Riding Shotgun: Army’s Move to the Strategic Front Seat
Abstract
Historically, the Australian Army has been precluded from a role in deterrence, but recent documents indicate that the Australian Government no longer wants its Army occupying a strategic backseat when it comes to deterring actions against Australia’s interests. At the same time, integrating mobile long-range, land-based rocket artillery will be inherently complicated, and needs a strategic community of teams to forge these systems into an accepted and credible deterrent. In moving to ‘ride shotgun’ alongside the Air Force and Navy, there is an opportunity for the Army to lead the challenge and draw on its experience in engaging with domestic and international partners. Working together in such a way provides a scale no one nation can generate alone, and Australia’s access to leading-edge technology and commitment to build a sovereign defence industry makes Defence an increasingly attractive partner.
Introduction
Historically, the Australian Army has been precluded from a role in deterrence. This has suited Army’s preference to pursue a self-issued mission, reflecting more its sense of identity and offensive spirit than a possible contribution to Australia’s strategic defence posture. As self-penned visionary missions such as ‘winning the land battle’1 have given way to formal direction—‘To prepare land power in order to enable the joint force in peace and war’2— Army finds itself reconsidering its role and purpose as part of Australia’s warfighting team. This is a timely evolution as the Defence Strategic Update and its companion, the 2020 Force Structure Plan, indicate that the Government no longer wants its Army idly occupying a strategic back seat when it comes to ‘deter[ring] actions against Australia’s interests’.3 Eras of Defence White Papers relegating Army as the silent service on deterrence appear to have expired, and for the first time in its history there are plans for the Australian Army to prepare capabilities with deterring strategic reach and lethality. Yet integrating mobile long-range, land-based rocket artillery will be inherently complicated, and building the strategic community of teams to forge these systems into an accepted and therein credible deterrent will be inherently dynamic. In moving to ‘ride shotgun’ alongside the Air Force and Navy, this is an opportunity for the Army to lead each challenge, the latter a mix of energetic and active variables.
The question at the core of this discussion is not one about the Army becoming more strategically employable. Since the ADF’s joint expeditionary debut in East Timor in 1999, the Army has been consistently engaged in an array of operations across the Indo-Pacific as part of joint and multinational forces. Being able to contribute and respond to Australia’s shifting military strategic needs has not been the issue. The question this discussion seeks to address is a broader one, concerning the character of Army’s contribution to those components of Australia’s future strategic defence posture that deter adversaries. On paper, an answer involving mobile long-range, land-based rocket artillery seems to help solve the age-old Australian problem of denying attacking adversaries a military advantage, particularly in periods of great power competition. For decades Defence has sought and sustained capabilities to appear militarily dominant in the air-sea gap to Australia’s north. Land-based, long-range lethal systems might be seen as an additive ingredient, giving the deterrent mix a little more spice. However, as is the case with machine guns and defensive positions, these weapons must be ‘tied in’ with other defence capabilities and to their geography. In Army parlance, interlocking the arcs of fire between weapon systems is known as ‘mutual support’. Drawing heavily on its experience in partnering, the real contribution of the Australian Army in bringing long-range rocket artillery into service will be the degree to which it ties these systems into the minds, institutions and defence infrastructure of the immediate region, both Australian and foreign. In doing so, it will forge a sense of mutual support among an emerging strategic community of teams, both domestic and international.
Under-Gunned and Outranged
The Australian Army Research Centre’s Dr Albert Palazzo recently posited that defensive firepower, for example long-range rocket artillery, ‘is once again in the ascendant; its strength is again more powerful than the offense’.4 If he is right, an outsider’s glance at current joint force land-based defensive firepower would suggest Australia has been severely under-gunned. The longest distance the joint force can launch a piece of ordnance from a land-based system, the M777 howitzer (field artillery), is no more than 30 km, allowing for the wind at its back. The maximum flight time of such munitions from the firing point to target is no longer than 90 seconds, the approximate time to take a selfie, check it and upload it to your preferred social media account. For the land-based in-service air defence system, the RBS-70, the maximum reach is less than 10 km. In other words, an RBS-70 sited atop a skyscraper in the centre of Melbourne or Sydney cannot reach their major airports, for lack of range.
