Category: Defence

  • Michael Keating. The Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Part 2 of 2.

    On Tuesday night the Treasurer announced that this year’s Budget was like none other – this Budget represents the Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Presumably the Government hopes that its Plan will represent such a compelling narrative that it can then sail to victory in the forthcoming election. Accordingly, in this article I propose to assess how the Government’s Plan measures up in terms of its probable impact on jobs and growth.

    As stated in the Budget the Government’s Plan for jobs and growth is based on:

    1. A ten year enterprise tax plan
    2. Continued investment in the national innovation and science program
    3. Securing an advanced local defence industry
    4. Opening up more export opportunities through trade agreements
    5. Its plan to get more than 100,000 young people into jobs.

    According to the Government’s own Budget forecasts, however, the growth in output over the next four years is expected to be relatively poor, and notwithstanding its Plan. In fact the forecast growth in GDP has been revised down yet again, and is now expected to continue growing by less than its potential in the next 2016-17 financial year. Indeed it is precisely because of this weak economic outlook, that the Reserve Bank took its decision on Budget Day to reduce interest rates to the lowest level ever for the cash rate of 1.75%. Of course, the Bank and the Government attributed the timing of this decision to the recent low inflation numbers, but those numbers only provided the opportunity to reduce interest rates. The need to reduce them was occasioned by the inadequate level of aggregate demand, and especially the poor rate of business investment in the economy.

    The good news, as the Government keeps reminding us, is that around 300,000 jobs have been created in the last year or so. But these new jobs are predominantly due to the very low rates of wage increase that have pertained in the last few years. Furthermore, according to the Budget these low rates are expected to continue, with nominal wages forecast to increase by only 2½ per cent and 2¾ per cent in the next two financial years, representing a forecast real annual increase in wage rates of only ½ per cent each year.

    No wonder employment is growing rapidly, but this has little to do with the Government’s strategy for growth and jobs. Rather what we are experiencing is how, following the reforms of the labour market by the Keating Government, the labour market is now much more flexible and how the price of labour is now much more responsive to economic conditions. But the counterpart of this success in creating jobs is that the rate of productivity increase has dropped to around only ½ per cent in each of the last two years, and is not expected to increase by much more in 2016-17.

    In that context, what is surprising and disappointing about this year’s Budget Statement on the Economic Outlook is that there is no section dealing with productivity, and this despite productivity having been at the centre of all discussion about economic reform for the past couple of decades.

    In addition to our poor productivity performance, what is also worrying about the economic outlook is that non-mining investment is projected in the Budget to continue to remain sluggish. To some extent both phenomena may be related. But this non-mining investment is precisely the area that one would expect the Government’s Plan and especially its innovation agenda to have an impact on if that Plan is to succeed.

    So what is the problem with the Government’s Plan, that its own forecasts do not seem to provide much evidence that it will be successful?

    First, one would have to be extremely sceptical about the claim that ‘the tax and superannuation plan can be expected to lift the level of GDP by just over one percent in the long term’. Frankly it is difficult to see how this claim could be modelled given the shortage of empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is most curious that this modelling was not done by the Treasury, but by private consultants, who too often assume what they have to prove. Perhaps it is therefore no accident that it is still not possible to find out how this modelling was done. But what we do know is that whenever the company tax rate has been changed, it has never made a perceptible difference to investment, either here in Australia, or anywhere else. And even if we were to accept this dubious self-described “modelling”, a one percent difference over twenty years is next to imperceptible, and Australia needs a much faster pick-up in non-mining investment than that.

    Instead the required pickup in investment will mainly depend upon the demand for each firm’s products. The profit share and the rate of return on investment is high enough, but the lack of demand is why so many firms are engaging in share buy-backs and acquisitions of existing assets, rather than expanding through new investments to create new assets. In this regard a credible path to accelerate the restoration of a sustainable budget surplus would make more difference than these tax cuts. A Budget surplus would reduce the relatively high real interest rates in Australia and would probably also lead to some further reduction in the exchange rate over time. Therefore the ten-year funding for the tax plan should be progressively re-deployed to bring the Budget back into surplus quicker.

    Second, there is the issue of what can realistically be expected from the innovation and science package. The most important elements of this package aim to improve:

    1. the collaboration between industry and researchers which according to an OECD study is worse in Australia than in any other advanced economy, and
    2. Australian business attitudes to risk and experimentation, and the incentives for early stage investment in start-ups.

    These are worthy aims, but how much difference can government make, especially when the funding largely comes from a re-arrangement of existing programs, and overall the funding has been cut for business assistance, and cut significantly.

    The third leg of the Plan is the support for an advanced local defence industry. Readers of this blog will have seen previous articles querying the suitability of the submarines to meet our defence needs and their cost. (The mistaken decision on submarines and A more efficient submarine solution.)  In brief, building the wrong boats at a cost at least a third higher than purchasing them off the shelf, is not the future for a competitive manufacturing industry. Australia does need to, and I believe can, have a future in advanced manufacturing which produces high value added products based on technological leadership. On the evidence, however, building these submarines in Australia does not meet these criteria and cannot be expected to ensure our industrial future.

    The other legs of the Government’s Plan identified above – opening up exports through trade agreements and the plan to get 100,000 young people – are also worthy endeavours, but again cannot realistically be expected to have a large impact on the economy as a whole.

    Instead having a comparative advantage in skills is the most critical element if Australia wants to pursue high value added industries based on technological leadership. The Prime Minister’s Innovation Statement did in fact recognise the importance of skills, but unfortunately his words haven’t been matched by action. Instead the funding for education and training, along with research, has been cut.

    A second critical element in improving Australia’s comparative advantage in high value industries is to make better use of the skills that are available. This is also the key to enhancing future productivity growth. But unfortunately there is considerable evidence that most firms in Australia are not at the frontier of best practice when it comes to making the best use of the skills of their workforce. What is needed is a renewed management focus on achieving improvements in the organisation of work, a principle source of innovation, and less focus on cost cutting, which at worst can lead to lower productivity.

    Closely related to this second element, and its focus on improving the organisation of work, is the scope to improve the effectiveness of education and health services, and consequently their productivity, by re-organising how they are delivered. This means breaking down some of the silos, developing teams, and particularly in the case of health it will require changes in the payments systems and consequent incentive structures.

    Finally, a good plan for jobs and growth would require much more carefully targeted infrastructure investment, based on the introduction of proper pricing signals and proper evaluation. While the use of infrastructure continues for the most part to be free, we should not be surprised if there is over-demand. Instead in future infrastructure investment (which is a huge drain on the Budget) should be guided by what will deliver the greatest economic returns, having regard to the value that users are prepared to pay for, and not in response to political whims.

    In sum, one can applaud the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for innovation and his efforts to encourage the embrace of new technology. However, the agenda for jobs and growth needs to broadened as there is much more to do, and the funding is inadequate to support many of what the Prime Minister himself has identified as priorities.

     

     

  • Jon Stanford. French submarines and the East and South China Seas. – why?

    A response to Richard Broinowski. 

    While the government might emphasise the roles for the new submarine that may be regarded as defensive – “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” – Richard Broinowski ignores perhaps the most important role, namely power projection in the East and South China Seas.

    This role was perhaps most graphically illustrated the Rudd government’s 2009 White Paper, which first made the case for 12 powerful new submarines. Rather extraordinarily, that White Paper mooted the possibility of unilateral action by Australia against a ‘major adversary’:

    “But we do assume that, except in the case of nuclear attack, Australia has to provide for its own local defence needs without relying on the combat forces of other countries. The Government considered such contingencies because although they are unlikely, they are not so remote as to be beyond contemplation. …In such circumstances, in order to defend ourselves we might also have to selectively project military power beyond the primary operational environment described in this White Paper, for instance in maritime Southeast Asia.” (Page 65)

    Lest there be any doubt, the 2009 White Paper (Page 59) suggested that “we will use strategic strike if we have to”. (Page 59) It stated that:

    “The Government places a priority on broadening our strategic strike options, which will occur through the acquisition of maritime-based land-attack cruise missiles. These missiles will be fitted to the AWD, Future Frigate and Future Submarine. …The incorporation of a land-attack cruise missile capability will be integral to the design and construction of the Future Frigate and Future Submarine.” (Pages 70 and 81.)

    Although the 2016 White Paper dropped all references to strategic strike, this does not mean that the aspiration has been discarded. Certainly, the requirement for 12 powerful, long range submarines has not changed since 2009. This is not the first time that Australia’s defence strategy has required the acquisition of a unique military platform. In 1963, the Menzies government ordered a special version of the American F-111 aircraft with the range extended so as to allow it to reach Jakarta.

    In any case, it seems clear that one of the reasons that Australia requires a unique conventional submarine is so that the RAN could undertake operations that most navies would leave to nuclear submarines, namely power projection against a ‘major adversary’ in contested waters far from home. For example, Rear Admiral Ray Griggs, former Chief of Navy (2011-14), defined the most significant operational task for the future submarine as “sinking hostile ships and submarines” and said that the area of most interest is the South China Sea. [1] Also, the new submarine will have the ability to launch either American or French cruise missiles through its torpedo tubes.

    It is difficult to build a logical strategic case for the acquisition of twelve large submarines with a very long range unless this power projection role plays a central part. Yet, as Australian Strategic Policy Institute has pointed out, it is not clear that the Americans would welcome Australian submarines playing such a role in the case of a conflict in which we were part of a US-led coalition. We can only hope that any Australian aspirations to take on a ‘major adversary’ unilaterally have, like a former sabre-rattling American general, “simply faded away”.

    [1] Peter Layton (2015), “Australia’s next submarine – will it be the Soryu”, Defence Today, Vol 11, No 4, page 8.

  • Alison Broinowski. Who decides when we go to war?

     Setbacks for democratic reform of war powers.

    Having taken one step forward, Australia’s major allies have now taken two steps back from reform of their war powers.

    In the UK, the Defence Minister has set aside years of bipartisan promises of legislation that would require British governments to consult the Parliament before committing forces to war, and has rejected what he now calls this ‘artificial’ constraint. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/18/ministers-abandon-plan-war-powers-law-mps-troops

    Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought legislation to bring to an end the exercise of the war powers by a prime minister under executive privilege. He hoped to transfer the decision for war to the Parliament, but abandoned the attempt in 2007. A bipartisan committee secured support of both houses in 2011 to enshrine in legislation the convention of executive consultation with MPs before committing armed force. Having asserted, in Opposition in 2006, that public trust depended upon MPs having the final say in troop deployments, David Cameron in government allowed the initiative to drift, but his plan to send RAF planes to Syria was defeated in the Commons in 2013. Cameron then secured a majority in favour of a similar deployment this year. Cameron has now reversed himself and rejected the prospect of legislation to change the war powers, even though the convention that governments should consult Parliament apparently remains in place.

    In the US, following several attempts to revise the 1973 War Powers Act, President Obama requested Congress in February 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/obama-war-authorization-congress.html?_r=0) to authorise him to dispatch forces against Islamic State, and to repeal the 2002 authorisation for President G.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He offered to limit the new deployment to three years, and to restrict ground combat to Special Forces. The measure was opposed by some Democrats and rejected. Obama subsequently sent US planes and troops to Iraq and Syria regardless, relying upon the authority granted by Congress in 2001 to his predecessor to fight Al Qaeda, which remains law. Then, in January 2016, in Obama’s final year as president, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader, introduced a Bill for the ‘Authorisation for Use of Military Force’, for which Obama had signed an executive order in September 2015. If it passes, the Act will take effect in August 2016. What the Bill appears to seek is virtually unlimited power for the President to deploy US ground forces anywhere in the world and for any length of time, including in the United States, without having to provide legal or strategic justifications to Congress.

    These US and UK developments set a dangerous example for Australia, where politicians have in recent years begun to see the risks of allowing ‘captain’s picks’ to decide the dispatch of Australian forces to war. When democratic processes are bypassed, the restraints of international and domestic legality are overridden. When accountability for war and its outcomes is not shared with the people’s representatives, the executive can do as it pleases, can withhold from the public the details of what is being done in their name, and can repeat its past errors with impunity.

    ‘Australian governments’, historian Henry Reynolds has recently written, ‘find it easy to go to war’ (Unnecessary Wars, 2016: 238). Reynolds calls Iraq an episode of military adventurism for which Australian leaders suffered no opprobrium nor inquiry; made no public expression of regret; and showed no sense of culpability or responsibility. ‘Calls for a formal investigation into the circumstances of Australia’s entry into the Iraq war,’ he adds, ‘have met with official silence’. We and many others live with the consequences of the Iraq disaster, and the prospect that our governments may repeat it.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Alison Broinowski. Losing ‘our’ Uruzgan.

    Most Australians live in cities where the only newspapers are owned by Murdoch. So unless they found Fairfax on line, they were spared the sorrowful report on 3 May that Afghan government troops have pulled out of more ‘strongholds’ in Uruzgan province. http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-troops-fought-and-died-in-uruzgan-now-afghan-troops-are-pulling-back-20160302-gn7z1i.html To the surprise of no-one who read it, Taliban are back.

    The withdrawal, Reuters reported mournfully, followed ‘many years of work and much blood shed by Australian troops to maintain peace and stability in the province, before the last Australians left in 2014’. After Australians spent thirteen years in Tarin Kowt, 41 died, and many more were injured, the Afghan authorities have made ‘a tactical decision to deploy forces more effectively’. So many Afghan soldiers and police have deserted or been killed, they say, that the province is short of its ‘assigned strength’. (One thing they appear to have learnt from years of US/NATO training is Western management-speak).

    The sombre announcement stirred barely a ripple of interest in Australia, for three possible reasons.

    First, Australia is over Afghanistan. Only a fortnight ago those at Anzac day services swore not to forget our past wars, which include several egregious disasters, but we do forget them. Many of us forget, for example, that Australia has not declared or won a war since 1945, unless East Timor and Gulf War I count as victories. Since well before Federation, Australians have habitually and repeatedly gone to fight in distant countries, which are then forgotten as we prepare for the next one. As Henry Reynolds says in his new book Unnecessary Wars (2016), most Australians don’t ask why we fought or what resulted, only how we fought, as if war was a game of football.

    Second, Afghanistan can’t be occupied. The British learned this to their cost in the Afghan wars of 1839-42 (‘Auckland’s folly’), 1878-80, and 1919, after which the rulers in Kabul took control of their country. The USSR fell into the Afghan quagmire in 1979 and was forced to withdraw ten years later by the United States’ proxies, the Mujahideen and the Taliban. In 2001 America attacked Afghanistan in revenge for the 9/11 attacks (in which no Afghan took part). The invasion made even less sense after Osama bin Laden fled al-Qaeda’s Afghan headquarters and was allowed to escape to Pakistan. Iraq was top on Bush’s list of target countries: Afghanistan was merely low-hanging fruit on the way to the invasion. Starting as a counter-terrorist war, the conflict in Afghanistan became a counter-insurgency, in which the only local support the US/NATO could expect for their objectives was what money could buy, and only for as long as they kept paying.

    Third, Uruzgan is not Australia’s province. It can no more be claimed as uniquely Australian than Nui Dat or Kapyong, the Kokoda track or Gallipoli could. As the junior ally of Britain and the United States, our troops have always gone where they tell us to go, fought who they tell us to fight, and left when they leave (with the honourable exceptions of Curtin bringing Australian forces back to defend Australia in 1942 and Whitlam pulling them out of Vietnam in 1972). Uruzgan meant no more to Australia than it did to our Netherlands predecessors there, who gave it up as a bad job. Australia was stuck in Uruzgan at the United States’ pleasure, as a consequence of John Howard’s unilateral globalisation of the Anzus Treaty.

    If anything can be learned from the current collapse of ‘strongpoints’ in Uruzgan, it is that invasion rarely defeats insurgency, that neither invasion nor occupation can last forever, and that Western invasion of Islamic countries attracts Muslim hostility like a magnet. Australia, learning nothing from Vietnam, repeated its errors by invading Iraq in 2003 and again in 2015, and by bombing Syria in 2015-6. The sooner the decision to commit Australian forces to these futile wars is taken out of the hands of an ill-advised prime minister, the better.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Richard Broinowski. French submarines for RAN – Why?

     

    The 2016 Defence White paper asserts that Australia’s future acquisition of 12 French submarines costing around $50 billion is the largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history. The first vessel is to be delivered ‘in the early 2030s’, the twelfth in ‘the 2040s or 2050s’. They are said to be for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, not only in Australia’s maritime zones, but in our maritime approaches and further afield. They are to be ‘regionally superior, with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’.

    No doubt the boffins in Defence put much expert thought into submarine selection, but given their enormous cost at a time of financial stringency, we groundlings are entitled to candid and detailed explanations about the choice of these vessels and the uses to which they will be put.

