It was a good week for women in Japan, with the country’s first female Defence Minister (2007), Yuriko Koike, breaking through another glass ceiling to become the first female governor of Tokyo—despite sharp opposition from …
The findings of the South China Sea Arbitration conducted at The Hague refutes China claim of indisputable sovereignty, and invalidates the ‘nine-dash line’ as a mechanism to delineate that claim—a heavy defeat for China. As …
Sea State There’s been plenty happening on the water this past week, with a number of incidents and training exercises taking place. On Friday, the Taiwanese navy mistakenly launched a supersonic missile in the direction …
On Monday I spoke at a conference sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, ANU’s Strategic & Defence Studies Centre and the JMSDF Command and Staff College on 21st Century Trilateral Maritime Cooperation. The conference …
Welcome to The Strategist Six, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, analysts, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world. 1. Japan will head to …
Happy the democracy waging an election with little argument about foreign affairs and defence. The outside world isn’t pressing too hard. The threats are far off and chances are good. A democracy that dwells inward …
It’s funny how the same document can be perceived so differently. In his demolition job on New Zealand’s latest Defence White Paper, Peter Jennings sees Wellington plumbing ‘new depths of vacuity’ in its ‘desperation to …
After all of the fanfare and chest beating on 26 April about how 12 submarines will be built in Adelaide: silence. By all appearances—or rather the lack of them—it seems that the Department of Defence …
With Donald Trump holding a few too many cards for comfort, The Washington Post is playing its ‘Obama nostalgia’ hand with a ‘virtual museum’ of the 44th Presidency. The masthead has released two ‘rooms’ so …
This piece is drawn from Agenda for Change 2016: strategic choices for the next government. Australia confronts a stream of global and regional ordering challenges, almost none within its ability to solve single-handedly. At the …
‘Alternative Futures’ is a methodology sometimes used in strategic planning, in which the robustness of current plans is tested against various hypothetical futures. (The RAND Corporation sometimes uses this approach—they used it to test US …
IT Security firm Symantec believes it has tied recent high-profile attacks against Asian banks using the SWIFT network to a North Korean group. Symantec has linked a piece of malware used in the attacks with …