Practically these analogies are redundant, but they are illustrative of a gap in reach and lethality between Australia’s land power and its national maritime and air power counterparts, illuminating the scale of capability change upon which Army must deliver. Until these systems are in service, Army will never have prepared a comparable capability with the endurance and reach to deliver a lethal strike far north of the continent, in partnership or independently. Some may lament an omission of contributions by Army’s Special Operations Command and Defence’s maturing amphibious capabilities. However, considering the scale and character of the threat Defence’s technologically advanced, regionally superior air and maritime forces seek to deter, it is hoped that this omission is self-evident. Effective deterrence is about perceptions of punishment and denial, and the sum of these costs in the minds of those Australia seeks to deter. The scope of potential Indo-Pacific peer and superior adversaries suggests that singular, surgical strikes will neither deny nor punish in sufficient scale. If developed to maximise the benefits Australia’s geography confers, and securely integrated across the joint force, mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery broadens government options to deny and threaten lethal destruction at range.
An Australian Deterrence Idea
The concept of broadening is enshrined in the continuity of an enduring Australian strategic idea of what might deter an attack on the nation. Possessing technologically advanced systems with the capability to deliver increasingly precise lethality away from Australian shores is a method grounded in an established national deterrence doctrine aimed at denying an adversary ‘effective use of the air sea gap’.5 Elements of Australia’s historical strategic defence posture have sought to connect the following dots in the minds of potential aggressors: ‘If the effort required to reach our island is not enough to deter you, our superior air and maritime systems will impose costly attrition on your military adventurism—that is, the juice will not be worth the squeeze’. Until now, lethal land power systems managed by the Army have not been a feature of this signalling, and any deterrent value drawn from activities such as Army’s extensive and growing Indo-Pacific engagement program is implicit at best, and difficult to measure. These endeavours remain valuable but should not be conflated with the deterrent value of prospective and explicit destruction of valuable forces and infrastructure at range, in an attempt to articulate strategic relevance. From a deterrent perspective, the Army has not been as strategically relevant as its peers but this will evolve in line with the national idea for deterring armed aggression.
The Defence Strategic Update and accompanying announcements make it unambiguously clear: precise lethality at long range remains as attractive a strategic option as it was over three decades ago in Defence of Australia, the 1987 Defence White Paper. Significant investment and departmental effort will be expended over the coming decade to enhance and procure new systems, giving Australia the ability to ‘hold potential adversaries, forces, and infrastructure at risk from greater distance’.6 Holding others at risk is something no other Defence White Paper has as explicitly stated, the term being usually reserved to highlight a threat to Australia, or used in relation to the management of complex procurement. In seeking to frame these lethal and destructive consequences in the minds of others, future Australian governments will have at their disposal a land-based strike option that can deter by existing on the edges of the ‘air sea gap’, rather than having to enter, strike and redeploy; a reality for Australian maritime and air power. This is a first for the ADF: a persistent strike effect without the need for persistent time on station.11
As regional maritime commons and airspace become more contested, striking from the edge offers advantages and new options, potentially re-weighting the uncertainty of an ‘increasingly complex and contested Indo-Pacific’ in favour of future Australian governments.7 In an effort to complement the array of land, sub-surface, surface, air and space sensors operated by other Defence platforms, mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery can threaten and deliver lethality from an extensive number of sovereign territory firing points (including the decks of Royal Australian Navy amphibious vessels—think lily pad) and host nation locations. Innovative and non-traditional measures to mask the movement and location of systems across the continent will generate surprise and uncertainty. This is more difficult to achieve in the air and maritime domains, where there is a known number of Australian air bases and ports from which these platforms must launch—infrastructure it is reasonable to assume will be saturated with space-based surveillance (at a minimum) during times of heightened tension. Concealable, highly mobile and dispersed land-based rocket artillery could become as difficult to locate and track as needles in haystacks.