    First, why French? Apart from its small fleet of nuclear-powered and armed ballistic missile submarines, France operates six attack submarines, currently being phased out and replaced by the Barracuda class boats also being chosen by Australia. But compared to the submarine industries in Japan and Germany, France’s is small and relatively inexperienced. Japan began its submarine industry in 1904 and its main factories at Mitsubishi and Kawasaki have designed and built a huge variety ever since. Both Japan and Germany made enormous technical strides in submarine design during World War Two when France was occupied by Germany. German submarine technology has an equally long history. Its Dolphin-class attack boats currently built by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and used by the German and Israeli navies are just as sophisticated as the Sōryūs.

    One suspicion worth ventilating here: Direction des Construction Navales Services (DCNS) that makes Barracudas at Cherbourg, predominantly builds nuclear-propelled submarines. Is the Australian government, which favours an international spent fuel nuclear dump in South Australia, surreptitiously planning to widen Australia’s nuclear industry by dropping nuclear power plants into its Barracudas at some later stage of their development? How would Australian punters feel about that?

    Second question: precisely how will our French boats be ‘regionally superior’? Compared to which other fleets? A cursory look at Jane’s Fighting Ships shows that a dozen Royal Australian Navy Barracudas won’t hold a candle in numbers to 15 Korean, 18 Japanese, an unknown number of Russian and nearly 60 Chinese diesel electric boats currently operating in the Western Pacific, let alone new ones constantly being built and added to these nations’ fleets.

    What about local fleets? Indonesia has had a submarine force since 1960. Its current fleet comprises five attack submarines with five more being planned. Singapore has two Swedish Vastergotland boats with more on order. Malaysia has two French-built Scorpene class boats based at Kota Kinabalu. Thailand is planning to acquire two German boats. More potent than any of these, Vietnam plans to take delivery of six Russian Kilo-class submarines between 2013 and 2020. The Chinese have considerable experience with these boats, and will be very concerned if the Vietnamese manage to operate them competently.

    These acquisitions do not represent a flat-out arms race, but add a sudden and significant new maritime sea-denial capability to littoral states in the South China Sea. Inevitably, these states will also acquire anti-submarine warfare counter measures, such as surface ships equipped with helicoptors, drones, sonars, mines and depth charges. The area will suddenly becomes a very crowded space indeed.

    According to the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian government hopes to be able to operate its Barracudas in these contested waters ‘with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’. But, my third question: why should we be interoperable with the US alone? Our submarines won’t even be available for deployment for another decade and by then may not be regionally superior. And is interoperability what Washington wants? Radical thought though it may seem, wouldn’t it be more productive for us to operate our boats in cooperation with those of Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia? After all, their desire for a ‘rules based’ maritime environment is geographically more urgent than the perceived needs of a great power which is finding itself manoeuvred out of its customary position as top dog in the western Pacific.

    A footnote on Japan’s failed bid to sell us Sōryū submarines. On 16 April 2016, the Japanese Ambassador hosted a reception in Sydney for crews of three MSDF ships which had just engaged in exercises with RAN ships. One of them was Hakuryu, a Sōryū submarine. Amid speeches and toasts, Australian and Japanese guests were aglow with goodwill and the optimistic expectation that the imminent announcement of Australia’s next submarines would be for Sōryūs. In his short speech, Harukyu’s skipper said this was the first visit by a Japanese submarine to Sydney since 1942. There were quiet smiles at his unintended solecism. A photograph of Hakuryu heading home through Sydney Heads the next day coincided with newspaper headlines that France, not Japan, had secured the bid. The poignancy of the situation was palpable, and those of us who have had a long association with Japan felt it. The bilateral relationship is strong enough to withstand the decision, but the healing will take some time.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico. He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW. 

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1917 to 1918. Part 2.

    During 1917-1918, the Australian divisions in France endured casualties far worse than at Gallipoli. There were huge losses.[1] New evidence shows that ‘four out of five’ of the AIF who survived were affected by disability of some kind.[2] Yet, for contemporary Australians, it is battle-honours that leap to mind, especially Villers-Bretonneux. This is scarcely surprising, considering the money being spent.

    The lesson hammered home in the Anzac centenary is quite simple: war is a bad but necessary thing – so it is just as well that Australians are so good at it. This is to keep Australians locked in a kind of protracted adolescence with regard to war.

    Missing almost completely from speeches and from many books on Australia’s Great War is the history of alternatives to the appalling loss of life. 

    In fact, from 1917 to 1918, across Europe there were rising popular pressures to revise war aims, to democratise, and to resolve the war – by negotiation. The war was kept going only by authoritarianism, propaganda, and censorship. Promising opportunities to end the cataclysm were stifled.[3] 

    1. Emperor Karl’s peace initiatives (December 1916-June 1917)

    Following the death of Franz Josef in November 1916, the new Austrian Emperor, Karl, pressed for peace. He used his French brother-in-law, Prince Sixte de Bourbon, in secret negotiations with France. In March 1917, Karl accepted the restoration of Serbia and Belgium, and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. Lloyd George and French premier Ribot were interested, but the Italians hostile, fearing that territory promised in the Treaty of London of 1915 might be sacrificed. The Italians stonewalled.

    1. Anglo-German negotiations on POWs (June-July 1917)

    A British delegation, led by Lord Newton, negotiated with a German delegation, at The Hague. British diplomats and politicians opposed the extension of these talks from POWs to peace. 

    1. Stockholm Socialist Conference proposal (May-August 1917)

    Planned by Scandinavian and Dutch socialists, a conference for European socialists was promoted by the new Russian government. They hoped to hammer out a compromise peace. The USA, France, and Britain sabotaged the plan by refusing passports to their socialist and labour representatives. 

    1. Russian proposal for an Inter-Allied Conference (May-June 1917)

    Russian Foreign Minister Tereshchenko proposed a conference to revise war aims and prepare for negotiations. The Entente and the USA dragged their feet, then ignored the proposal, following the failure of the Russian offensive of July 1917.

    1. Morgenthau Mission (July 1917).

    Henry Morgenthau, the ex-US Ambassador to Turkey, undertook a mission to test a negotiated peace with the Ottomans. In Gibraltar, he met with a British mission. It dissuaded Morgenthau from continuing, arguing that any peace was impossible without gains for the Armenians, the Arabs, and British control of Palestine (a prospective homeland for the Jews). 

    1. Reichstag Peace Resolution (July 1917)

    The Reichstag’s Centre-Left majority pronounced in favour of a non-annexationist peace guaranteed by a League of Nations. This was scorned by the Entente nations. Attempts to mount matching resolutions were defeated in the parliaments. The western allies made no coherent response to this breakthrough by the future Weimar Coalition, favouring peace and democratisation. 

    1. Papal Peace Note (August 1917)

    Benedict XV proposed a territorial settlement close to the status quo before the war, plus a League of Nations and disarmament. Wilson dismissed the note, bizarrely calling on the German people to revolt. The Entente powers hid behind his answer and made no reply. Chancellor Michaelis then spoiled the effort, refusing a public commitment to Belgian independence. Private assurances were not revealed.

    1. Armand-Revertera talks, Switzerland (7, 22 August 1917)

    These French-Austrian talks showed Austria ready to moderate terms; this prompted the Kühlmann offer. 

    1. Kühlmann Peace Feeler (September-October 1917)

    German foreign minister Kühlmann privately contacted both the British and French. The deal was for a territorial compromise: the restoration of Belgium in return for western concessions: territorial integrity for Germany and Austria-Hungary, colonies, and a disavowal of commercial war. The plan was weakened by French political infighting. Kühlmann then dodged and weaved, vowing to keep Alsace-Lorraine (9 Oct.), and Lloyd George announced unequivocal support for France (11 Oct.). 

    1. The Lansdowne ‘Peace Letter’ to the Daily Telegraph (29 November 1917)

    Lord Lansdowne went public, pleading for war aims revision in the Daily Telegraph. The ‘knock-out blow’ press rubbished him. The government cut him adrift. The USA failed to support him.

    1. British-Austrian talks, Switzerland: Smuts-Mensdorff (18-19 December 1917) and Kerr-Skrzynski (March 1918)

    British secret talks luring Austria-Hungary away from Germany, while avoiding general peace – failed. 

    1. Brest-Litovsk talks (December 1917-January 1918)

    Lenin’s new Bolshevik-led Russian government issued a six-point program for a general peace in December 1917. The Germans, under Kühlmann, made an offer accepting a non-annexationist peace. The Allies censored all news of these approaches for a general peace. Fearing domestic repercussions, the Allies rejected peace brokered by socialists. 

    1. Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and ‘Four Principles’ speeches and the Central Powers replies (January-February 1918)

    Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points Address’ (8 Jan.) marked a significant moderation. Promising public speeches followed from Austrian and German leaders, Czernin and Hertling. Lloyd George and Clemenceau sabotaged this with a belligerent statement, rejecting all negotiations, at Versailles on 4 February 1918.

    1. Archbishop Söderblom’s international Christian conference, Sweden, (December 1917 and February 1918).

    Some British Christians pressed for acceptance of Swedish Archbishop Söderblom’s plan for church leaders to discuss peace in Uppsala in December 1917. But most Anglican bishops opposed the meeting. Söderblom called a second conference for February 1918. Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, warned that British delegates would not be given passports.


    Reflections at Villers-Bretonneux

    The Tasmanian-born Radical MP, Leonard Outhwaite, warned the House of Commons in February 1916 what a disaster it would be ‘to hoist the flag of victory over an international graveyard.’[4] And so it was. Visitors to Villers-Bretonneux will reflect upon the dead – German, British, and Australian. We should reflect also upon the many lost opportunities to make peace, before these men were ordered to turn the machines of industrialised slaughter upon each other.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that 10,738 missing Australian servicemen are commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. http://www.cwgc.org/find-a-cemetery/cemetery/93000/VILLERS-BRETONNEUX%20MEMORIAL

    [2] See David Noonan, Those We Forget: Recounting Australian Casualties of the First World War (Melbourne, 2014), 194. ‘Of the total of 255,800 men [of the AIF] who survived the war, some 206,500 were either discharged medically unfit (130,500) or applied for pension assistance (76,000) before they turned sixty.’

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace in 1917-18, in addition to those cited in an earlier post, see Rex Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February-October 1917 (Stanford, 1969), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), Arno J. Mayer, The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917-1918 (New York, 1979), F. L. Carsten, War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London, 1982), David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads (London, 1986,) David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1991), Daryl Le Cornu, ‘Bright Hope: British Radical Publicists, American Intervention, and the Prospects of a Negotiated Peace, 1917’, unpublished PhD thesis (Western Sydney University, 2005): http://researchdirect.uws.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:801

    For German sources see Wilhelm Ribhegge, Frieden für Europa: Die Politik der deutschen Reichstagstagsmehrheit, 1917-18 (Essen, 1998) and the major document collections assembled by Wolfgang Steglich.

    [4] R. L. Outhwaite, HC Deb 23 February 1916 vol 80 c773 (23 Feb. 1916).

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1914 to 1916. Part 1

    A big centenary is approaching: the battle of Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918. Right now $93.2 million is being spent on the battle site to build the Sir John Monash Centre, ready for Anzac Day 2018.[1] Villers-Bretonneux is irresistible. It simplifies everything: German invaders, liberating Australians, grateful French. But it will provide a mere pinhole on the war, obscuring the big picture.

    No one at the opening ceremony is likely to ask: Why were millions of men, including Australians, still struggling on the Western Front in April 1918?

    The centre is likely to teach one lesson: the war was awful, but a dire necessity. Our political leaders frequently say so. On Anzac Day 2014 Prime Minister Abbott asked rhetorically, ‘But what was the alternative, in Britain’s time of need, and when Europe was at risk from Prussian militarism?’[2]

    The governing assumption clearly is that there was never an alternative to the carnage. In fact, there were many lost opportunities for a negotiated peace.[3] 

    1. Woodrow Wilson’s deathbed cable (4 August 1914)

    On 4 August 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson, from his wife’s deathbed, cabled all the major belligerents, offering to take the Balkan dispute to The Hague. All made excuses, protested their innocence, railed against the enemy, and pretended war was irrevocable.

    1. Danish initiatives 1914-15

    The Danes began shuttle diplomacy in late 1914 between Berlin and St Petersburg, seeking a compromise peace. Loyal to the Pact of London (September 1914), Tsar Nicholas slammed the door.

    1. Ambassadorial mediation, Washington (September-December 1914)

    In September 1914, prompted by German Ambassador von Bernstorff, William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State, launched British-French-German ambassadorial talks in Washington. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was negotiating to bring Italy, Greece, and Rumania into the war, and to give the Straits to Russia in order to keep her in the war, closed the talks down. 

    1. Christmas truce (December 1914)

    Inspired by Pope Benedict XV’s suggestion (supported in the US Senate), soldiers on the Western Front began a spontaneous truce on Christmas Eve. Horrified, the Entente was careful to include ‘Article 15’ in the Treaty of London (April 1915), agreeing to shut down all Vatican peace diplomacy. 

    1. The first Colonel House Mission (January-May 1915)

    House travelled to Europe as special US emissary. He found both sides coy on disclosing war aims. US proposals for a simultaneous end to both German submarine warfare and the British blockade of Germany were then derailed by the Lusitania crisis. 

    1. The International Congress of Women, The Hague (April-May 1915).

    Female suffragists met to promote the liberal internationalist alternative to the bloodshed: neutral mediation, a diplomatic settlement, and a new rules-based order with stronger international institutions. This boosted new like-minded pressure groups, the League of Nations Society in Britain, the Dutch-sponsored Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, the League for a New Fatherland in Germany, and the League to Enforce Peace in the USA. 

    1. The Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation (1915 to 1917)

    The American peace movement urged America to lead neutral mediation. Wilson was reluctant, preferring private diplomacy. US peace activists then set-up the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm in February 1916 and later at The Hague. There were successes: a delegation to Berlin persuaded German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to announce Germany’s acceptance of international arbitration and a League of Nations on 9 November 1916. 

    1. The second House Mission (January-February 1916)

    House encouraged both sides to moderate war aims and compromise. But London and Berlin preferred to gamble on coming battles (Verdun and the Somme). House and Grey did sign a memorandum: Grey agreed to invite US arbitration at a favourable moment; House agreed that, if Germany refused a reasonable settlement, the USA would ‘probably’ enter the war. Grey refused to initiate US mediation. 

    1. Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace (27 May 1916)

    Wilson committed the USA to enter a League of Nations, based on collective security, thus offering the ‘guarantees of security’ all claimed to be fighting for. Responses were cool.

    1. Emily Hobhouse’s ‘peace mission’ (June 1916)

    Emily Hobhouse journeyed to Berlin from Switzerland, and obtained an interview with von Jagow, German Foreign Minister. He declared a readiness to respond to a peace offer from Britain. Grey refused to see Hobhouse on her return to Britain. 

    1. Asquith Cabinet discussions and Lansdowne Memoranda (November 1916)

    In September, British Prime Minister Asquith invited his Cabinet to reconsider war aims. Lloyd George told the US press there must be a fight to the finish, a ‘knock-out blow’. In November, Lord Lansdowne opted decisively for negotiations. With the support of the ‘super-patriotic’ press, Lloyd George then rolled Asquith. On 5 December, he headed a Tory-dominated government, shunning peace by negotiation. 

    1. German and American Peace Notes (December 1916)

    Bethmann-Hollweg offered a Peace Note on 12 December. However, the new High Command hobbled it by insisting that no terms be specified. The new Lloyd George government condemned the offer as a ruse of war. An American Peace Note followed (December 18), urging peace terms. This evoked an incomplete response from the Entente (10 January 1917). The Germans offered to enter talks, but were silent on terms. Wilson then lifted the pressure. In his ‘Peace without Victory’ speech (22 January 1917) he argued that a negotiated settlement would be more durable. Peace hovered. He had stopped loans and supplies to the Entente. But Wilson’s efforts were wrecked by the German elite’s decision to reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare (1 February 1917) – much to the relief of ‘knock-out blowers’ everywhere. Here, typically, the wild men on one side came to the rescue of those on the other. And peace was snuffed out.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report 6/2015, Referrals made May and June 2015.

    [2] Prime Minister Tony Abbott, ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace, see Kent Forster, The Failures of Peace: The Search for a Negotiated Peace During the First World War (Washington, 1941), Laurence W. Martin, Peace Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (New Haven, 1958), Z. A. B. Zeman, A Diplomatic History of the First World War (London, 1971), David S. Patterson, The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York, 2008), Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (New York, 2011), Neil Hollander, Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I (Jefferson, 2014).

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Bullecourt to the Armistice, 1917-1918

    From 1916 to 1918 on the Western Front, the Australian divisions suffered 181,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead.[1] Some 10,892 of these dead have no known grave.[2] They died mostly from shrapnel and high explosive shells designed to tear people to pieces, or bury them alive. Pulverised, or ploughed under, their remains were unidentifiable.

