Many of the Chinese regime’s practises are repugnant to democratic values and human rights. That distaste and disapproval doesn’t warrant Australian governments pursuing a crusade or adopting an irrational strategic policy based on fighting a war with China, either in the company of the US or alone.
Setting strategic policy is difficult terrain to navigate. Armed conflict, as Clausewitz observed, is a policy issue. Articulating the purpose, objectives, and risks associated strategic policy decisions is often more like an art, or a gamble, than a science.
Governments are obliged to provide for the security of the citizenry. Some security threats that originate from beyond national borders require a military response. Some, not all! A capable military should be able to prevail over or to deter some threats that fall within a constrained band of situations without resulting in catastrophic harm or ending in existential damage.
The acceptable level of damage from military conflict to the lives and future welfare, well-being, and prosperity of the population is a subjective judgement. Political leaders often have been prepared to subject the people which they are responsible for protecting to the horrors of war for beliefs, ideologies, values, or national pride.
Governments face a bewildering calculus. Military effects are achieved within the constraints of geography. So, first look at a map. Then ascertain which states have the force projection capabilities to reach Australia and for how long they would be able to sustain an offensive at various levels of intensity. Power relativities could change dramatically over five, ten, or fifteen years.
To match adversary force projection capabilities may prove prohibitively costly or impossible. An adversary’s objectives in Australia’s case could stretch from destroying or occupying offshore energy infrastructure, blockading ports and disrupting seaborne trade, attacking critical infrastructure on the east coast, up to an invasion and occupation of centres and assets in the north. To protect against all possible objectives would be unachievable as each requires a different mix of air, sea, and land-based capabilities. Perversely, force structuring against one or more alternatives could influence an adversary to choose a different option.
Alliances make the challenge even more complex as states will act on their own strategic interest; especially if they face significant adverse consequences from acting. Being allied with a hegemon provides good insurance except when the scale of a crisis makes the hegemon baulk at acting. A high degree of self-reliance is sensible to protect critical national interests; particularly if it is judged that they are militarily defendable.
The inflexion point at which Australia should take the military option off the table can be difficult to detect. For many, submission to China without a fight would be un-Australian, against the ANZAC spirit, an ignoble national surrender, or abandonment of the things for which Australia stands and as such would be totally unacceptable. A government might even gain a political mandate to take a heroic stand; but it would not be in the best interests of the security of the nation.
Wars generally are determined by an interplay of domestic resources, relative industrial and technological advantage, available military forces, and tactical issues. Where nations are of a similar economic and demographic size, then industrial capacity, or past investment in the military, or geographical advantage could determine the outcome. When the imbalance in strength is very large, and the larger power is sufficiently motivated to prevail through force, there is a predictability about the outcome.
To sustain larger and better equipped forces in the field for longer while being able to absorb greater losses affords an almost insurmountable strategic advantage. To contrast China’s war potential with Australia’s capacity to mount a credible defence should persuade any rational Australian government to take the military option off the table. Economically, in nominal GDP terms China’s economy is ten times that of Australia; when measured as GDP(PPP) it is twenty times greater. Every year China’s economy grows at much more than half the total of the Australian economy.
China’s defence industrial base is now second only to that of the US. SIPRI suggests China has three companies in the top ten global arms sellers. Based on what it believes are probably underestimates, SIPRI consider China the second-largest national arms seller to the US. In 2017 China’s two main shipbuilding companies, CSIC and CSSC, delivered about 13 major military ships compared to the US’s largest US shipbuilder which delivered three. In 2017 alone China produced two nuclear and two conventional submarines.
The difference between China and Australia in defence expenditure is increasing. Between 2000 and 2018 China’s outspent Australia by a ratio of 6.25 to 1, between 2010 and 2018 by 7.8 to 1, and in 2018 by 8.9 to 1. Every year the disparity in military force grows exponentially. The Pentagon’s annual report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019 details just how great is the growing disparity.
The rhetoric and defence investment planning from Canberra indicates strongly that involvement in a military conflict with China is still on the table. Absent from these statements is any explanation to the public of how it is envisioned such a conflict would play out and how many lives could be lost, how much damage might result, and what might be achieved.
Australia needs a modern capable defence force for a number of roles and situations. However, the enormous investment in submarines, ships, and fighters, with an emphasis on high levels of interoperability with US forces, seems to betray a decision to patch into US forces in an East Asian conflict. It is the act of a tributary state subordinating its interests to the hegemon. That’s bad enough. Arguing for massive increases in defence spending in order to resist an attack by China on a friendless Australia is more disturbing and reckless.
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
5 responses to “MIKE SCRAFTON. When to take the military option off the table”
To start the article with the claim “Many of the Chinese regime’s practises are repugnant to democratic values and human rights” is starting a rational and intelligent debate on the wrong foot. Similarly, if a Chinese writer wrote “Many of the Western powers practices are repugnant to socialist values and human rights”, the intention is the same. Both are subjective views that create mistrust and misunderstanding in geopolitics which eventually lead to war. We need to remove this opinion for peace.
