Towards an Australian Way of War: Culture, Politics and Strategy, 1901–2004
The ultimate source of strategy lies in the values of the people of a nation
- Admiral Henry E. Eccles
In June 2002, the Department of Defence published a 25-page booklet called The Australian Approach to Warfare. This publication identified the manoeuvrist approach, a preference for advanced technology, and a requirement to engage in joint and coalition operations as being the main features of an Australian way of war in the 21st century.1 These features are, of course, not confined to Australia and can be found in other contemporary Western militaries such as those of the United States and Britain. Of much greater interest was the publication’s emphasis on the role that national culture plays in the employment of a country’s armed forces.
Although a section of The Australian Approach to Warfare was devoted to the subject of national culture, it was impossible in the limited space available to do more than sketch a few generalities about the interaction of liberal democratic values with military force.2 As a result, the content of the publication proved valuable not so much for the conclusions that it reached, but for the questions that it posed. Above all, The Australian Approach to Warfare raised a single compelling question:
how do culture, politics and strategy interact in a liberal democratic society such as Australia, and to what extent has this combination of forces shaped Australia’s way of war over the past century?
The purpose of this article is to investigate this question by trying to identify the main historical connections between Australia’s culture, its politics, and the development of its strategy and way of war. Five broad areas are examined. First, in order to provide historical context, the idea of distinctive ways in warfare is analysed. Second, the article contends that a way of warfare cannot be understood, even less defined, unless it is examined in relationship to the associated concepts of political culture and of strategic culture. Third and fourth, the components of Australia’s political culture and its links to strategic culture and a national way of war are sketched. Finally, several of the contemporary challenges that defence planners face in developing Australia’s strategy and way of warfighting in the early 21st century are discussed.
The Idea of Ways in Warfare
Historians have long been interested in the idea that the way in which a particular nation fights reflects its political and social structure. As the doyen of British military historians, Michael Howard, has put it, ‘the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality’.3 There is a diverse literature on ways in warfare. Well-known 20th-century examples of the genre include Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s 1932 work, The British Way in Warfare and Russell F. Weigley’s celebrated 1973 book, The American Way of War.4 In the early 21st century, the genre shows little sign of intellectual exhaustion. Indeed, even before the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States revived the cultural history of war in academe, the American scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, had achieved bestseller status with a provocative study entitled Why the West Has Won. Hanson’s book caught the popular mood in much of the English-speaking West and was followed by other major studies such as John A. Lynn’s, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture.5
The literature on ways in warfare raises the important question of definition. When we discuss the idea of a way in warfare, are we discussing policy, strategy, operations, tactics or all of these? Does a way of war refer mainly to strategic theory or to operational practice? Unless a degree of clarity is established on these issues, scholars of military affairs run the risk that the way in warfare concept will become so generalised as to have little, or no, analytical value. For this reason, there has to be an interdisciplinary approach to the subject—an approach that combines perspectives from both history and from the social sciences.
Ways in Warfare, and Concepts of Political and Strategic Culture
The idea that countries possess distinctive ways of warfare can only be understood in relationship to the modern concepts of political culture and strategic culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists such as Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba developed the concept of political culture in the quest for a better understanding of the relationship between ideas and actions in politics.6 Political culture has been usefully defined by the leading American social scientist, Lucian W. Pye, as ‘the set of attitudes and sentiments which give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behaviour in the political system. It encompasses both the political ideals and the operating norms of a polity.7
By the 1970s and 1980s, the study of political culture stimulated the development of the concept of strategic culture by leading Anglo-American scholars of strategy and statecraft such as Jack Snyder, Ken Booth, Colin S. Gray and Carnes Lord.8 In 1990, the British scholar, Ken Booth, provided perhaps the clearest definition of strategic culture when he wrote:
The concept of strategic culture refers to a nation’s traditions, values, attitudes, patterns of behaviour, habits, symbols, achievements and particular ways of adapting to the environment and solving problems with respect to the threat and use of force.9
What is the difference, if any, between a strategic culture and a way in war? While there is an intimate relationship between the modern notion of strategic culture and the older, more historical idea of a way of war, they do differ in methodology and scope. Strategic culture is essentially about what factors influence defence policy at the highest level in government; its main concern is how to conduct wars. A strategic culture, then, deals with how a nation views the place and role of military force in statecraft.10
In contrast, the idea of a way in warfare is more restrictive in scope and is usually concerned with the operational aspects of military strategy; in other words, it concentrates on military practice or how to fight wars. For this reason, the idea of a way of war is probably best viewed as a subset of strategic culture. 11 The notion of a way in warfare as a reflection of the values of a broader strategic culture is well illustrated by the 1993 edition of the United States Army’s FM 100-5 Operations. In a section describing ‘The American Way of War’, the manual states:
The [American] people expect the military to accomplish its missions in compliance with national values. The American people expect decisive victory and abhor unnecessary casualties. They prefer quick resolution of conflicts ... In the end, the people will pass judgment on the appropriateness of the conduct and use of military operations. Their values and expectations must be met.12
When it comes to devising a way of warfighting, military planners have to translate the values of a nation’s political culture from the idiom of theory into the idiom of strategy. For the purposes of this article, a way of warfare is defined as the set of attitudes and beliefs held within a military establishment about how to devise the most effective strategy and operational method of achieving the political objective of war in accordance with national values and beliefs.