    So, more terrible centenaries loom from 1917-18. Bullecourt, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux, the Hindenburg Line. For what did Australians die?

    To repel the German invader? It is simplistic to see in the German enemy a singular evil, a complete explanation for the protracted war, or a vindication of all that was done to resist German aggression. In this imperial bloodbath, all sides clung to territory conquered, all planned more conquest, all became more authoritarian, and all had their wide-mouthed politicians and generals insisting on more war.[3] The plague was on all houses – and they reinfected each other.

    For democracy’s sake? Enthusiasm for war and enthusiasm for democracy were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in every belligerent nation.

    What then were the Entente’s war aims for which the war was prolonged?[4]

    The Entente Reply to President Wilson’s Peace Note, 10 January 1917 (PUBLIC)

    In January 1917, while Australian soldiers on the Western Front endured a severe winter, Britain and her Entente partners, after 29 months of warfare, at last published war aims. They issued a formal reply to the German and American Peace Notes of December 1916. It ruled out a negotiated peace. It promised the Entente was ‘not fighting for selfish interests.’ It proclaimed moderate aims: ‘reparation, restitution’ and ‘guarantees’ against aggression. The war was to liberate Belgium, France, and Serbia, and get ‘indemnities’ for them. Grand aims followed: ‘the reorganisation of Europe’ along lines of nationality, the liberation of the oppressed inside Austria-Hungary, and the ‘expulsion’ of the Turks from Europe. The insincerity was stunning. There was to be self-determination, but only for enemy empires. There was silence on the secret treaties of 1915-16, and silence on plans for economic war.

    The Franco-Russian ‘Left Bank of the Rhine’ Agreement (or the ‘Doumergue Agreement’), 14 February and 8 March 1917 (SECRET) 

    Oblivious to imminent revolution, Tsarist Russia and France still played grab. Russia agreed to support France’s claim to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the seizure of the Rhineland. In return, France gave Russia ‘complete liberty’ to fix her borders with Germany and Austria. In short, France winked at Russian grab in the east, and Russia winked at French grab in the west.

    Agreements on German colonies and other territories, 1914 to March 1917: (SECRET) 

    The German colonial empire was carved up in a dozen agreements from 1914. Britain and France split German Togoland and the Cameroons (while Britain confirmed her annexations of Turkish territories, Egypt and Cyprus). In July 1916 Japan and Russia agreed upon their claims in China. By March 1917 the Balfour-Motono agreements were confirmed: Britain, France, and Russia granted Japan the German North Pacific Islands, and the German lease on the Shantung Peninsula, in China (Qingdao).

    The Imperial War Cabinet Committees, April-May 1917. (SECRET)

    While Australians endured hell at Bullecourt in April 1917, various Imperial War Cabinet sub-committees redrew maps of the colonial world. Louis Mallet’s ‘Committee on Territorial Changes’ recommended colonial seizures and swaps. Two imperial nabobs, both reactionaries, headed more powerful committees. Lord Curzon’s ‘Territorial Desiderata Committee’ insisted on Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) for Britain, Germany’s elimination as a colonial power, and British territory running Cape to Cairo. Lord Milner’s ‘Committee on Economic Terms’ wanted more protection: ‘imperial preference’, ‘Control of Imperial Resources’, and indemnities to pay for the war. A League of Nations was ‘impracticable’.

    St-Jean-de-Maurienne Agreements, 19 April 1917 (SECRET)

    At the St Jean de Maurienne conference, France, Britain and Italy agreed to more annexations in Turkey, adding to Sykes-Picot. Italy was to gain a vast share, the ‘green’ area, that is the southern third of Anatolia (now Turkey) including Smyrna, and an area of indirect control to its north, on the Aegean coast and hinterland.

    The Caxton Hall speech, 5 January 1918 (PUBLIC)

    After the disaster of Passchendaele (38,000 Australian casualties), and facing pressure from both revolutionary Russia and President Wilson, Lloyd George shifted ground. At the Caxton Hall in London he espoused moderate aims. He disavowed annexations. Britain was fighting above all for Belgium and France. There was ‘no demand for war indemnity.’ Germany’s colonies were ‘held at the disposal of a conference’. Alsace-Lorraine deserved ‘a reconsideration’. Soaring ideals prevailed: the ‘sanctity of treaties’, ‘self-determination’ for all, and ‘some international organisation’. So, after 41 months of terrible war, Britain’s Empire at last had moderate war aims. But Lloyd George’s rhetorical slithers were everywhere.

    True respect for Anzac 

    Thus, from Bullecourt, through the quagmire of Passchendaele, and on to the armistice, Australians continued to die on the Western Front – for all these war aims, known and unknown, sincere and insincere.

    Contemporary speakers on Anzac often indulge in sacrificial fantasies – young blood spilled to bring our nation to birth. They shower praise on the dead, imagining this is respect. It is not respectful of the dead to shun knowledge of the dubious causes smuggled into their heavy kits. It is not respectful of their generous instincts to gloss over what comes of empire. Catastrophes – such as the mechanised slaughter on the Western Front – demand the most searching inquiries.

    To what war aims were the diggers sacrificed in 1917-18? Did the Australian government carefully weigh costs and objectives? Did it try to prevent the steady enlargement of war aims? Sadly, the truth is stark: our inexhaustible loyalty to our great and powerful friend saw our government marginalised and our soldiers left fighting largely in the dark.[5]

    Therefore, was this horrific war truly a national awakening for Australia, or was it the high point of our imperial subservience?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] ‘WWI The Western Front’: http://www.army.gov.au/our-history/history-in-focus/wwi-the-western-front

    [2] Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front (Camberwell, 2007), 411.

    [3] John Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), see Ch. 4 and 158: ‘It would be quite incorrect to speak of a German singularity of destructiveness…’ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 194: ‘Wilhelmine Germany was not the only country to possess this sort of lunatic fringe.’ David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014) p. xii: ‘This work reaffirms that German Society was a highly complex hybrid of competing groups and interests and that to compare the Kaiser’s war aims in 1914 with those of Hitler in 1939 (as some British military historians have attempted to do) is far too simplistic.’ Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011), 50: ‘Yet Imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany. Despite the horror of the German wars in Africa, the Imperial German suppression of colonial revolts did not differ significantly from the violent campaigns of other colonizing powers during the nineteenth century….’

    [4] In addition to sources listed in an earlier post, ‘What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916’ (https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6275), works with a special focus on Britain, the Entente, and US war aims include Paul Guinn, British Strategy and Politics 1914 to 1918 (Oxford, 1965), Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923 (Oxford, 1987), John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict (Yale, 1992), David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford, 1995), Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992), Brock Millman, Pessimism and British War Policy 1916-1918 (London, 2001), and Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013).

    [5] Neville Meaney, one of the most prominent historians of Australia’s Great War, has written that regarding Gallipoli Australia was ‘neither consulted nor informed about the British plans’; that on Japanese entry into the war London ‘was not disposed to consult Australia’; that in the formulation of war aims during 1917-18, Prime Minister Hughes ‘had had no part in making British policy’; and that Lloyd George simply ‘took the Dominions’ assent for granted.’ See Neville Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923 (Sydney, 2009), 44, 59, and 247-8.

  • Richard Woolcott. Australia/China and Barracuda submarines.

    It seems that one of the important roles for the new Barracuda submarines that we are to purchase from the French is for the submarines to be able to operate at long-range in the South China Sea. Quite apart from the cost of the submarine purchase, is this a wise strategy for Australia to pursue. I have reposted extracts below from an earlier article by Richard Woolcott in which he warns of an adversarial attitude towards China based mainly on Japanese policies and US support. John Menadue.

    Extract from earlier article by Richard Woolcott ‘The Burning question – should Australia do more on the South China Sea‘ 9 March 2016.

    Australia must develop a more balanced approach to its relationships with the United States and a rising China.

    There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based mainly on Japanese policies and US support, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.  This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China, as well as a number of well informed academics, including Hugh White at the ANU. While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, as the United States has done. Australia’s focus should be on the unimpeded passage to the mainland of China through international waters in the South China Sea, as the United States insists on in respect of its access to its ports. There is no reason why China cannot rise peacefully if it is not provoked.

    China maintains it is simply protecting its regional interests from the US “pivot to Asia “, or “rebalancing “as it is now called. Although President Obama has not defined this policy in any detail, two senior US Admirals have recently said, in public, that it is directed at restricting China’s influence in the South China Sea.12

    Richard Woolcott was previously President of the United Nations Assembly, Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and many other countries.

  • Richard Broinowski. Australia’s maritime espionage

    According to The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson, an Australian submarine twice penetrated the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam in 1985. Nicholson’s claim appeared in an article in the newspaper on 27 April 2016 analysing Canberra’s decision to build French Barracuda submarines in Adelaide. HMAS Orion’s first intrusion resulted in ‘brilliantly clear’ footage of sonar and other hull fittings on a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear submarine. On the second, it shadowed a Soviet Kirov-class nuclear-powered cruiser and monitored its communications.

    In 1985 I was Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam, resident in Hanoi. I knew nothing of Orion’s activities. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden had instructed me to repair relations with the country, damaged by the war and by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s over-reaction to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia in December 1978. I was to encourage bilateral trade, re-start an aid program halted by Fraser, formally hand back to the Vietnamese our extensive embassy properties in Saigon, initiate a missing-in-action mission for Australian soldiers, facilitate a Royal Commission into Agent Orange, and generally re-build trust with Hanoi. I was to engage the Vietnamese in a dialogue on Cambodia and find out specifically if and when they intended to leave.

    At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Vietnam was commonly and quite mistakenly regarded in the West as a Soviet colony. Mr Hayden’s initiatives were strongly criticised by China, and five of the then six members of ASEAN (Indonesia, distrustful of China, and wanting a strong Vietnam to stand up to China to its north, was the exception). The Thais were particularly incensed, certain that the Vietnamese army would soon invade across the Cambodian border. Still smarting from their pull-out from Vietnam in June 1975, the Americans thought Hayden naive and foolish. Trenchant critics of Hayden’s initiative towards Hanoi also existed in Canberra, particularly in the Office of National Assessments and parts of Foreign Affairs.

    Despite the static, I was getting on with my job. We began an aid program and hosted a trade mission from Australia. I handed back our embassy properties in Saigon. With Vietnamese cooperation, we conducted the first MIA mission by any participating country in the Vietnam War and gathered evidence for the Royal Commission into Agent Orange.

    And I was also getting somewhere with Vietnamese officials on Cambodia. During meetings over several months, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach became increasingly frank with me. Since reunifying the country in 1975, Hanoi had been doggedly trying to pull the place together. By 1978, China, which had been unhappy with unification, was making threatening noises from the north. And that ‘madman’ Pol Pot persisted in attacking Vietnamese villages across the border from the south west. Vietnam had insufficient military strength to challenge China, but could certainly put a spoke in Pol Pot’s wheel. So on Christmas Day 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh. Vietnamese forces would leave when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been neutralised. Thach ridiculed the suggestion that Vietnam would stay in Cambodia or had territorial designs on Thailand.

    I reported our conversations to Canberra, along with my view that Thach and his colleagues were telling the truth.

    Meanwhile, if Nicholson and The Australian are to be believed, Orion was busy in Cam Ranh Bay. At the least, its activities were contrary to customary international law and the newly promulgated 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention. If detected in Vietnam’s internal waters, the consequences would have been horrific. Orion could have been depth-charged or captured, its complement of 63 crew interned, its armaments including its Mark 48 US torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles stripped. Bilateral relations could have come to a grinding halt. I could have been recalled or expelled from Hanoi. The increasing goodwill and understanding created through Hayden’s initiative and my activities would have been lost, and our sceptical western and ASEAN allies would have glowed with schadenfreude.

    In spite of its appalling baggage, this spying hubris appears not to have given either the Australian government or opposition cause to reflect. Indeed, it resonates in at least two respects with Australia’s recent decision to build at enormous expense a dozen French Barracuda submarines. First is range. The government says it wants long-range subs, a capacity the German and Japanese boats lack. This is presumably to enable us to spy on Chinese assets in the South China Sea. But 1960 British-designed Oberon-class boats costing a mere $10 million a copy (triple that in 2016 terms) had the capacity to reach the same neighbourhood in Vietnam. What is so special about the range of the vastly more expensive French Barracudas?

    Second, why is the Australian government so fixated on submarine espionage outside our immediate maritime neighbourhood? The consequences of discovery by China are more appalling than by Vietnam or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s one thing to sail on the surface through waters claimed by China in the interests of reinforcing ‘rules-based’ freedom of navigation, but quite another to penetrate coastal waters by submarine and conduct maritime espionage. If that’s not the purpose, why spend such colossal amounts on new submarines? To sustain the South Australian economy, keep Christopher Pyne in parliament, catch up with our neighbours? All of the above? I will explore motives and consequences in a following article.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW.

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating. the mistaken decision on submarines.

    The government has made a bad decision on acquiring the future submarines (FSMs). It’s bad for the Navy, bad for the taxpayer and it represents a major regression in terms of industry policy.

    It’s bad for the Navy because in terms of capability the decision fails to deliver on the objectives set out in the latest Defence White Paper. DCNS’ conventional Barracuda class boats will not be ‘regionally superior’ submarines in terms of their technology. By the 2030s, if operating in the South China Sea, they will be confronted by nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), of greatly improved performance compared to current models. The FSMs will not be, as the Prime Minister said, “the most sophisticated naval vessels being built in the world”. But on a ‘bang for the buck’ basis, they may well be by far the most expensive with the longest delivery timeline.

    An advanced, nuclear powered Barracuda class submarine, with underwater endurance limited to 100 days only by crew resilience and a submerged speed of 30 knots, could claim regional technological superiority. But no conventional submarine (SSK), however advanced, will be technologically superior in the South China Sea in the 2030s, nor will it be safe to send RAN submariners on offensive operations there on such a platform.

    The irony is that if the government’s power projection ambitions were to be pursued, the nuclear powered version of the advanced Barracuda class would be the ideal platform for the RAN. Yet Defence’s requirements have led DCNS to remove the single element in the Barracuda class that provides its overwhelming technological advantage, namely the nuclear reactor, and replace it with an updated version of the diesel electric propulsion that powered Australia’s first submarines over a century ago. It’s the naval equivalent of removing the engine from a Ferrari and replacing it with a motor from a Citroen 2CV.

    The ridiculous corollary of this is that it will cost Australia a lot more to procure the dumbed down version of the Barracuda submarine than it would have done to buy far more capable nuclear powered Barracudas as a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) purchase from France. If the Navy had acquired, say, four nuclear boats supplemented by six conventional submarines of an existing design to undertake the other roles required of the FSM, the overall cost could have been around $20 billion, as against over $36 billion plus at 2016 prices (the oft-quoted $50 billion represents future inflated costs). The Navy would also have been much better off in terms of capability.

    Another benefit of a MOTS purchase is that the new submarines would have been available a decade earlier, thereby avoiding some significant risks. There would be no need to attempt, at high cost, to upgrade the obsolescent Collins class, with a high risk of failure that would leave the Navy without an effective submarine capability for a decade or more. There are also major design risks in a new submarine, particularly in integrating American systems with the French platform and transferring power hungry systems from a nuclear design with a high availability of electricity. This could delay delivery of the new submarine beyond the current unacceptable timeline and increase the already unacceptable cost.

    The implications for industry policy constitute a particularly egregious element in the procurement decision. In this context, we need to remember that the Abbott government showed the door to the car industry. The end of the age of entitlement meant that around $500 million a year, not high by international standards, was too much to pay to support a high technology industry that, directly and indirectly, employed around 200,000 people.

    Now the government is keen to support an industry with a cost disability, according to the RAND Corporation, of up to 40 per cent. Given the likely moderate local value added in an industry where all the sophisticated hardware is imported, the effective rate of protection (assistance to value added) will be much higher than this. Indeed a leaked paper from Defence last week suggested an effective rate of protection of 500 per cent would be required to build the submarines in Adelaide. Even at the height of the Fraser government’s protectionist excesses in the early 1980s, the effective rate reached ‘only’ 143 per cent for the car industry.

    The government justifies a local build on the basis of job creation, developing an innovative industry and the ability to undertake through life sustainment of the submarines in Australia.

    On the Prime Minister’s figures, 2,800 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, a far cry from the 200,000 jobs that are related to the car industry. Some early estimates suggest we are looking at a cost of around $4 million for every job created.

    There is only value in building an innovative industry if it is internationally competitive. Little thought appears to have been given to developing an industry plan directed towards this objective. If this was an issue, the government would have given much greater attention to the German bid, which offered a substantially lower price ($20 billion), much earlier delivery, no cost penalty for a local build and the transfer of substantial digital technology to Australia.