This was the US air power experience during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. After a 43-day air campaign against Iraq and Iraqi forces in Kuwait, employing more than 2,780 US fixed-wing aircraft in more than 112,000 individual sorties, the US Department of Defence’s 1992 report, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, contains no evidence that a single mobile Scud launcher system was destroyed by aircraft.8 Despite an increased effort to target mobile Scuds from day three of the air war, the elusiveness of these mobile systems led to a focus on fixed Scud production and storage facilities.9 However, as the Iraqis had decided to ‘remove … most production equipment, components and documents’ before the coalition air campaign, final intelligence estimates determined ‘actual damage to Scud production and storage facilities [was] less than previously thought’.10 Further, while then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney hailed the victory a ‘triumph of Coalition Strategy, of international cooperation, of technology, and of people’,11 the inability of US air power to hunt and destroy any of the estimated 36 mobile Scud launchers in a country about a third the size of the Northern Territory reveals the potential that mobile long-range rocket artillery systems offer in using up resources and effort, generating two of war’s constant maxims: uncertainty and friction. The former adds a ‘fog’ to clarity and the latter makes ‘the apparently easy so difficult’.12 Such ambiguity and the ‘manipulation of uncertainty’ can generate, as deterrent theorist Thomas C Schelling offered, ‘a threat that leaves something to chance’.13 These phenomena of war are well known to most strategists and military planners, injecting doubt into the minds of decision-makers considering the use of force against Australia or its interests. Doubt, in turn, feeds fear and reluctance, raising the credibility of Australia’s strategic defence posture.
Mutual Support within and beyond Defence
Utilising cross-domain sensors to locate and track adversary forces and strategic infrastructure, while employing cooperative engagement systems to hold them ‘at risk’ with mobile land-based strike, simultaneously enhances the survivability of finite and expensive aircraft and maritime vessels. As expected, sensor ranges aboard ships, submarines and aircraft exceed the range of onboard weapon systems. Firing weapons which produce a detectable signature exposes Australian platforms to attack by a growing number of supersonic14 missile threats. Mastering the complicated challenge of achieving secure, cross-domain digital integration to harness the potential of joint integrated fire control is an opportunity to increase reach and lethality while hardening the joint force’s shield. This is mutual support on a number of levels. Consequently, a spirit of and commitment to intradepartmental cooperation is key to generating credible deterrence, while concurrently projecting a protective umbrella of latent, yet interlocked, defensive firepower across the immediate region.
Although not its primary purpose, if presented and incepted into the immediate region in an inclusive and transparent way, this capability will benefit the region’s strategic community as a whole. Such cohesion could lay the foundations for more formal collective-actor deterrence arrangements, where mutual support extends beyond national boundaries. This would represent an expression of ‘the existence of community’, offering an otherwise unavailable scale to deliver ‘effective responses to violation of community norms’.15
Connecting an effective network of teams at all levels across this strategic community will foster an atmosphere of shared responsibility and see Australian rocket artillery and, more broadly, long-range strike become a tool for immediate region stability and security. Moreover, while capability inception, procurement and operational employment mean the first community among equals is Defence writ large, the reality of Australia’s northern geography implies that the next members of this community are its near neighbours. The Defence Strategic Update bounded this geo-strategic reality for Australia when it framed the immediate region as principally, ‘maritime and mainland South East Asia to Papua New Guinea’.16 For Australia to mount a credible land-based lethal deterrent at ranges beyond what is now possible, it will be necessary to acknowledge that rocket artillery launched from Australian territory could enter the geography of the immediate region, events it is reasonable to assume would be concerning to our neighbours. This merits a judicious approach by Army to frame rocket artillery concepts in a language that is suitable for a diverse audience. Even if these analogies are unfairly misconstrued by others, including those sowing misinformation, their descriptive qualities are binary at best and are at odds with contemporary ministerial public sentiments, such as those proclaiming, ‘Australia’s perspective, Australian values, Australian principles have universal application’.17
Army’s choice of words to describe the effects of land-based strike should account for the unique interests and domestic political characteristics of Australia’s immediate neighbours. Doing so is indicative of Army’s capacity to appreciate international and cultural nuance and avoid preparing a Defence capability which is no more than a ‘blunt instrument’. As current Chief of Defence General Angus Campbell recently outlined in a discussion on defence-diplomacy cooperation, ‘the world doesn’t need blunt instruments. It needs really finely polished responses to complex challenges’.18 Establishing and maintaining credible deterrents toward potential adversaries who are more economically and militarily powerful than Australia meets these criteria. This complexity will be further amplified if Army and Defence appear ambivalent to the interests and perspectives of the immediate region. Increasing self-reliance is not an excuse for an overindulgence in self-interest.
