Defence Minister Stephen Smith used his ASPI speech on Wednesday night to make the definitive case for bringing the White Paper forward by a year. Close followers of the defence debate will be familiar with …
In my first post, I argued while there are very good historical reasons Australia should stay close to the United States, there are a number of factors for Defence White Paper writers to consider. Here, …
Paul Monk initiated a valuable debate on these pages about the role of risk in defence planning. As it happens, I’ve been thinking along similar lines for sometime myself. So here’s my take on the …
This post is the second on demystifying grand strategy; it looks at how we can influence others. Grand strategy involves interacting with others in a way that will change them to our advantage. Grand strategy …
For readers looking for a good one-volume text on strategy, I would recommend Beatrice Heuser’s work, The evolution of strategy: thinking war from antiquity to the present, published in 2010. Heuser, an academic at the …
It’s not hard to find examples of concerns about China’s military build-up. But how much should we actually worry about it? In my view, not as much as many commentators assume. It’s true that, at …
There’s a conundrum facing the writers of the Defence White Paper 2013. On one hand, Australia’s geography places it at the southern end of East Asia and its economy places it in a strong trading …
Singapore and the United States are linked not only by important economic relations, but also by a burgeoning defence relationship. Most recently in June 2012 the US announced that it would deploy as many as …
Having announced its intention to publish a new Defence White Paper in the first half of 2013, the government has now taken the curious step of issuing a new Defence Capability Plan (DCP). That is, …
The first step to victory is always working out the vital ground. Occupy that and you force the enemy to come to you. You’ve already achieved dominance and are halfway on the path to victory. …
There has already been some debate about the insurance analogy on this blog. I personally like the theme as it makes it easy to explain Defence funding to those not familiar with what our defence …
This week’s graph is an update of analysis started by ASPI in 2006. Drawing on annual figures published by the Pentagon, it analyses the real cost growth in the projected cost of the F-35 Joint …
Tony Abbott’s speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington last week had some messages for Canberra policymakers to help shape next year’s ‘blue’ Incoming Government Brief. The speech was oddly constructed as some commentators have …
Hugh White nicely joins the fray in focusing on the key difference between risks and threats: time. That is, a risk can turn into a threat over time, and vice versa. As Hugh says, risk …
Paul Monk raises an important issue about that slippery word ‘threat’ and its place in defence policy. I don’t think he quite gets it right, but nor do I agree completely with Rod Lyon’s objections. …
Over the following weeks, The Strategist is going to pore over its bookshelves to bring to you new and classic books for your essential reading list. The first entry is one of ASPI’s defence researcher’s …
Grand strategy is a big idea back in fashion as a useful way to think about and address important issues. But many grand strategic schemes advocated are complicated, incomplete, inappropriate and use arcane terms that …
I want to decline Paul Monk’s offer to see Australian defence policy as an insurance policy. I think there are three good reasons for doing so. The first has to do with the nature of …
There’s one consistent thread to Australian Defence White Papers that didn’t really come out in Peter Jennings’ article—the notion of self-reliance. Of course, we didn’t come to that notion by accident—it was pretty much forced …
If, as the saying has it, the exchange rate between words and pictures really is 1000 to 1, that’s too good a deal to pass up. Each week The Strategist will bring you some graphs …