    The defence argument for local acquisitions can be the last refuge of a scoundrel; in the past it was even applied to protecting the clothing industry. We already know that we do not need to build military assets, including missiles and systems, in order to maintain and upgrade them. We do not build RAAF fixed wing assets or missiles in Australia yet we deliver high quality through life support. Australian industry was perfectly well able to maintain the British-built Oberon class submarines and, indeed, to upgrade them.

    It’s not too late to amend the decision and deliver a better outcome. The submarines have not yet been designed, commercial terms have not been agreed and contracts have not yet been signed. A much improved approach could maintain DCNS as the preferred supplier, while providing the Navy with the capability it needs much sooner, at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer and with positive industry benefits in South Australia.

    The first step would be to negotiate with the French government (and the US) to acquire four nuclear powered Barracuda class submarines as a MOTS purchase. If agreed, the Navy could also acquire six conventional Scorpene class SSKs from DCNS, to be built in Adelaide on a fixed price contract if the cost penalty is acceptable. All these submarines would be delivered in the early 2020s with no need to upgrade Collins.

    If the acquisition of the four SSNs is ruled out, the capability requirement should be amended to exclude offensive operations in contested waters far from home. This would mean focussing on operations that are well within the capacity of a SSK, namely sea denial in Australia’s littoral and reconnaissance and intelligence gathering in neighbouring waters and archipelagos. This would require acquiring between six and nine SSKs of an existing design, to be built in Adelaide if the price is right.

    Of course, there would be political difficulties in making these changes. This would require strong leadership by the Prime Minister. Better this, however, than taking significant risks with Australia’s defence, imposing a large and unnecessary burden on taxpayers and going down in history as modern Australia’s most protectionist Prime Minister.

     

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating are Directors of Insight Economics. Previously they worked together in the Prime Minister’s Department, where Dr Keating was Secretary.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916

    Formal speeches about Australia’s Great War normally follow simple rules. The focus is upon military achievement, and defining national values – service, sacrifice, and mateship. Hardship and horror are added, giving lustre to military achievement. National awakening is emphasised: the diggers were ‘the founding heroes of modern Australia.’[1] Audiences are flattered: the Anzacs were ‘our mighty forebears.’[2]

    But the objects of that war – the ‘war aims’ for which so many Australian lives were lost – are seldom mentioned. Ignorance of purposes is assumed. ‘Few of us can recall the detail,’ Tony Abbott told the Gallipoli Dawn Service in 2015, ‘but we have imbibed what matters most: that a generation of young Australians rallied to serve our country, when our country called.’ And fought for what? Generalities suffice. ‘It was for country, Empire, King, and the ideal that people and countries should be free.’ The diggers fought ‘for duty, loyalty, honour and mates: the virtues that outshine any cause.’[3]

    But what cause? Many speechmakers simply confuse 1914-18 with 1939-45. They retrospectively democratise Britain’s Great War. Thus, our diggers fought for ‘freedom under the law, representative democracy and the universal decencies of mankind.’[4]

    This draws a veil over everything difficult: the expansion of war aims, the Great Powers’ jostling to redivide the colonial world, the private corporate interests masquerading as national interests, and the blundering ‘old diplomacy’ – all the systemic evils that prolonged the slaughter of Australians.

    Why did Australians die by the thousands at Gallipoli in 1915? At Fromelles in 1916? It is not enough to point to the wickedness of the German enemy.[5] We must explain the prolongation of the war. We must dig deep into our ‘war aims’.[6]

    As a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, but without control of her own foreign policy, Australia was bound by Britain’s diplomatic deals. These included:

    The Pact of London, 4 September 1914 (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia became ‘Allies’ and promised not to conclude peace separately. Russia pressed for this. Britain and France truckled to Russia, to keep her loyal. Tsarist Russia – Europe’s most reactionary power – was already eyeing annexations in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and beyond, the so-called ‘Thirteen Points’. Tsar Nicholas II and his ministers dreamt of stifling democratisation in Russia with victory. In signing up, Britain and France accepted the risk that the war would go on – until Russian war aims were achieved.

    The Straits Agreements, 8 and 12 March 1915 (SECRET)

    After great pressure from Russia, Britain and France agreed to plans for Russian annexations in Turkey. These included control of the Straits (Gallipoli and the Dardanelles), and Constantinople (Istanbul) – Russia’s great prize. As compensation, Britain gained the oil-rich ‘neutral zone’ in Persia (Iran). France won Russian backing ‘for the realization of plans which they [France] may frame with reference to other regions of the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere’, such as Syria. The agreements were secret. Thus, Australians died at Gallipoli so that Russia might rule in Constantinople. Truly, a Gallipoli ceremony should be held every year in London – outside Chesham House, Belgravia, the old Russian embassy.

    Cabinet Document ‘The Spoils’, 25 March 1915, CAB 63/3/104-7. (SECRET)

    On Gallipoli’s eve, Lewis Harcourt, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, drew up ‘The Spoils’. It outlined a repartition of the colonial world. Britain must ‘dictate any terms’. If Russia gained Constantinople, Britain had a long shopping list: annexations in Mesopotamia ‘from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad’, and a brace of colonial seizures and swaps among the victors, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa and the Pacific. Britain, her Dominions, and Japan would take all German Pacific colonies – anticipating ‘great trouble’ with Australia. To counter ‘Australian prejudices’, Britain aimed at ‘sweetening the pill’, giving Australia in addition Bougainville and the British Solomons.[7]

    The Treaty of London, 26 April 1915 (SECRET)

    During March 1915, Italian negotiators in London bargained on the price of Italy joining the war. The landing at Gallipoli closed the deal. It opened up the prospect of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. So, the day after Anzac, the Italian elite signed the Treaty, agreeing to bounce Italy into war. In return, Italy would gain swags of Austro-Hungarian territory, in the north and along the Adriatic. Italy was offered a slice of the Ottoman Empire, a war indemnity, and a £50 million loan. Under Article 15, the Entente agreed to support Italy in ‘not allowing the representatives of the Holy See [the Pope] to undertake any diplomatic steps having for their object the conclusion of peace or the settlement of questions connected with the present war.’ Catholic Anzacs, perhaps 25% of the AIF, had no inkling of this. The treaty was secret.

    The Sykes-Picot agreements, January-May 1916. (SECRET)

    British and French diplomatic negotiators struck a deal in May 1916. The victors planned to gobble up the great bulk of the Ottoman Empire. Later Britain and France also agreed to Russian and Italian gains. Again, secrecy prevailed. Australians would fight on in the Middle East from 1916 for all these objectives – and 1,400 died – knowing nothing about them.

    The Inter-allied Paris Economic Conference, 14-17 June 1916 (the ‘Paris Resolutions’) (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia agreed to form a trade bloc after the war. The ‘Paris Resolutions’ proclaimed a post-war economic boycott of the enemy. German commerce would be shut out. This would hobble the defeated, as the victorious empires became exclusive economic zones. Protectionism would triumph across the British Empire. This public deal strengthened the hands of the German militarists: they argued that Germany’s war was now indispensable. Sadly, Australia’s Prime Minister Hughes loudly promoted the ‘Paris Resolutions’.

    For such ‘war aims’, mostly secret, Australian troops endured their 5,533 casualties in one night at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. One hundred years later, the dead deserve better than to be washed into their graves afresh with a cascade of clichés and hyperbole. To honour them truly, we should ask ‘Why?’

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017

    [1] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Anzac Cove Address’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24397

    [2] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Address to Legacy Clubs of Australia’ 18 Oct. 2013, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23045 and ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Lone Pine Address, Gallipoli’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24398

    [4] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Remarks at unveiling of the Sir John Monash Centre winning design, Villers-Brettonneux’, 26 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24400

    [5] As Fritz Fischer has argued, ‘There is no question but that the conflict of military and political interests, of resentment and ideas, which found expression in the July crisis, left no government of any of the European powers quite free of some measure of responsibility – greater or smaller – for the outbreak of war in one respect or another.’ Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), 87.

    [6] For surveys of ‘war aims’ on the Entente side, see David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2005), David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1988), David Stevenson, French War Aims Against Germany 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1982), Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London, 1981), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War (New York, 1987), Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France and the Arab Middle East, 1914-1920 (London, 1969), Ronald P. Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London, 2006), Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Harvard, 2013), Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1967).

    [7] Lewis Harcourt, ‘The Spoils’, Secret. Cabinet Paper. Printed for the use of the Cabinet, dated 25 March 1915, in CAB 63: War Cabinet and Cabinet Office: Lord Hankey: Papers. ‘Magnum Opus files’, CAB 63/3, 104-107 (The National Archives, London).

  • John Menadue. Slogans or advocacy.

    At the last election, Tony Abbott gave us a long list of slogans.

    One of them was to ‘axe the tax’. And he did axe the carbon tax. But it was a serious mistake. With the continuing strong evidence of global warming, we badly need a carbon tax or an ETS to reduce carbon pollution. In addition to reducing our capacity to reduce carbon emissions, axing the tax meant that the Commonwealth Budget lost $7.6 b. p.a. in revenue. The slogan won the day. The losers were the planet and the budget.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘cut the budget deficit’. But we now know that under his leadership and that of Joe Hockey, the budget deficit has doubled over the forward estimates. Budget repair is still essential if we are to reduce annual interest payments and be in better shape to face possible global economic recession or collapse. The simplified slogan of cutting the deficit has not been delivered.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘eliminate the debt’ but net government debt has increased by almost $100b in the last two years. Yet Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull tell us that they are superior economic managers.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison said that they would ‘stop the boats’. They didn’t. And it seems likely that Malcolm Turnbull in his commitment to ‘continuity and change’ will continue to make the claim that the Coalition stopped the boats.

    The facts tell us something quite different about how the Coalition triggered an increase in boat arrivals in the first place and then did not stop the boats. But the slogan ‘stop the boats’ served its political purpose and an uncritical media accepted then and continues to accept the Coalition’s spin that it ‘stopped the boats’.

    Forgive me for stating the facts again, as Peter Hughes and I set out in two posts in December 2015, ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 1’ and ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 2’.

    There are two important issues relating to boats.

    The first is that the action of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, together with the Greens, in opposing the Malaysian Arrangement, opened the door for a dramatic increase in boat arrivals from about four boats per month at the time the Malaysian Arrangement was rejected in September 2011, to 48 boats in July 2013.

    The second is that the decision of the Rudd government in July 2013 to refuse settlement in Australia of anyone who came by boat resulted in boat arrivals falling from 48 in July 2013 to 7 per month in December 2013 when the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders commenced.

    By December 2013, boat arrivals had fallen dramatically.

    The Abbott government was only involved in the end-game and in a very marginal way. It was the Rudd government’s decision of July 2013 that was the game-changer and not Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders and a few turnbacks to Indonesia. Yet Tony Abbot and now Malcolm Turnbull contend that they stopped the boats. The facts just do not show that at all.

    When he became Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull promised us ‘advocacy rather than slogans’. He told us that there would be a ‘more mature and adult conversation’ about important issues.

    Whether it is on boats or negative gearing, we are seeing a continuation of slogans and very little mature conversation.

    Disappointments continue to mount.

  • John Menadue. Defence White Paper. US, China and Barracuda – class submarines.

    Rather than acquiring military off-the-shelf (MOTS) submarines, the Australian government has committed us to the French submarine that will be built to Australian specifications. It will be a ‘unique’ build, non-nuclear and very expensive

    The Defence Minister says that the Barracuda submarine will meet Australian Government ‘requirements for a submarine with considerable range and the capacity to remain undisturbed and undetected for extended periods’.

    The government hopes that this submarine will be able to operate in the South China Sea without running unacceptable risks for the crews lives,

    Notwithstanding that by the time these submarines are actually delivered these already ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea will be much more dangerous for a conventional submarine..

    In this way the government believes it will be helping the US resist China.

    We are apparently going to do this as a US ally at a large additional cost whether or not the US needs or wants our support.

    But is it in our interest to get involved militarily against China in the South China Sea?

    Hugh White, in this blog on 9 March 2016, (Australia’s Defence White Paper and the China threat), says. 

    ‘The White paper promotes a vision of the “rules-based global order” as a seamless and indivisible whole that must be either preserved unaltered or surrendered in its entirety and it sends a clear message that Australia should be willing to join a war against China to preserve it unaltered. This is plainly wrong. … So what are the implications of the White Paper’s view of regional order for the Defence policy it presents? The blithe assumption at the White Paper’s heart is that we can preserve the current rules-based order without serious military confrontation, because China will back down in the face of our threats. … This may prove a big mistake. Over the next few decades Australia will face a new order in Asia in which the US will play a lesser role and may even play no substantial strategic role at all.’ (Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies and the Strategic Studies Centre at the ANU and formerly Deputy Secretary, Department of Defence) 

    On the clash between China and the US in the Pacific, Geoff Miller in this blog on 31 March 2016 said:

    ‘We don’t know how the clash between these two great powers will be resolved. But I believe we can conclude that it is not a matter for or against freedom of trade, but rather a struggle for position between a superpower and its regional challenger, taking place near the challenger’s homeland. It’s not in our interest to become involved in such a clash, particularly militarily, and particularly when our relations with both contenders are both very good and very important.’ (Geoff Miller was formerly Australian Ambassador to Japan and Korea and Director-General of the Office of National Assessments.)

    In this blog of 18 April 2016, Richard Woolcott said:

    ‘Western “rules” of world order are no longer accepted by the major countries as the basis of world order. … There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China based on mainly Japanese policies could become a self-fulfilling policy. The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony. This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former ambassadors to China as well as a number of academics.’ (Richard Woolcott was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines and Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was Australian Ambassador to the UN and President of the UN Security Council. He was Secretary of DFAT from 1988 to 1992.)

    It is clearly an assumption of the Defence White Paper that we need a ‘unique’ naval capability that can operate in ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea and close to China. I don’t think there is much doubt that that is a mistaken and risky strategy as Hugh White, Geoff Miller and Richard Woolcott outline.

    The Defence White Paper and Government also assume that the US would like our naval cooperation in the South China Sea. But that is far from clear.

    In September 2014, a conference was organised by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). entitled ‘Strategy -The Submarine Choice.’ The ASPI describes itself as ’an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australian strategic and defence leaders’. At that conference Benjamin Schreer a Senior Adviser for Defence Strategy at ASPI raised serious doubts about whether the Americans wanted us involved in the South China Sea. He said

    ‘Operationally, it is hard to see Australian submarines contributing to any critical Coalition objectives in the South China and East China seas. The underlying assumption for such a function is that the US would want Australian submarines to operate in this space, but it’s questionable that the US has ever had enough confidence in Australian submarines performing such high-risk operations. And it’s even more difficult to see any future utility in having Australian submarines hiding off Hainan to threaten Chinese vessels as they leave port or hunting down PLAN submarines in open water. Given the enormous stakes in a future crisis involving the US and China, it’d be prudent to assume that the US would want to preserve this critical role for its own undersea force in order to maintain a single line of command and control, especially escalation control. In other words, the US would be likely to regard Australian submarines as an operational liability, particularly since their small numbers would mean that they wouldn’t make a significant difference to the outcome of the conflict.’ (See link to this Conference and Schreer’s piece on pages 45-48. https://www.aspi.org.au/publications/the-submarine-choice-perspectives-on-australias-most-complex-defence-project/Strategy_submarine_choice.pdf .Benjamin Schreer is presently Head of the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University.)

    This assessment by Schreer is consistent with the advice I have received that the US will not cooperate in Australia acquiring nuclear powered submarines.

    In their article in this blog on 16 April 2016 ‘A more efficient submarine solution’ Jon Stanford and Mike Keating said

    ‘If the government is determined to operate submarines in the South China Sea in support of the Americans, we should make it clear that Australia’s participation is contingent on the US allowing Australia to acquire nuclear submarines. On the other hand, if Australia cannot or will not acquire nuclear submarines, then it should abandon the ambition of projecting offensive power against a major adversary in far off contested waters. As ASPI has pointed out, there is no evidence that the US expects the ADF to undertake this role, which in reality is a great power role. Abandoning this force projection mission makes the capability requirement much more straightforward. Other roles include sea denial in the approaches to Australia, together with intelligence gathering and surveillance in our region. Indeed a smaller SSK (conventional submarine) readily available off the shelf is better suited than a large boat for these tasks.’ See link https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6169. 

    The Defence White Paper and a future role for Australian submarines seem based on two very dubious assumptions.

    The first is that we should if necessary involve ourselves militarily in the contest between China and the US in the seas adjacent to China.

    The second is that the US needs or wants us to operate submarines alongside it in the South China Sea.

    We are likely to foolishly waste a lot of money on ‘unique’ submarines whose capacity to operate successfully in the South China Sea twelve years or more from now is also very questionable.