Moving from the general to the specific, how have Australia’s political and strategic cultures impacted on the national approach to warfighting over the past century? In order to answer this question we must first examine the components of Australia’s political culture, and analyse their influence on Australia’s strategic culture and way of war.
'The Fragment Theory': Australia's Political Culture
Australia’s political and strategic cultures are deeply Western in character and—to the extent that any theory can provide a basis for understanding political and strategic behaviour—they are best understood in terms of American historian, Louis Hartz’s ‘fragment theory’.13 According to Hartz, Australia is an historical offspring of European civilisation in general and of Britain in particular—a society transplanted into an alien environment where cultural loyalties persisted long after the growth of local nationalism. As a colonial fragment, Australia bore the powerful cultural imprint of 19th-century British values and beliefs, symbolised by what the patriarch of Federation, Sir Henry Parkes, called ‘the crimson thread of kinship. 14
Not surprisingly, then, the main precepts of Australia’s political culture are drawn from the worlds of Anglo-Saxon government, philosophy and law. Similarly, Australian strategic culture reflects variations on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American ideas about the use of force by liberal democratic societies. In 1901, when the modern Australian state was formed, it was based on a political culture that reflected five broad and overlapping characteristics: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, conformism, collectivism and materialism. Collectively, these five characteristics provided the foundation stones of the Australian Federation.15 In order to understand the anatomy of Australia’s political culture, it is necessary to examine each of these components in turn.
The first characteristic of Australian politics—utilitarianism—is perhaps the most important component. The impact of utilitarianism on Australia can best be conveyed by a brief comparison with the founding of the United States. Both Australia and America began existence as Hartzian colonial fragments of Britain. However, whereas America’s early colonising fragment was imbued with John Locke’s 18th-century ideas of individual freedom—which led to a war of independence and a utopian view of nationalism—Australia’s colonial fragment did not undergo any great revolutionary struggle to establish democracy. Instead, Australia was, in Richard Rosencranz’s words, ‘born modern’ and, in the course of the 19th century, ‘won reform without nationality [and] social change without unity’.16
As a result, 19th-century Australian colonial politics were dominated by the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham, the reformism of the English Chartist movement and a social view of nationalism. These features ensured that the Great South Land developed as a New Britannia rather than as a New Jerusalem. Australian nationalism was, and remains, social and conservative rather than ideological and utopian in character. The central idea of Benthamite utilitarianism is that a civilised society should reflect the greatest happiness of the highest number of people. The operation of material interests for all, not abstract ideals or special rights for some, is at the core of utilitarian political philosophy.17
Those that triumphed in Australian politics by 1901—such as Edmund Barton, George Reid and Alfred Deakin—were Benthamites, and they made utilitarianism the dominant political ideology of 20th-century Australia. This philosophical consensus meant that the Australian national style of politics became pragmatic and instrumental, and centred around social economics, emphasising the requirements of material prosperity. As Ian McAllister has noted, ‘to the extent that Australia has any identifiable political character, it is based on utilitarianism and a belief in common purpose, uniformity and an ultimate social good’.18 Through utilitarianism, the Australian political system came to reflect an instrumental view of the political process that emphasised the need for social harmony, fairness and equality.
The second characteristic of Australian political culture—that of egalitarianism with its ethos of mateship and ‘fair go’ —is closely related to the idea of utilitarianism. The notion of egalitarianism stems from both the need to cooperate in a harsh frontier environment and the intrinsic social character of Australian nationalism. Unlike America, Australia has historically always given priority to the needs of social and economic equality. In terms of ethical principles, the ideals of social harmony and the common good have tended to rank more highly as Australian political objectives than the ideal of individual self-expression as enshrined in the American Bill of Rights.19 One consequence of egalitarianism is that Australian political ideas and institutions tend to reflect a strongly legalistic frame of mind.20
The third feature of Australian political culture—conformism—can be traced to the fact that the harsh squatter frontier did not favour individual initiative. One example of the stark contrast between the 19th-century American and Australian frontier experiences is instructive. Between 1803 and 1805, Meriwether Lewis and Lewis Clark traversed America from east to west, discovered a fertile interior and returned to proclaim America’s Manifest Destiny. In 1860–61, Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills crossed Australia from south to north but, on their return journey from the Gulf of Carpenteria, both men perished in a vast and infertile interior. Thus, unlike the American pioneer who could always strike out for the fertile West, the Australian pioneer was confronted by a frontier where physical existence itself was threatened.21
The Australian bush came to consist of scattered outback communities of selectors and pastoral workers. The isolation and harshness of the pastoral frontier and its lack of resources placed a premium on social cooperation or what Rosencranz calls a ‘conformitarian pattern’.22 There was a powerful emphasis on conformity of Anglo-Celtic ethnic background and on unified belief. Conformity was regulated by means of selective immigration and the White Australia policy. The identity and survival of the scattered Australian settler communities was guaranteed by conforming to a set of shared cultural values as ‘independent Australian Britons’.23 In this manner, conformism ensured that the parallel values of utilitarianism and egalitarianism could be transmitted within a British cultural framework.