As demographics show, Australia’s immediate region is anything but uninhabitable or unoccupied. Instead it is intrinsically connected with Australia and the wider Indo-Pacific. It is reasonable to wonder whether political leaders across the region would recoil at images of themselves residing within or alongside areas with the anecdotal labels of ‘no-man’s lands’ and ‘killing zones’ ascribed to the potential of modern defensive firepower.19 The region includes Australia’s nearest neighbours and increasingly important security partners, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste—the first, home to 3.5 per cent of the world’s population20 and an emerging economic giant; the second, where ‘5,000 Australian businesses [are] operating directly and indirectly’21 and where the respective mainlands are 150 km apart;22 and the third, a nation whose sovereign birth bookended an era of great peace for Defence.
Developing a lexicon and the kinds of behaviours that promote regional cooperation and sharing of responsibility is an effective and respectful way to establish an interconnected strategic community of teams. Rather than being about benign, inoffensive niceties, such a move is more about thinking in terms of partners and broader, dynamic relationships. Deterring attacks and other threatening actions against Australia conveys wider protective benefits for sovereignty across the immediate region. As Army’s role is to prepare land power, it has agency to promote a sense of shared responsibility, demonstrating the positive and essential contribution an engaged and present Australian Defence Force offers in terms of stability and peace. For example, adapting the role of the 2nd/30th Training Group, Army’s permanently overseas-based unit in Penang, to leverage its ‘persistent physical presence’ and become a joint and multi-nation integrator, could position the ADF and regional partners to cooperatively ‘operate into all five domains’.23 Reimagining and re-scaling collaboration, (while staying clear eyed to the stress this could place upon traditional information security thinking) maximises Army’s partnering potential to ‘ensure the future ADF can project military power to shape our environment’.24
Unlocking Army’s Partnering Potential
Some may see the case for Army as the capability manager of mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery as a forgone conclusion—effects delivered from the land denoting land power pedigree. In terms of technical expertise, however, it is likely that Navy, Air Force and Joint Capabilities Group are further ahead in their journey to deliver networked systems capable of collaborative and cooperative target engagement, relying on information from other domains and platforms to employ their weapons. Likewise, long-range rocket artillery strike systems could be designed to operate almost exclusively within a joint and cross-domain architecture, not as part of the Army’s traditional combined arms team. It is therefore reasonable to question why Army, with the least experience in delivering lethality from over the horizon, should be responsible for introducing this component of Australia’s future strategic defence posture. In the approximately 15 minutes it takes a modern anti-ship cruise missile travelling at 0.9 Mach (310 metres per second) to reach maximum range, a ship manoeuvring at speeds of 28–30 knots (52–56 km/h) could be 13–14 km from where it was first detected, and likely launching decoys or shielding amongst islands, commercial shipping or merchant fishing vessels. This presents an immense technical challenge for the Army, and strategic decisions seldom appear to be about ensuring everyone gets a fair go.
The answer can be found in relationship building and partnering. Army’s efforts to expand its international engagement activities are part of Defence’s broader strategy to build strong and resilient service-to-service relationships across the immediate region. These increased efforts pre-date the 2016 Defence White Paper and ‘demonstrate the pivotal role of the organisation in pursuit of Australia’s national interests and the region’s prosperity and security’.25 Perhaps unrealised by many at the time, Army’s attempts to be a persistent presence in the immediate region marked the start of its task to tie in future land-based rocket artillery systems. International engagement is now institutionalised core business for the service, being described by contemporary Army chiefs as a means to ‘achieve unique access’,26 ‘sustain Australia’s influence and generate security partnerships and build regional security resilience’.27 But while these advantages may help prevent conflict, they should not be conflated as deterrents of conflict in and of themselves. More accurately, they are condition-setting outcomes of Army’s committed sincerity to build trust through transparency with partners like the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Tentara Nasional Indonesia—Angkatan Darat (TNI-AD).28
Acceptance and openness among the immediate region’s strategic community has the potential to do as much for the deterrent effectiveness of rocket artillery as integrated joint fire control systems. The former mitigates those energetic and active variables which could, as critics of the Strategic Update suggest, ‘unintentionally reinforce the security dilemma and feed arms racing pressure’.29 Open, consistent and meaningful defence international engagement underpins open and constructive dialogue at the political level, shaping the conditions for regional responses to regional challenges. Given Army’s modern view of partnering as a means to unlock potential and provide for team success amidst uncertainty, Army stands to engender the access and acceptance mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery requires among senior foreign military and political leaders.30 Increasing self-reliance is not the same as ‘going it alone’ but rather an opportunity for Australia and sovereign partners across the immediate region to pursue shared interests together, adopting defence postures that are mutually supporting. Building relationships through long-range rocket artillery becomes the nexus through which Army’s strategic potential is realised, leveraging years of partnering experience to navigate the ‘delicate interactions of [the] land and sea factors’, therein avoiding ‘blunt solutions’,31 and striking a tone and ‘sense of strategic community between Australia and its neighbours’.32 This is also an important opportunity for signalling to revisionist Indo-Pacific powers.