    Footnote:   The media release on the submarines says that the decision is subject to commercial terms being agreed later. This is ominous. I would have thought the commercial terms were key matters that should be resolved up front. We have had too many examples of escalating defence costs.

  • John Tulloh. The odd couple – the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and their uneasy relationship.

    As enduring international couples go, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia must rank among the oddest. They have been kind of firm friends since 1933 when oil was discovered in the kingdom. Yet their societies are so different as President Obama might have seen for himself when his limousine drove through the streets of Riyadh last week. For starters, he would not have found a woman driver anywhere or one buckled up lest the bodily contours the seatbelt creates excite the male driver. America is a wide open democracy with rights for one and all whereas Saudi Arabia is like a feudal fiefdom where rights are limited – especially if you are a woman or non-Moslem – and it is an offence to question or challenge the king’s word. America has no restriction on religious establishments, but in Saudi Arabia only mosques are permitted. Apostasy is punishable by death.

    It is money, oil, security, arms, influence, investment and even more money which keep them together. But the strains are showing. The Saudis cannot wait to see President Obama leave the White House. They feel he has let them down. No doubt, he must feel fed up with them as well. A lot of his time has been spent dealing with Islamic global terrorism, much of it inspired and even subsidised by Saudi Arabia’s Wahabism, the kingdom’s austere interpretation of the religion. A recent report in The Times said Saudi Arabia has contributed more fighters to Daesh than any other country.

    The Saudis blame Obama for many things, starting with not supporting President Hosni Mubarak when Egyptians rebelled against his rule and forced him from office. Then he had second thoughts about confronting a Saudi nemesis, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, after he crossed the line in the sand regarding chemical weapons. Next he turned his main foreign attention away from the Middle East to Asia only to return and do a deal with Saudi Arabia’s arch rival in the region, Iran. The Saudis showed their displeasure when Obama arrived in Riyadh to attend a Gulf summit last week. King Salman, having personally welcomed Gulf leaders arriving earlier in the day, pointedly sent the local governor to greet Obama. State television, unusually, ignored the president’s arrival altogether.

    Back in Washington, relations are fragile. Congress is considering a bill which could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Saudis have threatened to sell up to $975 billion in securities and other assets in the U.S. lest they be frozen by American courts. President Obama has lobbied Congress to block the bill and, if necessary, promised to veto it. But a group of families of the 9/11 victims blame Saudi Arabia and want justice.

    (The majority of the 9/11 airborne terrorists were Saudis. But the commission which investigated the attacks found ‘no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials individually funded the organisation’. However, suspicions to the contrary linger. There is now a move to release the suppressed 28 pages of the commission’s report which might answer that scepticism once and for all).

    ‘We’ve seen a long deterioration in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and it started well before the Obama Administration,’ a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, Charles W. Freeman Jr., told the Los Angeles Times. ‘The U.S.-Saudi relationship is based entirely on interests, not values. It’s been an impossible relationship in value terms from the beginning’.

    ‘U.S.-Saudi relations have never been in complete harmony’, observed the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. One of its senior analysts, Ray Takeyh, goes further. ‘Saudi Arabia is no longer tethered to the American alliance’, he writes. ‘The House of Saud is beginning to rely on its own resources. It is hard to see what role, if any, the United States has in this evolving foreign policy’.

    Saudi Arabia arouses savage passions in the U.S., especially because of the 9/11 culprits and the country’s adherence to sharia law under which primitive punishments, such as beheadings and stonings to death, are still valid. 

         ‘The tragedy for the Arabs, especially, has been who got the oil wealth. It wasn’t the sophisticates of Beirut or even the religious scholars of Cairo, but Bedouins with a bitter view of faith. The Saudis and their fellow fanatics in the oil-rich Gulf states have used those riches to drag Muslims backward into the past and to spread violent jihad’.

    So wrote Ralph Peters, a Fox News strategic analyst, in the New York Post on the eve of Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

    While Saudi Arabia in its huff has been trying to go its own way, most U.S. commentators say there will be no fracture in the relationship. ‘Despite all the differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced – we need each other’, said former White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald. They share intelligence, the Saudis rely on America for their security, their investments in each other’s country are too big to endanger and for American arms manufacturers there is no better customer.

    ‘As unpalatable as cooperation with the kingdom might be for some, cutting it adrift is worse,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. ‘Whatever the resentments, neither side has a realistic alternative to the other — something President Obama has clearly had difficulty reconciling himself to’.

    The Los Angeles Times noted that even when the two countries were closer, Saudi Arabia was never an ally. It was a partner. ‘Both countries still need each other, but less than before’, it said. ‘They’re still partners – but colder, more distant partners now’.

    FOOTNOTE. One aspect of the relationship which is booming is the PR industry. The Washington Post says the Saudis are spending millions on PR companies and lobbyists to help burnish their image and protect their interests in the U.S. ‘Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington’, said Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money and influence in politics. ‘That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.    

  • Duncan MacLaren. Does Brexit mean a second independence referendum for Scotland?

    The algebra goes something like this: EU ref: Brexit – Scotland = indyref2? In other words, if England overwhelmingly votes to leave the European Union while Scotland votes to remain in and the overall result from England, Northern Ireland and Wales, (known since the debate on independence in Scotland as rUK – rest of the UK) is to leave, will this automatically mean a second referendum on Scottish independence? The answer is maybe.

    Certainly, the Scots are the most pro-European of the four nations of the UK. The Scots have consistently shown over a number of polls that they favour remaining in the EU. There are economic reasons for staying in such as the £2 billion benefit to the Scottish economy. There are social reasons such as the protection of human rights through legislation which the Westminster Parliament wishes to change but which the Scottish Government champions. Above all, there are strong historic reasons for the Scots feeling European.

    Scottish monks helped Christianise the continent of Europe in early medieval times, hence the proliferation of Schottenklöster (Scottish Monasteries) in Germany and Austria. Scots traders, soldiers and philosophers, even before the reluctant 1707 Union with England, had access to markets, armies and academe all over Europe. At one time, it was a toss-up whether French or English should be the language of the Scottish court after the decline of Gaelic and we still celebrate the Vieille Alliance (Auld Alliance in Scots) between France and an independent Scotland, called by de Gaulle in 1942, “the oldest alliance in the world”.

    By anecdotal contrast, English TV celebrity and ‘University Challenge’ host, Jeremy Paxton, recently called French “a useless language” and maintained French achievements were all in the past. Nigel Farage, the leader of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP) commented furiously that on a train from the suburbs to central London, he was surrounded by people not speaking English. Welcome to the mentality of the Little Englander who believes in a (Great) Britain (or England – the two are often interchangeable in such a mindset) comprising a feudal Royal Family, an unelected Second Chamber (the House of Lords), warm beer, cricket pitches, chauvinism and exceptionalism.

    The just published manifesto of the Scottish Government led by the Scottish National Party (SNP) for the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May this year opts for campaigning to keep Scotland and the UK in the EU. It further states that there would be a second independence referendum only “if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.

    Many journalists in Scotland who have an “SNP bad” obsession speculate that the very popular First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, “secretly” wants Scotland to vote to stay in and England to vote to leave. This would mean taking Scotland out of the EU against the will of the Scottish people. If this does happen, there will certainly be a constitutional crisis, but I doubt if there will be a referendum because the first part of the manifesto statement quoted above may not pertain, i.e. that independence has not necessarily become the preferred option of the majority of Scots. To hold a referendum on Scottish independence when the polls hover around the 50% mark for and then lose would scupper Scottish independence for a generation or maybe for ever. Nicola would not want that.

    In addition, the right to hold a referendum on the constitution is in the hands of Westminster as it is not a devolved matter and Cameron and other Conservatives have already ruled out another referendum. The Scottish Government could hold its own referendum but Westminster could ignore it as the Spanish government has done with the Catalan independence referendum.

    On the other hand, the brouhaha created by such a vote and the ensuing British jingoism with figures such as Boris Johnston, Tory leader contender and Brexit campaigner, and Nigel Farage possibly at the helm of government would so appal the Scottish people that they may clamour for another referendum. There is the added thought that being dragged out of the EU would consign Scotland to another 20 years of rule from Westminster by the Conservative Party which the Scots haven’t voted for in any numbers since 1955. The Tories have currently one MP in Scotland, a lightweight who had to be appointed the Scottish Secretary of State not because of talent but because he was their only MP!

    The Tories are taking forward austerity cuts, the semi-privatisation of the National Health Service and schooling, the £800 billion renewal of Trident nuclear subs, conveniently placed within 25 miles of Glasgow, and a bellicose foreign policy to maintain a vestige of imperial grandeur, all of which is anathema to most Scottish voters. They are also in a mood to cut the budget of the Scottish Parliament.

    Interestingly enough, ‘ Yes’ and ‘No’ voters in the Scottish independence referendum were asked if the Brexit scenario came about with the Scots voting to stay in, would they vote for another Scottish referendum? The answer was 70% of the Yes voters in favour and 62% of the No voters also in favour. If such a poll were to show such figures after 23rd June (voting day), the Scottish Government would certainly propose another Scottish independence referendum which, this time, would probably gain a majority ‘Yes’ vote.

    The post-EU UK jingoistic reaction to a successful independence referendum would be, to say the least, interesting. Having read some of the blogs of English Brexit enthusiasts, some of them might welcome the departure of “the moaning Scots”. Little England searching for a greatness that is delusional in the current world of alliances will have been born.

    Duncan MacLaren is an Adjunct Professor of Australian Catholic University and a PhD candidate in theology at the University of Glasgow.

  • Cavan Hogue. Saudi Arabia involvement in 9/11 attack!

    The United States has long supported one of the most repressive regimes in the world. It invaded Iraq where women were able to do anything men could (which wasn’t much admittedly) but not Saudi Arabia where women are kept in subjection. It also ignored the fact that Saudi Arabia is home of the Wahabi brand of puritanical Islam that is the ideological inspiration for the Taliban and other extremist groups. Australia has trotted faithfully behind.

    The New York Times and the US Congress now claim that at least some parts of the Saudi ruling clique were involved in the 9/11 attacks on the USA and the US Government has begun to criticise some aspects of Saudi domestic policies. This has led to Saudi Arabia threatening to withdraw funds in the US but this may not be a serious threat since it could do as much damage to theSaudis as to the Americans.

    The Saudis are of course players in the kaleidescopic imbroglio in Syria and Iraq, a major oil producer and a strategic ally of the US. All of this poses a dilemma for countries that wish to export their version of human rights to countries like Saudi Arabia which are not interested in receiving it. It is perhaps one example of a wider phenomenon. Western countries do not always practice what they preach and then wonder why they are not trusted.

  • Douglas Newton. The hard questions we should face on Anzac Day 2016.

    On Anzac Day 2016, the centenaries of 1916 should loom large. In April 1916, the Australian divisions that had been mauled at Gallipoli were being despatched to the Western Front. The industrialised kill-chain at the Somme awaited them. Other centenary moments from 1916 are coming: of diplomatic deals that escalated the war, and of lost opportunities to end the war.

    The cataclysm of that war for Australians ought to prompt hard questions – beyond the nationalist obsession over whether ‘the mettle of the men’ shone bright on the battlefield.

    Why were Australians so exposed in this protracted catastrophe?

    Because we plunged in, so recklessly.

    From the outset, Australian politicians boasted of their absolute loyalty to the Empire. They offered men without qualification – anywhere, for any objective, under British command. George Reid, Australia’s High Commissioner in London, gushed that Britain and Australia were united, like ‘enraptured lovers’ – ‘Two hearts that beat as one.’[1]

    Prime Minister Fisher told the British Colonial Secretary, in February 1915, that ‘when the King’s business will not fit in with our ideas, we do not press them.’[2] In October 1915, Prime Minister Hughes told parliament: ‘I do not pretend to understand the situation in the Dardanelles, but I know what the duty of this government is; and that is – to mind its own business, to provide that quota of men which the Imperial Government think necessary.’[3] In this spirit of imperial subservience were the men despatched to unimaginable horrors.

    For what purposes were Australian lives committed?

    For noble – and for dubious purposes. The noble were largely window-dressing.

    War aims escalated on every side during 1916. The imperial leaders compiled shopping lists of annexations. In May 1916, Britain and France struck the Sykes-Picot Agreement, planning a carve-up of the entire Middle East. In June 1916, the Inter-allied Economic Conference in Paris confirmed plans to crush Germany, with a post-war economic boycott. In August 1916, Rumania was bribed into entering the war, with the promise of a great slice of Transylvania. These added to the fatal territorial deals struck in 1915, the Straits Agreement with Russia and the Treaty of London with Italy. All such bargains prolonged the war.[4]

    One shell-shocked Anzac from the ‘Abattoirs’ at the Somme, Private E. J. Ryan, captured the soldiers’ disillusionment. In October 1916, he wrote to British Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, urging him to resist the wide-mouthed ‘bitter enders’ and press for negotiations. ‘Has England still got her old ideal, that of Conquer & not the supposed new ideal, one of Peace? … Every man I have spoken to is absolutely sick of the whole business,’ he wrote.[5]

    Why was peace not achieved in 1916?

    Because promising opportunities to end the war by negotiation were stifled.

    In February 1916, Colonel House, US President Wilson’s special emissary, concluded the ‘House-Grey Memorandum’. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, agreed to invite American mediation at a moment of Britain’s choosing. But Britain never jumped. The ‘bitter enders’ preferred to speculate on more war. Armed with emergency powers, governments everywhere spooked and coerced their populations. Victory, they argued, was indispensable. In truth, reactionaries demanded it, to save as much of the old order as possible.

    But there were always alternatives. Internationalists, radical Liberals, and socialists in every belligerent nation, pressed for negotiations and a new rules-based order. Even Tories tried. In November 1916 Lord Lansdowne challenged British Prime Minister Henry Asquith’s Cabinet: ‘Can we afford to go on paying the same sort of price for the same sort of gain?’ He argued that ‘the responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it.’[6]

    Then, in late 1916 came a chink of light. On 12 December, the Germans offered round-table negotiations; a week later President Wilson issued a ‘Peace Note’, urging all sides to specify war aims, as a prelude to American mediation. The Entente Powers stamped upon the opportunity.

    This year, we should remember all these telling centenaries – not just the bloodbaths at Pozières and Fromelles.

    But what was ‘the Anzac spirit’? 

    The posters proclaim ‘Their Spirit – Our History’. Countless sources testify that the original Anzacs were fiercely democratic and ferociously egalitarian. They hated privilege, defied hierarchy, and mocked inherited advantage. They believed in pooling resources against common dangers. Their spirit was collective – for above all else, they supported each other.

    Do we have a right to invoke ‘the Anzac Spirit’ in contemporary Australia? If we tolerate widening inequality, monstrous private wealth amid public squalor, intensifying social stratification, and weakening social mobility, dare we speak of ‘Their Spirit’? If we pursue a neo-liberal agenda, that preaches an acquisitive individualism, hollows out the public sector, privileges the private provider, relentlessly privatises our pooled resources, and lauds lower taxes as the one true household god – is ‘the Anzac spirit’ alive?

    And the hardest question: if egalitarianism is lost in Australia, what is the point of Anzac?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, ‘The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014).

    [1] George Reid, ‘Empire Trade’, The Times, 7 Oct. 1914. Reproduced in George Reid, ‘Fifth Annual Report of the High Commissioner of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom (printed 21 July 1915)’, dated 5 April 1915, in Papers Presented to Parliament, Vol. V, Session 1914-17, p. 247.

    [2] Harcourt cited the letter from Fisher, dated 15 Feb. 1915, in Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th series, vol. 71, 16 (14 Apr. 1915).

    [3] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 29 Oct. 1915, p. 7022.

    [4] Of course, Germany also planned annexations. As Fritz Fischer wrote, ‘all great powers had “annexationist” policies in the age of imperialism.’ Fritz Fischer, ‘Foreword’ to his Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), p. x.

    [5] Private E. J. Ryan (Service Number 4635) to Ramsay MacDonald, 16 Oct. 1916, Ramsay MacDonald Papers, PRO/30/69/1160 f. 108 (The National Archives, London). I am very grateful to Duncan Marlor for generously providing a copy.

    [6] Memorandum from Lord Lansdowne, 13 November 1916, Lansdowne Papers, LANS (5) 85/9 (The National Archives, London).

  • David Stephens. How did Canberra get its memorial to Kemal Atatürk?

    The Atatürk Memorial in Anzac Parade, Canberra, was unveiled on Anzac Day 1985. Over the signature ‘Kemal Atatürk’, the memorial bears an inscription which commences like this:

    Those heroes that shed their blood
    And lost their lives …
    You are now lying in the soil of a friendly Country.
    Therefore rest in peace.
    There is no difference between the Johnnies
    And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
    Here in this country of ours …

    Research by Honest History and its associates shows there is no strong evidence that Atatürk, an Ottoman commander at Gallipoli and the founder of modern Turkey, ever said or wrote these words. This article looks at how Canberra got a memorial including them. It draws upon the files of the then National Capital Development Commission (NCDC).

