On current planning, in the next great war Australia will have no strategy.
Strategy, the link between policy and the battlefield, is now more important than ever. Great power warfare has moved into territory so different from the past that some of the verities of strategic theory have been superseded. However, the insights of strategic theorists into the relationship between policy and strategy are needed more than ever.
Inevitably war will be fought in five interdependent domains in future. Apart from land, maritime, and air, it will compass the two novel domains of cyberspace and space. Modern weapons, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (IRS), communications, and command and control systems rely heavily on sophisticated digital and space-based technologies. As Congress recently heard from experts, ‘losing space degrades not only our space capability, but degrades our capability in the three other terrestrial domains as well’.
Respected strategic theorist Colin S. Gray, who passed away in March this year, had some important things to say about the relationship between policy and strategy, and therefore political and military leadership. The strategic problems he addressed during his life were shaped in large part by the Second World War, the Cold War and the nuclear age. But for his theoretic lessons Gray drew on more classic sources.
While the means of warfare are always changing, Gray insisted the fundamentals of strategy were to be found in the books that ‘comprise the canon’: in particular, those of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Thucydides.
Gray wrote The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice, (2010) in order to ‘find and develop a general theory of strategy explicable in terms that should be universally and eternally valid’. Gray believed it was possible for theory ‘to help educate the realm of practice by assisting people to think strategically’. Always pragmatically focussed, he believed strategic theory should be directed at ‘the better education of executive strategists, their political masters, and their military agents’.
In Fighting Talk; Forty Maxims On War, Peace, And Strategy (2007), Gray got to the nub of the strategy problem that will confront political leaders facing high-tech great power war. ‘When politicians decide to resort to war’, he observed, ‘they choose to depart from their area of expertise’. Inevitably, the civilian policymaker will ‘be poorly informed about the current state of the art and science of warfare’ and will ‘struggle to understand the character of the warfare that is unleashed’. That is more true now than ever before.
Civilian control of the military remains an incontrovertible prerequisite for democracy. In previous great wars the political leadership could broadly comprehend, in outline at least, the intent of the operations proposed by the military leadership to meet the policy objectives. They could understand that effects of military options were contained to known geographic locations, albeit often extensive, and make a judgement about the probable consequences of various operations.
Anticipating the consequences of massive cyber-attacks and destruction of large numbers of space-based assets, probably the opening moves in the next great power war, may well be beyond even the capacity of the military leadership.
If it happens, the next war will be different. It will be imperative for the political leadership to be clear and definitive about their strategic goals and about what victory would look like, at a time when the technological complexity of the weapons systems, and the range of technologies involved, will provide a major barrier to the level of understanding of civilian leaders.
The world hasn’t experienced a great power war for three quarters of a century. Now political leaders will be asked to adopt a strategy and authorise untried tactics against adversaries whose measure in the five domains is unknown, and whose own tactics will be unpredictable.
Their decisions will be irrevocable once conflict between great powers becomes likely. Because of the potentially decisive initial terrestrial advantage, the temptation to act first in space and in the cyber domain will be strong. The first encounter between great powers is unlikely to deliver a victory to either, but may impose sufficient damage on the military capacity and economic strength of one of the combatants such that the eventual result is almost certain.
The political, social and technological world in which Clausewitz wrote has passed, but Gray would point to the eternal nature of war emphasised by the Prussian. He would concur with Clausewitz’s view that ‘the political aims are the business of government alone’, and with the cautions that war is ‘a matter of assessing probabilities’ and ‘universally bound up with chance’. Operations in the five domains makes judgements about relative strengths more fraught and random outcomes more likely.
Australia’s strategic quandary emerges from its status as an ally to a great power. If it abrogates its responsibility to set national policy aims by joining in a coalition in which one great power antagonist determines the goals of the war it cannot claim to have a strategy. It cannot claim to be linking Australia’s national priorities to the military actions. Its fate would be in the hands of its great power ally. The option of not going to war, of not endangering the lives and welfare of a generation of Australians, would be foregone.
That might be understandable if Australia’s political leadership were involved in its ally’s development of the strategy, understood the probabilities involved, and grasped the extent to which chance and the unknowns might play a role in the course of hostilities. There is no evidence of this.
The clear course set by successive governments to develop military forces prioritised to be interoperable with those of the US and explicitly designed to operate in the South China Sea indicates that recent governments have abandoned any prospect of strategic autonomy and national independence. On current planning, in the next great war Australia will have no strategy.
Moreover, they have effectively tried to make that decision binding on future governments. Gray would be aghast!
Mike Scrafton was a Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, senior Defence executive, CEO of a state statutory body, and chief of staff and ministerial adviser to the minister for defence.
Mike Scrafton was a Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, senior Defence executive, CEO of a state statutory body, and chief of staff and ministerial adviser to the minister for defence.