With DFAT, Not Instead of DFAT
Signalling and interpretation of explicit and implied communications across the Indo-Pacific will be an essential component of a ‘mobile missile force[s]’ deterrence value as part of Australia’s broader defence strategic posture.33 As Schelling noted:
To fight abroad is a military act but to persuade enemies or allies that one would fight abroad, under circumstances of great cost and risk, requires more than a military capability. It requires projecting intentions.34
If a spirit of intradepartmental Defence cooperation is key to unlocking complicated integration challenges, and cooperation with immediate region sovereign partners unlocks the broader deterrent and stabilising potential of long-range rocket artillery, the next team member of this strategic community to be tied in is the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). As Allan Gyngell offered in Fear of Abandonment, DFAT’s role in pursuing foreign policy has been about the ‘creation of institutions that frame Australia’s international activities’ and how the nation has learned ‘to live in a region with very different neighbours and to project its own interest’.35 If ‘foreign policy is the politics whose failure means conflict’,36 Army will benefit from appreciating the role DFAT plays in reinforcing efforts by government to ‘maintain armed forces sufficiently strong to deter assault from abroad’.37 Much of the deterrent value of mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery lies in its never being used, remaining powerful through its potential and latency. ‘Diplomacy and defence,’ as DFAT Secretary Frances Adamson recently observed, ‘are two sides of the same coin; representing comprehensive national power’.38
Delivering defence capability which adds to comprehensive national power is as tied to understanding the signals others send Australia as it is to ensuring Australian signalling is understood as projected. When asked about the relevance of deterrence in the Strategic Update, former Defence Associate Secretary Brendan Sargeant observed that ‘the most interesting thing about deterrence is that it’s not you deterring, it’s you in a relationship with someone else. And deterrence is how you manage that relationship’.39 DFAT, by its mandate, is in the business of managing and interpreting Australia’s relationships with foreign entities. Those same entities may harbour designs to act against or harm Australia’s interests. Whether it be leveraging diplomatic pathways provided by a comprehensive strategic partnership with Indonesia or reinforcing and relaying warnings to potential aggressors, it is DFAT to which the Government will turn in managing diplomatic communication and assessing perceptions. A 2018 RAND study into what deters and why regarding US extended deterrence found that ‘Clarity and consistency of deterrent messaging is essential’, as is a capacity for ‘Compromise and concession … to help meet a potential aggressor’s interests and deprive it of a sense of imminent threat’.40 As deterrence is a relationship concerning ‘future pain’, it offers a degree of bargaining power to both parties.41 These types of delicate interactions require a capacity to communicate and a willingness to listen, suggesting that any immediate deterrence efforts will be DFAT led and Defence enabled.
In developing mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery for Australia, Army should account for DFAT’s overlapping and unique responsibilities so as to inform a collective approach to building productive dialogue with partners and potential adversaries. This relationship could exist along the entire capability life cycle, not just at times of crisis or when full operational capability is announced. Regardless of whether an interstate relationship is categorisable as being in cooperation, competition or conflict, it is worth noting that ADF senior leadership views Defence contributions as being ‘with DFAT, not instead of DFAT’.42 Army’s history of partnering suggests that it is well positioned to embrace interdepartmental collaboration during all stages of the capability life cycle. Having a mission to ‘prepare land power’ implies that this is now a necessity. Separately, yet nevertheless of relevance for ‘Team Australia’, is the requirement for Army to understand DFAT resourcing and its implications for strategic defence posture. It could be observed that a steady decline in funding of Australian diplomacy while simultaneously growing Defence spending suggests something of a strategic incongruity, potentially harming the comprehensiveness of Australia’s national power. Such strategic acuity would be indicative of the partnering apex an ‘Army in Motion’ aspires to, resonating with the hand-in-glove approach senior Australian diplomatic and defence leaders espouse.43
Calibrating Army’s Rocket Artillery Relationship with US Counterparts
Looking around Australia’s contemporary Defence Force, the scale of material cooperation with the US Department of Defense is broad and deep. From combat, maritime surveillance and strategic lift aircraft in the Air Force to Navy’s Aegis combat system and Sea Hawk helicopters, and finally the Abrams tanks, M-777 howitzers and Chinook helicopters of the Army, US influence is visibly evident in the ADF (and this is without including the sophisticated US weapons and ordnance these systems employ). Through exchanges of people, platform commonality, munition procurement arrangements and shared digital services and infrastructure for satellite communications, much of the ADF’s potency comes from armament cooperation with its much larger US equivalent.