    In September 1984, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) advised NCDC of a proposal for a commemorative plaque referring to the Australians at Gallipoli. At the same time, discussions were underway about how Australia could reciprocate the Turkish gesture of officially renaming part of the Gallipoli area ‘Anzac Cove’. Calling a stretch of Limestone Avenue outside the Australian War Memorial ‘Gallipoli Avenue’, or perhaps even ‘Atatürk Avenue’, had been suggested but seemed unlikely to satisfy the Turks – or the Memorial, which objected to ‘Atatürk Avenue’.

    After the federal election on 1 December and the Christmas break, things began to move. At the end of January, Prime Minister Hawke’s office (PMO) advised the Turkish Ambassador that Australia was attracted to a proposal that Turkey would provide a brass plaque bearing a depiction of Atatürk’s head and the text in English of his famous saying.

    Soon after, PM&C advised that the prime minister wanted the plaque in place by Anzac Day, NCDC was told that the prime minister’s ‘personal interest’ dictated haste, and the prime minister himself wrote to the responsible minister, Gordon Scholes, asking him to take ‘personal responsibility’ for the project. The Australian War Memorial vetoed putting a plaque next to the Lone Pine in the grounds of the Memorial. (This was because Atatürk was not Australian.) Somehow – NCDC files are unclear on the details – the decision was made to place a plaque – and a memorial – in Anzac Parade.

    The PMO’s January advice hinted at the strong involvement from the Turkish government: it wanted to supply both the likeness of Atatürk for the memorial and the accompanying text. A few days later the Australian Embassy in Ankara advised PM&C that it had seen the Turks’ proposed words and thought they were satisfactory.

    The files do not disclose whether anyone knew the translation they were getting from the Turks had been worked up seven years earlier in an exchange between the Turkish Historical Society and Alan J. Campbell of the Gallipoli Fountains of Honour Committee in Brisbane. They reveal, however, the gradual dropping of the word ‘attributed’, as in ‘words attributed to Atatürk’. When Minister Scholes unveiled the memorial he simply referred to ‘Atatürk’s own moving tribute’. Reciprocity apparently eschewed caveats like this.

    Strike action during March delayed the work and the files include suggestions that the Anzac Day deadline would not be met. Senior NCDC officials speculated that an Anzac Day ceremony might be avoided anyway to avoid upsetting Armenians commemorating the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on 24 April.

    Relying on Ankara added further uncertainty. The Turkish Ambassador was, said PM&C, ‘adamant that his Government provide the plaque(s) for this Memorial’. Atatürk’s bas relief head had still not arrived from Ankara but PM&C were disinclined to press the Ambassador. In early April the head was still absent.

    As it turned out, the memorial was unveiled on schedule on Anzac Day. Questions remain about why the Turks pushed so hard for the project. A partial answer may lie in the Turkish Constitution of 1982, which set up the Atatürk High Institution of Culture, Language and History, incorporating the Turkish Historical Society, ‘to disseminate information on the thought, principles and reforms of Atatürk, Turkish culture, Turkish history and the Turkish language’.

    At a time when Turkish relations with ‘Western’ countries were patchy, there may well have been attractions in using the ‘Atatürk words’ in cultural diplomacy with an American and British ally in the Southern Hemisphere. With Prime Minister Hawke’s strong support a new memorial appeared in Anzac Parade.

    David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (www.honesthistory.net.au). The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. A longer version of this article, with links, will appear on the Honest History site.

     

  • Mark Beeson. Australia still hasn’t had the debate on why we even need new submarines.

    Australia is about to make its biggest-ever investment in military hardware. Although we don’t know yet whether Germany, France or Japan will be awarded the contract to build our 12 new submarines, it is possible to make a few confident predictions.

    What to expect

    First, the actual cost of the submarines when completed will be much higher than the figure that is proposed now.

    If cost were the only consideration, it would actually make more sense to let the successful bidder build them in their own country. But the construction is now seen as a de-facto industry policy for South Australia, a politically important state that has haemorrhaged manufacturing jobs of late.

    There are good arguments for maintaining a manufacturing capacity in Australia – even on national security grounds. But given the cost blowouts in the construction and maintenance of the troubled Collins-class submarines, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether building submarines is really our collective strong suit.

    Second, it’s a pretty safe bet that Japan will awarded the contract to build the submarines. This has nothing to do with the debates about the boats’ technical capacities, however. The principal reason Japan is likely to get the contract is that it will consolidate the relationship between America’s regional alliance partners and the collective effort to discourage Chinese aggression.

    There may be much to be said for such efforts. Plainly, China has become more aggressive in its pursuit of highly implausible-looking territorial claims in the South China Sea. This is something Australians might collectively feel alarmed about.

    But if Australia is trying to influence China’s behaviour, a sternly worded diplomatic note is likely to have as much effect and would be rather cheaper, too. The reality is that Australia can do very little to influence the outcome of the growing tensions in the South China Sea, with or without the new submarines.

    The third point to make about the submarines is that they will almost certainly never be used in anger.

    It is worth asking what the world would look like if we were ever in a situation where we did have to use them. The strategic – not to say economic – circumstances would be so apocalyptic that having the enduring capacity to destroy part of a notional enemy might be the least of our worries.

    In reality, the subs are supposed to “deter” our notional foe. The idea is that simply by possessing these sorts of weapons, the likes of China will be discouraged from acting aggressively. But if China is not deterred by the prospect of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the US, why should we imagine that our 12 submarines would do the trick?

    Will the subs deter other rising regional powers, such as Indonesia or Vietnam, from having hostile intentions toward us? It is quite possible that we may risk “invasion” from Indonesia – as we did from Vietnam many years ago – but this is likely to take the form of political, economic and environmental refugees in fishing boats, not the Indonesian army’s rather underwhelming might.

    The submarines could certainly deter asylum seekers, but this could probably be achieved in more cost-effective ways. It might not do much for Australia’s rather battered international reputation either.

    The flow-on effects

    China rightly points out that, unlike the US and Australia, it has not been involved in a war worthy of the name since the 1970s, when it received a humiliating bloody nose at the hands of Vietnam.

    Australia, however, has fought in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan and Syria in recent times.

    Given Australia’s enthusiasm for foreign military adventures, no matter how remote the conflict, our neighbours may feel understandably alarmed at both the submarine purchase and the relative diminishing of their security as a consequence.

    This is a classic “security dilemma” in which each side feels less secure because of the actions of the other. The all-too-predictable response is to increase spending on national defence in a futile effort to enhance security.

    History suggests that arms races end badly. The first world war had complex causes, but the simultaneous ramping-up of national defence spending by the potential belligerents didn’t help. When war did break out, the modernised, more lethal weapons systems were put to astoundingly effective use.

    The principal consequence of the inevitable but little-debated decision to acquire these boats is to contribute to a rapidly escalating regional arms race.

    This would be a ruinously expensive, dangerous and ultimately futile exercise at the best of times. But in a part of the world where there are still much better uses for public money, despite remarkable improvements in economic development, such expenditures seem entirely unjustifiable.

    At the very least, political leaders and strategic thinkers ought to be compelled to give a much more plausible and specific account of the new submarines’ real benefits and demonstrated deterrent effects.

    Being secure is undoubtedly a desirable thing. Quite what it means and how it is best achieved ought not to be left entirely to the pointy-heads in the defence establishment, though.

    Mark Beeson is Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 18 April 2016.

  • Editors, East Asia Forum. Australia’s fraught decision on submarines

    The submarine deal would fundamentally change the Australia-Japan security relationship.

    Australia is about to embark on its single biggest ever military acquisition. The Future Submarine Program (SEA1000) will see Australia purchase 12 submarines to replace its ageing Collins-class fleet.

    The SEA1000 has been a source of ongoing controversy with criticism over the lack of transparency of the process, debate about its strategic implications amidst the shifting regional geopolitical landscape, and questions about Australian economic interests and the creation of jobs in the local shipbuilding industry.

    The Australian government under prime minister Tony Abbott initially ruled out a tender process. As Yuki Tatsumi explains in our lead this week, Abbott ‘clearly preferred Japan’s Soryu-class submarines regardless of the amount of workshare or technology transfer to Australia’, ostensibly prioritising capability and cost factors ahead of Australia’s shipbuilding industry.

    Abbott was not the first to look to Japan — Labor Defence Minister Stephen Smith also considered Japanese submarine technology as a way of minimising the cost blowouts and sustainment problems that have mired Australia’s existing Collins-class submarines.

    But Abbott’s decision, in reality, was driven by the conception of a United States–Japan–Australia quasi-alliance framework.

    There was little regard for canvassing alternatives publicly. As the pressure of a looming leadership spill came to bear, Tatsumi notes: ‘Abbott reversed his government’s initial position’ and installed a competitive tender process which has delivered bids from France and Germany as well as Japan. France’s state-controlled naval contractor is offering a conventional-powered version of the nuclear-powered Barracuda-class submarine and Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) are proposing a Type 216 Class submarine, an up-sized version of the popular Type 214 submarine. The Japanese government has a proposal based on the existing Soryu class.

    Japan is still considered the frontrunner because of the gathering security relationship. ‘Without doubt’, David Envall reckons, the Australia–Japan ‘relationship has deepened substantially since the historic 2007 Joint Declaration “affirming” the partnership…upgraded, first to a “comprehensive” partnership in 2008 and then to a “special” partnership in 2014’.

    Some in the United States, notably hard-line Japan defence-analyst Mike Green, as well as ex-prime minister Abbott and his former national security advisor, Andrew Shearer, are pushing the Japan option. They argue the US Navy is unwilling to provide its most advanced combat systems to Australian submarines if they are built by France or Germany, although the existing close Australian technology partnership with the United States suggests otherwise.

    Abbott penned an essay lauding Japan for building ‘the world’s best large conventional submarine’. And Shearer, in a paper for CSIS, explicitly invokes the case ‘for significantly deeper trilateral maritime cooperation between Australia, Japan, and the United States’ to respond to ‘the evolving threat environment in Asia and the Pacific, including increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and East China Sea’.

    There are hazardous strategic implications in a potential deal with Japan. On the one hand, Hugh White argues that partnering with Japan would incur a strategic as well as financial cost. ‘Tokyo expects that in return for its help to build [Australian] submarines, it would receive … clear understandings that Australia will support Japan politically, strategically and even militarily against China’. On the other hand, a minor swarm of commentators have rushed to counter White. Stephan Fruehling argues that ‘[h]istorically, defence acquisition has done little to support strategic relationships, so cost and capability considerations should remain central [to Australia’s submarine choice]’.

    Unlike other arms transactions, the SEA1000 will have a 40 year lifespan and ongoing service requirements; this fact alone makes it a relational deal not a transactional deal. In a project of this dimension and longevity, each of the potential vendors stakes a claim of some sort in Australia’s security territory.

    A submarine deal would fundamentally change the Australia-Japan security relationship. Even a casual examination of Japanese thinking behind their bid reveals that, in the Japan defence establishment, the deal now has deep strategic undertones, even though it initially reluctantly came to the idea of selling submarines to Australia. As Tatsumi explains ‘the bid for SEA1000 is important for Japan in the overall context of deepening security ties with Australia’. Japan’s ‘2013 National Security Strategy identified Australia as an important security partner not only as a fellow US ally, but also as a regional partner that shares Japan’s key strategic interest in upholding an international order based on the fundamental norms that have underpinned the post-WWII world. Such norms include the rule of law, freedom of navigation and the non-use of coercive measures to assert diplomatic positions’.

    The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs placed the deal within the context of the elevated status of the Japan-Australia ‘Special Strategic Partnership for the 21st Century’ noting it would: strengthen Japan-Australia bilateral maritime security cooperation in the Asia Pacific, deepen US-Japan-Australia trilateral cooperation, as well as contribute to Japan’s own security by improving its domestic submarine capabilities.

    A critical question for Australia is whether it can or should sign up to the current Japanese administration’s defence aspirations and its particular expectations of the partnership with it.

    These strategic questions put Australia at the centre of a seismic contest of political forces in Japan.

    The fallout from and outcome of this contest is highly uncertain. The submarine deal could represent a tipping point in its outcome.

    On one side of the fault-line there is the Abe government’s desire to take defence reforms further, with a formal revision of the constitution. The security-related bills passed in September 2015 were the tortured result of the Abe government’s ambition to expand the roles and missions of the Self-Defence Force, to strengthen its alliance relations with the United States, and to build new security partnerships with other US allies and partners. But they were tempered by a deep domestic discomfort and distrust of Abe’s intentions towards the Article 9 peace clause of Japan’s constitution.

    On the other side, most Japanese are still, quite correctly, concerned about what removal of the anchor of the peace clause in their constitution might do to attenuate, not strengthen, regional security circumstances.

    Then there is the US ambition to elevate Japan’s defence role, around the realistic assessment that Americans are less and less willing to finance a pivot to anywhere (including Asia), while keeping Japan locked tightly down to prevent military adventures. Linking Japan with trusted alliance partner Australia through the submarine purchase is seen as a useful tool to achieve this goal. But what is Australia’s interest in being the midwife to this arrangement?

    Germany and France also have long-term skin in Australia’s security space, but it’s very different from that of Japan — less complicated and potentially more complementary to the economics of Australian interests in the submarine deal. They have hinted at the potential to develop Australia as a hub for submarine building to serve other clients in the wider Asia Pacific region, an incentive for the long-term production base in Australia to which Japan cannot pretend.

    With the Turnbull government poised to announce the winner of the competitive evaluation process in the coming months, the Australian government faces a major dilemma. If the Japan bid is chosen, a clear articulation of the future strategic relationship with Japan and where it might be taken will be demanded in Australia but also by China, among others. If the German or French bid is chosen, Australia’s partnership with Japan and its surrogate role in the US alliance framework will be under a shadow.

    It will require careful management to clean up the mess that Abbott has left on the submarine deal — a lose-lose game in which none of Australia’s key partners will end up happy. It need not have been thus. And the Japan bid, succeed or fail — despite Tatsumi’s brave hopes otherwise in this week’s lead essay — will vastly complicate Australia’s otherwise benign and well-established enmeshment with Japan.

  • Tony Wood. The $50 b. submarine project.

    Jon Stanford’s papers on the submarine project make an important contribution and deserve widespread circulation particularly among our decision makers. The replacement submarine decision has profound implications for all Australians. Its intention is to provide a deterrent to “potential adversaries”, but also to offer to the young members of our defence force weapons at least comparable with those they might face in opposition. To achieve this it is proposed we spend more on this project than we have ever spent before on military equipment.

    The Stanford papers make a fair case that the present proposal will result in failure on all counts except the last one, expenditure. Exceeding predicted expenditure on military weapons appears to be one of our specialities. The project did not start well when a previous government arbitrarily determined that the nuclear option would not even be considered and the present government followed this view. Here was an example of bipartisan politics, but was it for better or worse? We will never know because the public who has to live with and pay for the decision has never heard the arguments put.

    The section on time line in Paper 2 should itself have excluded any thought of building the submarines in Australia. In the best case scenario, if the first is built in 2020 and the next 11 follow at yearly intervals and they are projected to last 30 years, the last will not phase out until 2061 and, in the worst case scenario, 2065. The world will be a much different place by 2065 and we will have long since discarded diesel submarines at enormous write down cost. All this for party politics and short term jobs in South Australia now. It would shorten the time line considerably to rent recent diesel submarines or better still nuclear submarines. Don’t laugh at the rental option. India has been renting nuclear submarines from Russia for some time now, as a prelude to building them itself. Maybe the US would rent us, for a few years, nuclear submarines surplus from the cold war, until we could reassess the world political situation. There is historical precedent. Historically our navy frequently used second hand Royal Navy vessels.

    My sympathy goes to the Government officials who are obliged to support the Government decision whatever it is. This can mean finding weasel words to justify the unbelievable. The Defence White Paper states that: “maintaining Australia’s technological edge and capability superiority over potential adversaries is an essential element of our strategic planning.” The claim is that because the diesel submarine is presently quieter than a nuclear submarine then it has, “capability superiority” in the region of the shallow waters of the south China Sea. Technological edge embraces more than avoiding detection. What about getting home safely? If or when our diesel submarine is detected off the China coast, the chances are that the crew will end up in a Chinese jail or worse. This is because upon detection it cannot move because, as Jon Stanford points out, it is too slow to escape and eventually it must come up for air. The parents of the crew members are not likely to thank our politicians when they discover the real risk to the crews and the irony is that the choice was not to save money, but to serve an ideology which cannot be supported by fact.