Comments
7 responses to “MIKE SCRAFTON. Australia’s strategic quandary: political leadership and the abandonment of strategy”
‘Inevitably, the civilian policymaker will ‘be poorly informed about the current state of the art and science of warfare’ and will ‘struggle to understand the character of the warfare that is unleashed’’.
If as a politician or advisor your overwhelmingly major focus is on ways to damage your political opponents and successfully seeking re-election, then who is available in your cohort to learn about military strategy? Who would have the knowledge or experience in the application of policy to strategy? Ex-generals might well be out of date in their thinking. Are we sending senior officers overseas to other military systems to learn about various strategies? Or or we just taking instructions from the more senior partners in treaties? We are poorly served by our political class.
“The clear course set by successive governments to develop military forces prioritised to be interoperable with those of the US and explicitly designed to operate in the South China Sea indicates that recent governments have abandoned any prospect of strategic autonomy and national independence. On current planning, in the next great war Australia will have no strategy.
Moreover, they have effectively tried to make that decision binding on future governments. Gray would be aghast!” [Scrafton, above]
Exactly.
The military/intelligence complex in Canberra continues to play toy soldiers when that type of conflict is no longer viable if national survival is the issue.
In a major conflict between the US and China, with Australia being an embedded ally of the former, we would be toast in no time. The power systems that drive our economy would be paralysed and our military retaliatory capacity would at best be marginal. The devastation would be catastrophic. The Cobin19 virus attack would not be comparable. Who would wish to live through this just to pick up a few shattered pieces?
There is no going back to the security/insecurity of past decades which turned out to be benign as it was. But there is nothing inevitable about our fate if we act sensibly. While we remain a connected ’at the hip’ ally of an unstable US no good can come of it unless we had real rather than notional influence over US policy. At best we have a little of the latter but ultimately of minor consequence.
We must therefore make our own path on the assumption that we would be irrelevant in a major was (Pine Gap keeps us a hostage to fortune). We should concentrate on low level military contingencies in our region where we might be of assistance to others without imperilling their fate or ours. We already defer to China in trade matters and more of that may have to come. Surely we can live with that, and with China more broadly. What reason then would there be to attack Australia?
It is hard to see an “abandonment of strategy” which, since WWII, has always been “all the way with LBJ”
“The clear course set by successive governments to develop military forces prioritised to be interoperable with those of the US and explicitly designed to operate in the South China Sea indicates that recent governments have abandoned any prospect of strategic autonomy and national independence. On current planning, in the next great war Australia will have no strategy.”
I think this assessment is overly dismissive of the efforts made by the ADF’s planning staff and the intelligence gathering services which help inform their work.
There are numerous contingency plans around which our military capability is developed and maintained. These plans have differing levels of priority. They underpin the agreed strategy for the defence of our nation.
We are currently seeing what happens when we, as a nation, take our eye off the ball. Our last pandemic preparedness exercise was conducted over ten years ago. After that, the need for regularly updated contingency planning lost importance. The ADF, however, continually maintains its readiness to execute the contingency plan(s) considered most likely to be needed be meet the current threat assessment.
The ADF at all its levels of responsibility is both professional and dedicated. As is undoubtedly right, only by direction by the Government of the day can the use of military force be authorised. It is the responsibility of the ADF to make known to Government the appropriate preparedness levels required at all times. I, for one, have confidence in the ADF’s unswerving commitment to this end.
‘They underpin the agreed strategy for the defence of our nation.’
What agreed strategy for a major war in Northeast Asia.
That’s not the issue. It is in a great war-a conflict between China and the US in North Asia-who will be call the shots and what scope would having a highly interoperable force give Australian politicians to make an independent decision in Australia’s interest.
National strategy is not about what the ADF can do. Its about what the political leadership decides to do in a crisis. I understand that the highly professional ADF makes contingency plans for defence of Australia. Which plan they operate, if any any all, will be the call of the political leadership-the leadership’s strategy.
But in the build up to a great power war in Northeast Asia are they so locked into the US’s forcesthat they will fall in behind the US’s strategy without choice.
I think it’s important to define terms. We have Military Strategy and Grand Strategy. ADF Contingency Plans for the defence of Australia are formulated on the basis of military strategy; this in turn, is developed within an agreed grand strategy.
The ANZUS treaty currently forms part of the grand strategy for our defence. The US is by far the predominate partner in this security agreement. This means a subordinate role for Australia and NZ.
If the relationship with the US is to be scrapped, what form of grand strategy is to be adopted. One option is to become a ‘neutral’ state, ie. accept that we are willing to the being manipulated by any state more powerful than ourselves. Other options? Enter into a bilateral defence agreement with an another nation (Indonesia, perhaps) or another group of nations (such as used to exist with SEATO)?
Mike – you posit a war in north-east Asia.
Between whom? With which respective allies?