It may therefore seem a little late in the discussion to be considering the US’s position within a strategic community of teams. Such debate could be viewed as a foregone conclusion. However, this is not the case, as partnering with the US Department of Defense in the development of mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery will be subtly different to the traditional partnering efforts Army has pursued with its US Army and US Marine Corps counterparts, pursuing high levels of interoperability in land and littoral operations. The long-range rocket artillery relationship might be less about doing things together operationally, as collective training events such as Talisman Sabre prepare for, and more about maximising the benefits of sharing research to create like capabilities, and performing sovereign roles based on unique national interests. Calibrating this area of the relationship affords government confidence that the ADF is growing its ‘self-reliant ability to deliver deterrent effects’, vice procuring systems which reduce the nation’s capacity to deter independently.44
Self-reliance moves beyond the capacity to act or threaten to act; it includes decisions to defer action or to act differently to traditional partners with the confidence that you can leverage the independence and resilience of sovereign defence capabilities. It would therefore appear contradictory, perhaps even self-defeating, for Army to prepare future land power which maintains or increases the nation’s degree of capability reliance on its US partner, or where optimum performance is only achievable in US-led coalition settings and where US defence export laws, known as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), are adhered to. Such features diminish Australian efforts to practically and figuratively tie these systems into Australia’s strategic defence posture and thereby into the minds and cooperative approaches of a strategic community of teams. While US Army aspirations and technical progress in the development of artillery systems that aim to reach targets in the mid-range (about 500–2,000 km),45 are of great interest to the Australia Army, this facet of the service-to-service relationship could be calibrated to give Defence and Australian sovereign capability ‘a technological qualitative edge’ beyond the life of contractual arrangements.46
Israel has leveraged this edge over time to underpin deterrence ‘through a homegrown technological capability that benefits from mutual collaboration between the educational system, the civilian industry and the defence and security establishment’.47 Israel’s experience in developing and sustaining military hardware that deters armed attack, in spite of its being without any ‘third-party extended assurances’, is encouraging for countries such as Australia.48 As Army reviews its contribution to Defence strategy, a merging of its efforts to build strong army-to-army connections and its stated commitment to the development of Australian industrial capability may evolve from supporting ‘defence export opportunities’ to enabling defence industry greater access to the technological edges of tomorrow.49 Forging increased intellectual and proprietary access confers competitive advantages in sovereign capability, illustrating a maturing of military– industry cooperation. Cultivating this mutual support and homegrown technology could arise from placing Army personnel with US systems experience into Australian businesses or adding Australian business representatives to the delegations of senior Army officer visits, or be as far reaching as adapting the curriculum of Army Cadets from traditional activities50 to those including rocketry and hypersonic flight. Such changes could also broaden Defence’s recruiting pool and prepare future Australian generations for careers in an increasingly technology-dependent Defence Force and Australian defence industry.