    The best solution would be to place a hold on this project for a year while all the options are re-examined in an impartial way . Are our submarines there to back diplomacy and if so how serious a threat would diesel submarines offer? If they are to defend our shoreline, how is that defence impacted by the slow transit speed and the high rate of “indiscretion” of the diesel submarine? To those who will argue we must have a home grown product for independence, how much independence do we have now with much of the sophisticated technology of our present submarines, such as the critical command systems, borrowed from the US nuclear submarines?

    Let’s turn our backs on those who want to rush in, the present politico- military situation in our region does not demand it.

    Tony Wood, nuclear engineer 30 years experience on reactor operation and safety for Aust Atomic Energy Comm and ANSTO and some time on Molten Salt Thorium Reactor in US.

     

     

  • Richard Woolcott. A modern Australia for the 21st century.

    Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said it is a great and exciting time for Australia.  Indeed, it is a time of great opportunity for the Australian Government elected later this year to take bold action which will transform Australia into an updated, modern member of the Asian and South West Pacific Region.

     

    After World War II the United States wanted to implement ideals and practices it believed should be applied throughout the world.  The spread of democracy was the overarching goal.  Now, however, the United States, exhausted by unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now faces the rise of States with greater economic growth rates and rapidly expanding middle classes, such as China, India and Indonesia in our own region, and a more assertive Russia which regards itself as both a Pacific and an Atlantic power, as well as countries such as Brazil and Mexico in South America.

    From 1948 to 2000 will probably be seen as a brief period of history when global order was based on American idealism and traditional concepts of the balance of power.

    America wanted to expand a co-operative international order of countries following common rules which included liberal economic systems, respect for national sovereignty, and the general adoption of democratic systems of governance.
    Western “rules” of world order are no longer  accepted by other major countries as the basis of world order.  United States leaders, with the possible exception of Donald Trump who ,for the wrong reasons, seems reluctant to accommodate the major changes in power now underway.

    The goal for leaders in our region – Asia and the South West Pacific – must be to build a regional community which will reflect the world ahead.

     

    On the basis of more than 60 years of experience, including Special Envoy roles for both Coalition and ALP Prime Ministers, I would strongly recommend that the incoming Government after our General Election demonstrates the agility and forward-looking approach to respond to change.

    Such changes will be resisted by yesterday’s political leaders including, in particular, Abbott, Andrews and others on the far right of the Coalition and even some ALP politicians, including Stephen Conroy, the Shadow Minister for Defence.  To maintain policies rooted in the past, will undermine our ability to determine what Australia’s real national interests are.

    What needs to be done?  The first priority in updating Australian Trade and Security Policy is to focus on the Asia and South West Pacific Region.  In what is now generally called the Asian Century we should focus on our own region.

    The former Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, Sabam Siagian, and now Editor in Chief of the Jakarta Post, wrote last year when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister “Australia is still stuck in the 20th Century mode.  It is a monarchy, with a Head of State in London and its security arrangements are largely Cold War relics … Australia is out of sync with the emerging geopolitical environment of Asia today”.

    Australia needs a fundamental change of our national psyche focussed more on Asia and the South West Pacific than on our well established, traditional links with the US, UK, Canada, NZ, and Europe.  Australia should have much more regular and sustained discussions with our neighbouring counties, including New Zealand.

    Secondly, the Government should look discretely towards the evolution of an Asia Pacific community.  Meanwhile ,we should use existing organisations that do meet at Head of Government level, such as the G20, APEC (although it does not include India), the East Asian Summit (which now includes both the US and Russia), the UN Leaders Week in New York, and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (although they are a relic of British Colonialism ,some Asian leaders attend and discuss regional issues ).

    Thirdly, the above policy will require an updated and more balanced Australian approach to the relationship between the United States and China.  There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based on mainly Japanese policies, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.

    This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China as well as a number of academics.  While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Fourthly, Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims, as the U S has done. Australia’s focus should be on unimpeded passage to China through waters in the South China sea.

    Fifthly ,and Importantly in readjusting the main focus of Australian policies, we should withdraw our forces from Iraq and Syria.  Our presence in the Middle East will not contribute meaningfully to defeating ISIS or to securing stable, democratic, corruption free governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Our involvement was in support of the American alliance, although US policies appear to be failing.  The reality is that our participation is peripheral and symbolic.

    We should move out of this very complex, changing kaleidoscope of warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurd religious factions  and involved countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran , Yemen, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. We should not pretend to ourselves that we can really influence an outcome, which may be years away. The considerable financial savings could be much better used in shaping our next budget, including on defence (submarines),health and education.

    Sixthly, we should remove our remaining troops in Afghanistan. While there were reasons for joining the US led invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, 14 years later, with 40 Australians killed, over $550 billion spent and more than 13,000 Afghan civilians dead, objectives once deemed to be indispensable, such as national building and effective counter insurgency, have been downgraded or abandoned because there are no longer adequate resources, time or a publicly supported US will to achieve them.

    Seventhly, we should avoid, in our references to the ISIS, suggesting that it is a State. It is not a State. It has no air force or navy and even the territory it controls in Iraq and in Syria is relatively limited.  There is a tendency to regard all terrorist activities as being conducted by ISIS. In fact, Al Qaida, the Kurds and other groups ( e g Boku Haram in West Africa ) have been  responsible for a number of recent terrorist activities.The ISIS probably welcomes this insofar as it is Western intervention in the Middle East which it believes leads to an increase in terrorism ,rather than a lessening of it.

    Eighthly, a very important policy priority for Australia is to give a greater priority to Indonesia.  In the long term no bilateral relationship will be more important to Australia than that with Indonesia.  The stability, unity and economic growth, of a peaceful, predominantly moderate Muslim (81 %) nation of 250 million people, stretching across our North, a distance from Broome to Christchurch in New Zealand, is vital to Australia.  The empathy towards Australia evident in the 1980’s and early 1990’s needs to be rebuilt ,especially with the relatively new Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

    Ninth, the elected Australian Government should place the Republic back on the front burner.  An Australian Republic will increase Australia’s international standing as a more independent nation.  Continuing foreign perceptions of Australia as a Constitutional Monarchy whose Head of State is the Queen on England ( quaintly called here the Queen of Australia )and who’s flag is dominated by the Union Jack are anachronisms in the 21st Century.  The establishment of the Republic of Australia will be like Federation – a defining moment in the history of our country.  This is not simply a symbolic issue.  It lies at the core of our national and international identity.

    Tenth, and in the same context, we should call our High Commissioners Ambassadors and our High Commissions Embassies, which is what they really are.

    To conclude, Australian attitudes must reject and suppress religious intolerance, bigotry, latent racism, insularity and self-satisfaction. The Australian Government, to be elected later this year, should seize the opportunity to embrace the changes outlined above – major, and as difficult politically as they will be. If it does, Australia will be a more secure, prosperous and outward-looking modern nation, genuinely more welcomed in our region of the world, and internationally.

    If we do not make these bold policy changes, we may find Australia left behind and wallowing in a bog of lost opportunities.

    Richard Woolcott was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines, and High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was Australian Ambassador to the UN and President of the UN Security Council. He was Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1988 to 1992.

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating. A more efficient submarine solution.

    This week the Melbourne Age, SMH and the Canberra Times carried the following article written by Jon Stanford and Michael Keating on the $50 b. submarine project. This article is based on a three part article written by Jon Stanford and posted in Pearls and irritations. See link to three articles below.  John Menadue

     

     

    The 2016 Defence white paper proposes a substantial increase in expenditure on major assets for the Australian Defence Force. The largest item, and the most costly acquisition ever for the ADF, is the $50 billion project for 12 future submarines.

    This project raises major concerns related to its cost, timelines and the possibility that Australia will be left with no effective submarine capability for a decade or more.

    First, at $4.2 billion for a conventional submarine (SSK), the cost is unacceptably high. The improved Soryu class SSKs now being built in Japan cost about $720 million each. The latest nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) of the Virginia class (US) and Astute class (Britain), much larger and more capable than the FSM, currently cost about $3.85 billion and less than $2 billion each respectively.

    Second, since the white paper  posits a clear strategic need for the capability and the navy’s existing submarines are obsolescent, the delay in acquiring the FSM until the early 2030s seems excessively risky. A submarine purchased on a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) basis could be delivered at least 10 years earlier.

    Third, the delay means that the obsolescent Collins-class submarines will need to be upgraded, with the details, including the cost, yet to be specified. One former captain of the Collins considers it is not feasible to upgrade the class to contemporary standards and that such a project would be “throwing good money after bad”. The risk of an unsuccessful outcome leading to a 10-year gap in effective submarine capability is very high.

    These three substantial problems arise because of Defence’s assumption that Australia has a unique requirement for submarine capability that can be met only by a new design. This is because no current design of SSK would have the range to undertake extended offensive patrols in the South China Sea, regarded by Defence as a key role for the FSM.

    Yet the risks involved in developing a unique platform for the ADF and integrating new leading-edge systems are well known from past experience. The costs of commissioning a unique design for the Collins-class submarines, as well as of sustaining them, have been substantial. Before we go down that high-risk path again, at a vastly higher cost, we need to ensure that a more efficient solution is not available.

    While the navy’s requirement for submarine capability is ambitious, it is by no means unique. Its requirement, for example, is similar to that of the British and French navies. The problem is that its ambitious capability requirement for force projection in contested waters far from home points to a need for nuclear submarines (SSNs), which both the British and French navies have operated for many decades.

    The white paper  states that the FSM will be technologically superior to other submarines in the region. This is not accurate. Other navies in the Asia-Pacific, including those of Russia, China and India, already deploy SSNs and are in the process of acquiring more, of advanced design. China will have up to nine SSNs by 2020 and many more by the early 2030s.

    Although quiet, a SSK can never rival a nuclear submarine in the vital areas of underwater speed and endurance. If an Australian SSK were detected and attacked by a hostile SSN or by surface ships, it would not be capable of the sustained speed required to offer some reasonable chance of escape.

    This is hardly news to the defence community. For example, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), in proposing the operational characteristics required by the FSM, suggested its analysis “pretty much says ‘SSN’, but that’s not going to happen”. Indeed, former defence minister David Johnston belled the cat by saying: “ideally we are seeking a comparable capability to a nuclear submarine with diesel-electric motors”.

    Unfortunately, such a submarine is a fantasy. If the government is determined to operate submarines in the South China Sea in support of the Americans, we should make it clear that Australia’s participation is contingent on the US allowing Australia to acquire nuclear submarines (as agreed for Canada in 1988, although never taken up).

    On the other hand, if Australia cannot or will not acquire nuclear submarines, then it should abandon the ambition of projecting offensive power against a major adversary in far-off contested waters. As ASPI has pointed out, there is no evidence that the US expects the ADF to undertake this task, which, in reality is a great power role.

    Abandoning this force projection mission makes the capability requirement much more straightforward. Other roles include sea denial in the approaches to Australia, together with intelligence gathering and surveillance in our region. Indeed, a smaller SSK, readily available off-the-shelf, is better suited than a large boat to these tasks. We may need six submarines, delivered in the early 2020s at a total acquisition cost of less than $6 billion. Combined with the savings from not upgrading Collins, the budget would be more than $45 billion better off than under the current $50 billion proposal.

    Of course, Australian industry participation is a good thing provided it’s competitive and does not compromise defence requirements. In supporting South Australian jobs, however, it makes no sense to let the car industry go and then replace it with a more highly protected industry with significantly less spillover value. If ASC could deliver six SSKs in the early 2020s on a fixed-price contract within 5 per cent or so of a MOTS price, then by all means go for it provided the risks are managed appropriately. But otherwise, let’s bank the $45 billion or so saved by an overseas acquisition, minimise the risks and let Adelaide be content with the $30 billion project to build nine frigates, as promised in the White Paper. ASC would also be tasked with sustaining the new submarines, at a through life value much higher than the acquisition cost.

    Technology, economics and Australia’s future submarine. Part 1 of 3.

    Technology, economics and Australia’s future submarine. Part 2 of 3.

    Technology, economics and Australia’s future submarine, Part 3 of 3.

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating are directors of Insight Economics. Previously they worked together in the Prime Minister’s Department, where Dr Keating was Secretary. Longer articles on this topic first appeared on the Pearls and Irritations policy blog.

     

  • China and North Korea: the long goodbye.

    Jonathan D. Pollack from The Brookings Institution quotes Ambassador Wu Dawei, Japan’s long-time leading negotiator on the Korean nuclear issue, who expressed mounting frustration that North Korea lets China’s advice ‘go through one ear and out the other ear’.  Ambassador Wu suggests that North Korea ‘ had signed its own death warrant’.  For link to Pollack article, see below.

    http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/03/28-china-north-korea-sanctions-pollack#.Vv2jy9wxlqc.email

  • Richard Butler. Nuclear Security Summit: Washington Finale?

    Seven years ago, President Obama spoke in Prague Square and undertook to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. He cautioned that this outcome would be immensely difficult to achieve and may not be reached in his own lifetime, but his speech was heard and widely taken as signaling an enhanced US commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

    A year later he called the first meeting of a Nuclear Security Summit, to be attended by Heads of State/Government. It was held in 2010 and then followed, in 2012, 2014, and last week, the 2016 Summit, held in Washington DC, was designated as the last such gathering, at Summit level.

    Australia was represented in Washington by Foreign Minister Bishop, who claimed that no country has done more to ensure nuclear security than Australia. That airy claim aside, what she did do at the Summit was sign a bilateral agreement under which Australia would supply Uranium to Ukraine.

    Even though they interact in critical ways, a distinction needs to be drawn between the goal of the elimination of Nuclear weapons, and the agenda and objectives of the Nuclear Security Summits.

    As was evidenced in the final communiqué, the Summit was focused, virtually exclusively, on preventing nuclear materials from being obtained by non-state groups –terrorists – and criminal groups, in other words, on a particular aspect of non-proliferation.

    Unquestionably, this is a deeply important objective and the mechanisms, and international cooperation that the Summit process has established, are impressive.

    About half of the areas of the world in which relevant nuclear materials have been held or stored have been cleared of them and a low enrichment nuclear fuel bank is being established in Kazakhstan, with IAEA involvement, so that States needing fuel for electricity generation can obtain it from and return it, when spent, to the bank. The point is that spent uranium fuel can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. Sending it back to the bank is designed to prevent this.

    The Summit was characterized as taking place not only in the light of the need to address the special challenges posed by the contemporary phenomenon of actions by non-state groups and criminal organizations, but also the wider need to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The cornerstone of that regime is the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

    It is essential to recall that NPT, in fact, has two objectives; preventing new acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the elimination of those already held by states, specifically the five states recognized in the treaty as the “Nuclear Weapon States” (NWS): US, Russia, China, France, UK.

    In the past, the NWS have argued that these two objectives are separate and do not rely on each other. This has enabled them to argue that their tardiness in nuclear disarmament in no way reduces the obligation of non-NWS to abstain from acquiring nuclear weapons. Few have agreed with this obviously self-serving argument, not simply because that is evidently its purpose, but also because it contradicts the negotiating history of the NPT. Indeed, it seeks to re-write it.

    During the course of the Summit there was discussion of the increasingly serious matter of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and there was a side meeting of the five NWS plus EU and the IAEA, on progress in the implementation of the recently concluded agreement with Iran. These were and remain palpable issues in non-proliferation.

    On the other hand, it is not clear what attention was given to the nuclear weapons programs of India, Pakistan and Israel, the three non parties to NPT, each of which have nuclear weapons, have already proliferated. These are critical issues of nuclear arms control and disarmament.

    Of further importance, are the facts that: the US has embarked on an extensive program of modernization of its nuclear arsenal and the development of a new Long Range Stand-off nuclear missile; the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons and longer range missiles and torpedoes; China is developing the DF-41 long range missile, with possibly the longest range of any in existence; UK is planning to renew its massively expensive Trident nuclear force.

    On March 30th, the day before the Summit opened, the Washington Post published an Op-Ed by President Obama in which he claimed that he has “ruled out developing new nuclear warheads”. This attracted responses of incredulity in the US, including from former Defense Secretary William Perry. The fact is, 6 years ago, the President gave an undertaking to Congress to expend some $85 billion on warhead renewal in order to obtain its agreement to the ratification of the New Start Treaty with Russia, which set limits on their deployed nuclear weapons systems, leaving between 1800-2000 each. In fact, the overall planned upgrade of the US arsenal now approved by Obama is expected to cost some $3trillion in the next 30 years. The President may claim that this is not inconsistent with what he stated in his Op-Ed, by arguing that “renewal’ does not involve new weapons, just stockpile maintenance. Such semantics will be lost on others.

    Furthermore, for the first time in the series of Nuclear Security Summits, Russia declined to attend last weeks Washington Summit.

    India and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons developments signal unambiguously that they are engaged in a nuclear arms race.

    And, the US continues to refuse to allow any discussion of Israel’s undeclared, but believed to be substantial, nuclear weapons capability. That refusal has come to threaten the existence of the NPT.