Mr Scrafton however, is correct in his logic, despite the “subjective” sentiments of the West on China’s political system; war is unnecessary or required.
Australia has gone overseas for wars and no war has been fought on Australian soil except for a few skirmishes in overpowering the First Australians. Whilst US and UK have had wars in their own soil as well as abroad, the peoples’ distaste for war is more intensive than Australians.
Judging from history, China is unlikely to invade Australia or another other SE Asian country. The conventional practice was “buffer states” and self-governance of neighbouring countries. The exception was the Mongols, where they conquered lands as far as Hungary.
If Australia really wants to be aggressive militarily, then Sunzi Art of War would have recommended “Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack”. Sounds great, but we couldn’t afford it. Decoupling from Coronavirus already cost us a whooping $14 billion deficit.
Finally, war does not solve any problems it only perpetuates it! Peace and co-prosperity is better for all mankind irrespective of differences in political ideology.
It should be clear to P&I readers by now that much of Defence planning in Australia and the accompanying White Papers is pure fantasy and serve essentially to support the living of a class of White Hall warriors and their strategic policy advisers who doubtless are motivated by the most worthy of motives derived from past traditions. But this can not justify billions of dollars on capital state of the art equipment that will never be utilised in conflict apart from training. These billions are being diverted from essential infrastructure developments – transport, energy, hospitals, etc. – and from alleviating serious social problems in our cities and elsewhere. We have lost a sense of proportion for determining priorities in accordance with actual need. As noted in a previous item in these pages, a defendable military conflict is still on the table.
Sure we need a military to deal with possible low level conflict around our coastline and close in-shore, probably perpetrated by non-state actors. Not for another Great (but unwinnable) War.
If the US got into a serious war with China the consequences for a participating Australian military ally would be unthinkable. A single state-of-the-art DF-41 solid fuelled hypersonic ballistic missile launched from China and travelling at 25-30,000 km/hr would take less than 30 minutes to reach the centre of Australia and release its multiple warheads. No US missile defence system can stop an Iranian missile, let alone a DF-41. The DF-41 carries up to 10 multiple re-entry vehicles, each one capable of carrying a nuclear or conventional warhead. Four of the warheads would destroy every major US base in Australia within seconds – in Darwin, Alice Springs, Exmouth, and Geraldton – with 6 others destroying the RAAF northern airfields, the Stirling Naval Base in Fremantle, and any remaining major port or air infrastructure that Chinese military experts identified as a potential threat. All of this in less than an hour.
As stated, “To contrast China’s war potential with Australia’s capacity to mount a credible defence should persuade any rational Australian government to take the military option off the table.”
Well, that is how it is right now, therefore relevant for today’s situation. However, if we wait until 2032, or thereabouts and with a large dose of luck, we might be able to be ranked as the greatest military power between Indonesia’s southern islands and the Antarctic with our French designed diesel-powered submarines, easily seen from space and which by then, based on a fast deteriorating dollar, could have cost us Aus $ 90 billion, already on this date guesstimated at Aus $ 70 billion with a decade or so to go.
Of course, our current ‘amicable’ US-influenced relationship with China, as well as our dependence on exports to China to maintain a level of financial stability, may all come to a grinding halt if our current government keeps reacting to the loud anti-Chinese baying of our intelligence experts, needing such a climate to maintain their current employment.
I am certain that the clever Chinese military planners are already preparing to face the prospect of having to confront such a mighty force of submarines. Adding to that, the problem-ridden, totally dysfunctional F-35 US fighters that are to be delivered at great cost, all being accepted by this country regardless of their stated failures and we will really be a force to be reckoned with.
Time we had a ANZUS, sorry, an ANZ Treaty and faced reality. 25 million Australians plus 4.8 million New Zealanders facing off to 1.39 billion Chinese, clearly means that being friends (with an independent foreign policy) is better than being a US controlled and by then, perhaps a bankrupt enemy run by a hypocritical bunch of foreign warmongering would-be hegemons.
Is that rational?
Sir,
All the preparations to defend Australia would come to nothing if a serious war were to break out between the US and its allies against China and its allies or Russia and its allies. Once the nuclear arsenals of these major powers are deployed, humankind will be annihilated. What is the point of a dead Australia being allied to a dead US?
The greatest military strength of Australia lies in its corps of exprienced and very able diplomats, and retired diplomats, who can be put to great use in averting any possible miltary conflict. They are a very valuable resource built up over years of dealing with China, an advantage that few Western democracies can claim. No real understanding of another country can be derived without having lived among the people that one is dealing with. We have this advantage. Why don’t we use it instead of playing at cowboys and Indians? Why doesn’t the government and politicians in charge of defence and foreign affairs make better use of this resourse instead of shooting from the hips once a perceived foreign interference in our internal affairs is detected? Shooting from the hips by kindergarden politicians here and the US sends the “other” into a siege mentality and feeds the arms race.
Violence of any kind should be avoided at all costs be it in the family, the neighbourhood, within an nation or between a nation. The role of a peacemaker is crucial in averting a conflict. Australia can play this role.
Sincerely,
TI