Conclusion
In the time it has taken to write this paper, Dr Palazzo published part two of his contribution to the Army’s Land Power Forum, titled ‘Deterrence and Firepower: Land 8113 and the Australian Army’s Future (Part 2, Cultural Effect)’. His perspectives and the thoughts contained in the preceding sections of this paper share a major common point: both discuss an Australian Army that will and must be different from the one we know. The drivers of this change are a combination of shifting power across the Indo-Pacific, the Australian Government’s response and the timely re-emergence of artillery as a dominant arbiter in future war—making it an attractive suitor to an embedded Australian idea of deterring through strike. In turn these drivers precipitate a number of ‘firsts’. For the first time in modern history, the Australian Army will share the burden of preparing strategically relevant options to deter within a system of connected lethal platforms, allowing government to hold targets at risk from greater range. This requires rearming a service whose identity is enshrined in an idea of close combat between light infantry forces on foreign shores. If integrated across all domains, it will tie together a lethal long-range striking system capable of digesting volumes of mission data from an array of sensors, and launching munitions at moving targets beyond the horizon and across time zones. This is another first for the Australian Army.
However, as some things change, others will stay the same. As future Australian governments prepare to ‘push back against intrusions into what we would consider our strategic space or area of interest’, the Australian Army can also view this new preparedness requirement through a lens of continuity, given its commitment to building strong partnerships across the immediate region.51 As the value of generating a persistent presence is realised, mobile land-based, long-range rocket artillery will demonstrate the strategic contribution Army can make as Defence’s vanguard for enhanced cooperation, generating access and anchoring Australia’s deterrent posture among a strategic community of teams.
This will benefit Australia and its neighbours where the scale and archipelagic geography of the immediate region create planning dilemmas for respective armed forces. Working together provides a scale no one nation can generate alone, and Australia’s access to leading-edge technology and commitment to build a sovereign defence industry make Defence an increasingly attractive partner. Developing these connections is as much about Army’s embrace of foreign policy as it is about defence policy, where respected partnerships are founded upon having ‘futures together’ and projecting this collective resolve to the wider Indo-Pacific.52 While much of the Army’s warrior ethos finds solace in imagery of a service that can ‘seize and hold ground’, the deterrence challenges and relationship management considerations facing Australia are to be addressed in partnership, where our Army can stand in the shoes of others and not only find but hold common ground.53
Endnotes
1 Department of Defence, 2008, Defence Annual Report 2007–08, Volume 1, Section 2, Outcome 3: Army Capability (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), at https://www.defence.gov.au/annualreports/07-08/vol1/ch3_o3_01_risks.htm
2 Department of Defence, 2020, DEFGRAM 376/2020: The Defence Strategic Update and Australian Defence Force Mission Alignment, 1 September 2020.
3 Department of Defence, 2020, 2020 Defence Strategic Update (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), 25.
4 Albert Palazzo, 2020, ‘Deterrence and Firepower: Land 8113 and the Australian Army’s Future (Part 1, Strategic Effect), Land Power Forum (Australian Army Research Centre), 16 July 2020, at https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/land-power-forum/deterrence-…
5 Department of Defence, 1987, The Defence of Australia 1987 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service), 27.
6 Prime Minister Scott Morrison, speech, Launch of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, Canberra, 1 July 2020, transcript at: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/address-launch-2020- defence-strategic-update
7 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2017, 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), 26.
8 US Department of Defense, 1992, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress, Chapter VI: The Air Campaign, 117–248.
9 Ibid., 129, 168.
10 Ibid., 207–208.
11 Ibid., I, 129.23
12 Carl von Clausewitz, 1976 (1832), On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, ed. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 101, 121.
13 Michael J Mazzar, A Chan, A Demus, B Frederick, A Nader, S Pezard, JA Thompson and E Treyger, 2018, What Deters and Why: Exploring Requirements for Effective Deterrence of Interstate Aggression Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation), 22.
14 ‘Supersonic’ refers to munitions that travel at a speed greater than that of sound. ‘Hypersonic’ relates to speeds five times the speed of sound (Mach 5). See Australian National Dictionary Centre, 2004, The Australian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 2004 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press).
15 Patrick M Morgan, ‘Chapter 7: Collective Actor Deterrence’, in TV Paul, Patrick M Morgan and James J Wirtz, 2009, Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 158, 163, 178.
16 Department of Defence, 2020 Defence Strategic Update, 6.
17 Foreign Minister Marise Payne, speech, Launch of Rory Medcalf Book: Contest for the Indo-Pacific—Why China Won’t Map the Future, Canberra, 3 March 2020, transcript at: https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/speech/launch-…
18 Angus Campbell, 2020, speech, Institute of Public Administration (IPAA), Diplomacy on the Front Line, Canberra, 2 September 2020.