    I have argued on earlier occasions, in Pearls and Irritations, in a number of contexts, that what we are witnessing now, in international politics, is a turning away from a will to live by and implement the key purposes and principles of the UN Charter, the post- World War II compact, and a reversion to the more traditional determinants of action by states; national interests, military power, the threat of use of force. There is possibly no clearer evidence for this claim than the insistence by NWS that their nuclear weapons capability is their right, and that it is legitimate for them to determine who else may or may not hold such weapons.

    While, self evidently, the NWS are able to make such claims, and such muscularity is all too evident in history, including in its disastrous outcomes, the simple historicism which asserts that such behavior has always been the case, especially with strong and competitive States, is deeply flawed and today, unacceptably dangerous, given the horrendous destructive capacity of nuclear weapons.

    In addition, the NWS have given the undertaking in NPT that they will progressively eliminate their nuclear weapons. Whether the NWS care to accept this or not, the undertaking on nuclear disarmament is fundamental to other states continuing to eschew obtaining nuclear weapons. Their current policies violate that undertaking.

    It seems that the Nuclear Security Summit process has established some means to reduce or contain the dangers posed by nuclear materials, but in sidelining the gut issue of reductions in nuclear weapons already in existence and being further sought by those who already have them, it addressed only a portion of the nuclear security task. How much more encouraging it would have been if the Summit had been able to announce that the eight states possessing nuclear weapons had agreed to commence a process of working together to pursue overall reductions in their weapons arsenals.

    The NPT was and is a two- way bargain. It is not being kept.

    It is worth recalling an axiom identified by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons: as long as nuclear weapons exist they will, one day, be used either by accident or decision, and any use would be a catastrophe.

    This truth was discerned before the emergence of contemporary terrorist groups, the suicide bomber and, the miniaturized, portable nuclear weapon.

    Both in his Op-Ed and in his statement at the Summit, President Obama said that he believed that, as the US is the only state that has used nuclear weapons, it had a moral responsibility to pursue ridding the world of the unacceptable danger they pose. Doubtlessly, his acknowledgement of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have infuriated many in the US. He deserves credit for that courage, but he would move from the zone of sentiment into reality were he to seek to promote nuclear disarmament amongst holders of those weapons.

     

    Richard Butler AC is former Ambassador to the United Nations and served as Convenor of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating – Submarines; cost, capability and timelines.

    This article is a response to the article posted yesterday by Paul Barratt and Chris Barrie.  ‘The case for building the future submarines in Australia.’

    Both Paul Barratt and Chris Barrie have served at the highest levels in Defence and their views are clearly worthy of very serious consideration. Indeed, their contention that a military-off-the-shelf (MOTS) solution is impossible because Australia does have a unique role for a submarine and that the future submarine (FSM) should be built in locally, is shared by many people.

    Nevertheless, it is surprising that Mr Barratt and Admiral Barrie do not discuss the capability for the FSM required by the Navy, the cost of providing that capability and the timeline in which the capability needs to be delivered. The authors have not attempted to justify spending $4.2 billion each on a conventional submarine (SSK), the first of which will not be delivered for 17 years, when a MOTS conventional submarine would cost well under $1 billion and even a large, highly capable Virginia class nuclear submarine costs around $3.7 billion. These submarines could be delivered in the early 2020s, or ten years earlier than under the White Paper scenario. This would mean that a costly and highly risky upgrade of the Collins submarines would not be required.

    While the Navy’s requirement for submarine capability is ambitious, it is by no means unique. Its requirement, for example, is similar to that of the UK and French navies. The problem is that its ambitious capability requirement, particularly for force projection in the South China Sea, points to a need for nuclear submarines, which both the other two navies operate. The previous Defence Minister acknowledged this by saying: “ideally we are seeking a comparable capability to a nuclear submarine with diesel-electric motors”.

    Unfortunately this is a fantasy. If Australia is determined to operate its submarines in the South China Sea in support of the Americans, then this could only be achieved with a reasonable margin of safety by a nuclear powered submarine. In that case, Australia should make it clear that its support for the US in forward operations in the South China Sea is contingent on the US agreeing to allow Australia to acquire nuclear submarines.

    On the other hand, if Australia cannot or will not acquire a nuclear submarine, then it should abandon the strategy of force projection in far-off contested waters. In any case, as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has pointed out, there is no evidence to suggest that the US expects the RAN to undertake this task, which, in reality is a great power role.

    Once the role of force projection in contested waters has been dropped, then contrary to what Mr Barratt and Admiral Barrie suggest, there are several off-the-shelf solutions that would meet Australia’s submarine requirements. These roles include sea denial in the approaches to Australia, together with intelligence gathering and surveillance in our region. Indeed, a small conventional submarine, readily available off-the-shelf, is more appropriate for these tasks than the large boat the Navy wants. We might need six of these submarines, delivered in the early 2020s at a total acquisition cost of less than $6 billion. Combined with the savings from not having to upgrade Collins (an impossible task, according to a former submarine captain), we would be well over $45 billion better off than under the $50 billion proposal contained in the White Paper, which in any case does not allow for the highly risky Collins upgrade.

    Of course, Australian industry participation is a good thing provided it is competitive and does not compromise the defence benefits to be provided by the new assets. If ASC could deliver six SSKs in the early 2020s on a fixed price contract within, say, five per cent of a MOTS price, then by all means go for it provided the risks are managed appropriately. But otherwise, let’s bank the $45 billion or so saved on the submarine acquisition and let ASC content themselves with the $30 billion project to build the nine large frigates they have been promised in the White Paper. They will also be tasked with sustaining the new submarines, at a through life value much higher than the acquisition cost.

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating  are Directors of Insight Economics and formerly worked together at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, where Dr Keating was the Secretary.

  • Paul Barratt and Chris Barrie. The case for building the future submarine in Australia

    When charting a trajectory to a desired end point it is as important to have an accurate fix on the starting point as it is to know where one wants to end up. So it is with SEA 1000, the Future Submarine (FSM) project.

    Much of the commentary is based on a politically inspired perception that the Collins Class submarine project (‘Beazley’s subs’) was a disaster characterised by cost over-runs, delayed delivery, intractable technical problems, and chronic unreliability once introduced into service.

    The facts are that the submarines were built to within 3-4 per cent of the original contract price after allowing for inflation, that the average delay in delivering the submarine compares well with other major projects, and that the overwhelming consensus among military insiders is that the submarine project was a great success, with regular claims being made that the Collins Class submarines were the finest conventional submarines in the world[1]. Certainly they are highly regarded by the US Navy.

    Furthermore, in 2000 the Government acquired all of the shares in the Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC – now ASC Pty Ltd) so it began the new century in possession of a highly capable submarine builder and maintainer, with associated facilities and skilled workforce.

    Some of these painfully acquired advantages were compromised in the first decade of the 21st century by the fact that the submarines were introduced into service without a validated strategy for sustainment throughout the life of the class[2], and without an adequate inventory management system[3]. This in turn compromised availability, with flow-on consequences for crew training and inevitability the availability of trained crew. These situations have largely been rectified.

    Our industrial advantages were further compromised by the fact that from the moment the Howard Government acquired the outstanding shares in ASC, it saw ASC as something it was preparing for sale. This got in the way of Governments reaching the simple and obvious conclusion that the successor to Collins should be built onshore by the successful submarine builder it already owned, with the focus of attention being on the required characteristics of the replacement submarine and which overseas submarine builder should become our design partner for the FSM project.

    This ambivalence towards ASC, and the feeling that there might be someone out there who would give us an off-the-shelf solution or a bespoke submarine, has led to a succession of governments spinning their wheels for so long that we are now committed to a multi-billion dollar life extension of the obsolescent Collins submarine as well as the cost of FSM, so any potential savings have long since vanished.

    To compound this error, there is strong circumstantial evidence that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott did a handshake deal with Japanese Prime Minister Abe to acquire Soryu submarines from the Japanese – a deal he walked away from on the eve of the first challenge to his leadership. In walking away from the deal he set up a ‘competitive evaluation’ (whatever that might be) of potential partners, a process which over time seems thankfully to have drifted back in the direction of being a thoroughgoing evaluation of potential partners.

    Is there a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) solution out there? Many of those who see proposals to build a purpose-designed submarine in Australia as an indulgence and/or a branch of industry policy rather than defence policy would assert that there is. The Abbott Government seems to have thought so, based perhaps on advice in 2010 to then Opposition Defence Spokesman David Johnston by Vice-Admiral Robert Thomas, Commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet: ‘you want to find the finest diesel-electric submarine made on the planet – it’s made at Kobe works in Japan’[4]. “Finest submarine for what?”, one might ask.

    Those who think the Japanese Soryu submarine is the solution would do well to read Option J for FSM – a Japanese solution?, Rear Admiral (Retd.) Peter Briggs’s comparison of the Soryu with the Collins Class published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

    We would contend that there is no off-the-shelf solution, and this is the testimony that a range of expert witnesses gave in 2014 to the Senate Economics References Committee inquiry into naval shipbuilding, leading the Committee to recommend that

    • the Government formally and publically rule out a MOTS option for Australia’s future submarines
    • the Government focus its efforts on the ‘new design’ or ‘son-of-Collins’ options for Australia’s future submarines and suspend all investigations for acquiring a MOTS submarine, including the current Japanese Soryu-class[5].

    Having heard a range of evidence on the advantages of a local build, the Committee concluded:

    Given the weight of the evidence about the strategic, military, national security and economic benefits, the committee recommends that the government require tenderers for the future submarine project to build, maintain, and sustain Australia’s future submarines in Australia.

    When selecting its preferred tenderer the government must give priority to:

    • Australian content in the future submarines; and
    • proposals that would achieve a high degree of self-reliance in maintaining, sustaining and upgrading the future submarines in Australia for the entirety of their lifecycle[6].

    We agree with this conclusion, based upon the evidence presented to the Committee. We note in particular the evidence of Rear Admiral Briggs that the ability to build, sustain and evolve in country puts us in a much better position to manage the cost of ownership[7], and the evidence of Commander Frank Owen of the Submarine Institute of Australia regarding the experience with sustainment of the Oberon Class:

    We were second cousin, twice removed of the logistics support capability surrounding that submarine. When the host nation stopped operating them, the supplies dried up and we had occasions [where] submarines were unable to sail because of vital components and spare parts that were unavailable[8].

    We also agree with Rear Admiral Briggs that there is no point in buying a submarine that does not do the job:

    There is no point spending any money on a submarine that does not do what you need it to do. You have to modify and extend to get a new Collins-like capability. Buying an off-the-shelf submarine with a 6,000-mile range would be worse than a waste of money; it would be an illusion. You will think you have submarine capability and the day you want to use it you will find that it cannot get there or stay there and do the job[9].

    Finally, there are some important geo-political considerations to be brought to account. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott commented in Tokyo in February that “for Japan this submarine deal is strategic: for the others, it’s commercial”. That seems to us a good reason to stay away from the Japan option, not only for the reasons cited by Hugh White and many others, but because our interests would be better served by a partnership with an experienced exporter that values its commercial reputation. Japan’s main interest would be served the day the contract is signed; for the Germans and the French, to protect their commercial reputation, the objective is successful, timely delivery of the project.

    Second, the submarine arm of the US Navy has demonstrated a high regard for the capability of our purpose-designed submarines, and for working with us in relation to submarine training, exercising and operations. If we simply became the operators of Australian-crewed Japanese submarines, would they sustain that interest?

    Our conclusion is that the Government should proceed with all due diligence in accordance with the November 2014 recommendations of the bipartisan Senate References Committee, and not be distracted by the siren-songs of those who would argue that there is a cheaper, lower risk, “adequate” option to be found elsewhere.

    Paul Barratt AO, Former Secretary, Department of Defence

    ADM (Retd.) Chris Barrie AC, Former Chief of the Australian Defence Force.

     

     

    [1] Yule, P. and Woolner, D., Steel, Spies and Spin: The Collins Class Submarine Story, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 325-6.

    [2] Australian National Audit Office, 2008-09, Management of the Collins-class Operations Sustainment, paragraph 3, at

    http://www.anao.gov.au/Publications/Audit-Reports/2008-2009/Management-of-the-Collins-class-Operations-Sustainment/Audit-brochure

    [3] Ibid., paragraph 11.

    [4] Bloomberg 2014, ‘Australia Mulls Japan Submarines Under China’s Cautious Gaze’, Bloomberg Business, 18 December, at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/australia-mulls-japan-submarines-under-china-s-apprehensive-gaze.

    [5] Senate Economics References Committee, Part II: Future of Australia’s Naval Shipbuilding Industry: Future Submarines, page 38.

    [6] Ibid., p. 21.

    [7] Ibid., p. 29

    [8] Ibid., p. 31

    [9] Ibid., p. 61

  • If we strike a deal with Japan, we’re buying more than submarines.

    In this article in the Melbourne Age, Hugh White comments

    ‘So before we decide whether to select the Japanese (submarine) bid, we have to ask if an alliance with Japan is good for Australia.’

    See link to full article below:

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/if-we-strike-a-deal-with-japan-were-buying-more-than-submarines-20160314-gni3hl.html

  • Geoff Miller. Japan, ’embedding’ and a world not of pure reason.

    “The Australian” of 29 March reported Murray McLean, former Ambassador to Japan, as defending the Japanese submarine bid against criticism that it would amount to a “virtual alliance” that would ultimately thrust us into conflict with China. He reportedly said that “Australia should choose a submarine based on the best technology and the best price”, taking the right decision without “thinking if some other country is concerned about it or otherwise”.

    This issue has recently been ventilated both in the press and online, with articles by people including Prof. Hugh White of the ANU. His point has been not so much that China would be concerned about us buying Japanese submarines, but rather that Japan would use a successful submarine bid to enlist us on its side in its on-going rivalry with China, conceivably ending up in armed conflict.

    The Japanese submarine issue also came up for discussion at an on the record conference on Indo-Pacific Maritime Security, held last month by the National Security College of the ANU. At that conference a number of Australian speakers said that “of course” the purchase of Japanese submarines would not compromise our ability to make our own decisions on involvement or not should tensions increase to the point of hostilities between Japan and China.

    In my view, while in a world of pure reason they might be right, in the real world habits of close consultation and working intimately together in such a vital area of defence would certainly make disassociation difficult should a crisis arise. I think similar factors would already have this effect in regard to the US should that country decide that it had to use military force in the Asia-Pacific and sought our support.

    Given the ANZUS Treaty (even though this requires us only to consult), the Marines in Darwin, the enormous amount of US defence equipment used by our armed forces, the amount of intelligence sharing, joint exercises, the secondment of Australian defence units to larger American formations, the doctrine of inter-operability, and the amount of personnel exchanges and “embedding”, including at very high levels, I find it very hard to imagine an Australian Government—particularly given the Defence advice it would most probably be receiving—bold enough to decline a US request for military support and involvement in a future Asia-Pacific “emergency”.

    Indeed, a “The Times” article carried in “The Australian” of 30 March quotes an Obama administration official as saying that “Australian leaders are the easiest allies to manage—our allies all give us headaches, except for Australia. You can always count on Australia”.

    (Also in “The Australian” of 30 March Paul Kelly quotes Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson as saying that “what comes out of this (Defence) Department (on the submarine project) will be based on a hard-headed assessment of capabilities”, but he concludes his article by noting that “Cabinet, of course, is supreme (and) can decide whatever it wants”.)

    According to press reports (“The Australian”, 9 March) the Commander of US Pacific Air Forces, General Lori Robinson, has said that negotiations are under way about rotating USAF bombers and tankers through RAAF bases at Tindall and Darwin. Press reports put this proposal squarely in the context of the South China Sea and China, and speak of the very advanced B1 bombers being involved.

    If we eventually decide to purchase the Japanese “Soryu” submarine we will perhaps be getting a very good submarine, but we will also be becoming “embedded” with yet another country deeply suspicious of China. In an article in The Lowy Institute’s “Interpreter” of 30 March the experienced Asia specialist Malcolm Cook cites two recent political statements by the Japanese Government as reflecting “how deep, even neuralgic, Japan’s sense of rivalry with China is”. He goes on to say that “The Japan-China rivalry is deeper and broader than the US-China one, and it is driving deep Japanese policy changes across a wide spectrum”. Indeed many senior people in Japan are keen to build anti-China coalitions, in which they see Australia taking part, together with the US, India and Japan itself.

    Our armed forces are already deeply embedded with those of the United States. This brings with it many advantages. A close defence relationship with Japan would also bring advantages. But we need to be very aware that because of this actual and potential embedding we could end up in the extraordinary position of having to join in the use of military force against our largest trading partner, and a country with which we have a Strategic Partnership.

    Geoff Miller was formerly Australian Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and Australian Ambassador to Japan.  He was also Director General of the Office of National Assessments.