisis of 1983 was one of …
Well, she certainly doesn’t look a hundred. Indeed, it’s rather more as if the Navy’s developed something of the sophisticated allure of an older woman; after all, she was painting her ships 50 shades of …
I was in Malaysia last week at the 2nd Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum, and on Friday I reported on the outcomes of the Conference on Maritime Confidence Building Measures (MCBMs) in the South China Sea that …
The South China Sea is ‘probably the world’s single most complex, and intractable, international relations problem’. Gareth Evans, in proclaiming the South China Sea as the biggest and most complex headache, didn’t mention any of …
It’s another public holiday here in sunny Canberra, but we thought these posts from our archives would be topical to revisit. First up, submarines: last week saw Cameron Stewart publish articles on the prospects for life …
The attacks on Westgate mall in Nairobi provide a number of insights into the decision making cycle of a terrorist organisation, some of which we tend to pay insufficient attention to. The targeting of a …
At a time when Australian attention obsesses with China to the dangerous exclusion of much else, one of the quiet success stories in growing bilateral relations has been between the United States and India. In …
Today marks the 20th anniversary of recent history’s best known small-scale battle, immortalised in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down. An attempt by a small US special operations force to apprehend two of Somali warlord …