19 Palazzo, ‘Deterrence and Firepower’.
20 Worldometer, ‘Indonesia Population (Live)’, accessed 30 July 2020, at: https://www. worldometers.info/world-population/indonesia-population/
21 Jeffrey Wall, ‘This is Not the Time for Australia to Reduce Its Aid to PNG and the South Pacific’, The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), 28 July 2020, at: https://www. aspistrategist.org.au/this-is-not-the-time-for-australia-to-reduce-its-aid-to-png-and-the-south-pacific/
22 National Museum of Australia, n.d., ‘A Short Guide to the Torres Strait Compromise’, at: https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2413/Mr_Dabb.pdf
23 Rick Burr, 2019, ‘An Insight into the Australian Defence Force’s Future Land Capability’, address to the ADM Congress, Canberra, 13 February 2019, transcript at: https://www. army.gov.au/our-news/speeches-and-transcripts/insight-australian-defence-forces-future-land-capability
24 Department of Defence, 2020 Defence Strategic Update, 55.
25 Department of Defence, 2019, Defence Annual Report 2018–19, Secretary’s Review (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), 3.
26 Rick Burr, 2015, ‘Army and International Engagement: Opportunities and Challenges in a Changing Strategic Environment’, The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), 26 June 2015, at: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/author/rick-m-burr/
27 Campbell, Angus, 2017, ‘Preparing for the Indo-Pacific Century: Challenges for the Australian Army’, speech, Royal United Services Institute, London, 8 December 2017, transcript at: https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/aaj_autumn_2018_… xiv_no_1.pdf
28 Burr, ‘Army and International Engagement’.
29 Tanya Ogilvie-White, ‘Stoking the Fire of Asia-Pacific Missile Proliferation’, The Interpreter (The Lowy Institute), 10 July 2020, at: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/stoking-fire-asia-pacific-missile-proliferation
30 Australian Army, 2019, Army in Motion: Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy (Canberra: Australian Army), 5.
31 Julian S Corbett, 2005 (1911), Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Project Gutenberg).
32 Department of Defence, The Defence of Australia 1987, 22.
33 Palazzo, ‘Deterrence and Firepower’.
34 Thomas C Schelling, [YEAR OF EDITION BEING CITED—EITHER 2008 OR 2020] (1966), Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 36.
35 Allan Gyngell, 2017, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World Since 1942 (Carlton, Victoria: Latrobe University Press).
36 Ibid.
37 Alan Renouf, 1979, The Frightened Country (South Melbourne: Macmillan), 533–535.
38 Frances Adamson, 2020, IPAA, Diplomacy on the Front Line, Canberra, 2 September 2020.
39 Brendan Sargeant, ‘Australia’s Defence Strategy Update’, National Security Podcast, 8 July 2020.
40 Mazzar et al., What Deters and Why, 89.
41 Tami Davis Biddle, 2020, ‘Coercion Theory: A Basic Introduction for Practitioners’, Texas National Security Review 3, no. 2: 97.
42 Campbell, IPAA, Diplomacy on the Front Line.
43 Adamson and Campbell, IPAA, Diplomacy on the Front Line.
44 Department of Defence, 2020 Defence Strategic Update, 27.
45 Jen Judson, ‘For the US Army’s Fires Capability, 2023 Is the Year that Will Change Everything’, Defense News, 8 September 2020, at: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/09/08/for-the-us-armys-fires-capa…
46 Shmuel Bar, ‘Israeli Strategic Deterrence Doctrine and Practice’, Comparative Strategy 39, no. 4, 326.
47 Ibid., 326.
48 Ibid., 338.
49 Australian Army, Army in Motion: Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy, 46.
50 The Australian Army Cadets offers the following activities for prospective cadets: ‘Drill and Ceremonial Parades’, ‘Abseiling’, ‘Watermanship’, ‘Use of Service Firearms’, ‘Navigation’, ‘Living in the Field’ and ‘many other exciting activities’. See Army Cadets, ‘Activities’, at: https://www.armycadets.gov.au/activities/
51 Sargeant, ‘Australia’s Defence Strategy Update’, National Security Podcast.
52 Campbell, IPAA, Diplomacy on the Front Line.
53 Australian Army, Army—Royal Australian Infantry Corps, https://www.army.gov.au/our-people/organisation-structure/army-corps/ro…, accessed 28 September 2020.