Closely connected to conformism is the notion of collectivism in Australian political culture. Again, this feature of Australian political culture is well illustrated by a comparison with conditions in the United States. Collectivism implies group action and, in the Australian context, is intimately linked to the role of the state. 24 Unlike America, in Australia the state, not the individual settler, was the creator of civil society. Government was regarded as the administrative agent of the electorate—the facilitator, rather than the enemy, of individual freedom and economic equality.25 As a result, state paternalism—that which the French writer, Albert Métin, described in 1901 as Australia’s le socialisme sans doctrines (socialism without doctrines)—came to be regarded as a useful means of achieving socioeconomic goals for the benefit of all.26
As Australia’s greatest political historian, Sir Keith Hancock, put it famously in 1930: ‘Australian democracy has come to look upon the state as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number’27 Australian democracy was based on the embrace, not the rejection, of the power of the state. This position was described by W. A. Holman, later Labor premier of New South Wales, who observed in 1905:
We regard the State not as some malign power hostile and foreign to ourselves, outside our control and no part of our organised existence ... We recognise in the Government merely a committee to which is delegated the powers of the community.28
Finally, there is materialism as a characteristic of Australian political culture. Materialism is perhaps a natural consequence of a political culture firmly based on utilitarian values. Australian political debate, past and present, has been firmly centred on economics and the administration of prosperity for as many citizens as possible. For critics, materialism as reflected by the general anti-intellectualism of Australian public life and the alleged lack of ideas of a nation defined by suburbia is a matter of despair. To quote the politician and writer Frederick Eggleston:
[Alexis] de Tocqueville remarked of Americans that they were much attached to general ideas. This is emphatically untrue of the Australian. He has no Bill of Rights; he takes them for granted, and they are never queried. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence would move him less than the Gettysburg Address of Lincoln.29
Hence, Patrick White could write of ‘the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions. Similarly, Robert Hughes observed that ‘there is no tradition of intellect in Australia. There are only intelligent men.30
By 1901 all of these elements of political culture—utilitarianism, egalitarianism, conformism, collectivism and materialism—were reflected in the great Australian Settlement that accompanied Federation. As Paul Kelly has noted in his seminal 1992 work, The End of Certainty, the Settlement of 1901, fashioned by the founding fathers of modern Australia—Barton, Deakin and Reid—came to be based on five great interconnected pillars of public policy.31 The first three pillars were socioeconomic in character and were designed to bring prosperity based on social justice. They were state paternalism, industry protection and wage arbitration. The fourth and fifth pillars, the philosophy of White Australia and the ideology of imperial benevolence, were socio-political in nature and reinforced the first three domestic foundation pillars. White Australia buttressed the social nature of Australian nationalism by supplying a unifying philosophy that came to form the bedrock for Australia’s development for well over half a century. For its part, imperial benevolence allowed Australia to exploit its cultural links in order to seek military security first as part of the British Empire and, later, in the fold of the Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) alliance. 32
Australia's Strategic Culture
Having sketched an outline of the main characteristics of Australia’s political system, what connections can one make between Australian political culture and its strategic culture? In simple terms, for much of the 20th century, Australian strategic culture operated to protect the domestic pillars of the great 1901 Settlement against any potential threats that might emerge from the Asia-Pacific region—a region in which Australia had no natural allies. There have been four main features of Australian strategic culture that have conditioned Australia’s way of war over the past century. These features have been the reality of liminal geopolitical status, the triumph of a continental philosophy over island-consciousness, the irrelevance of Australian strategic theory to military practice and, finally, the tendency to fuse statecraft with strategy in order to defend values in times of war or prolonged security crisis.
The Reality of Liminal Geopolitical Status
If one dominant feature characterises Australia’s strategic culture from 1901 until the mid-1960s, it is the clash between Asian geography and European history. The paradox of geographical proximity to, but cultural distance from, Asia and of geographical distance from, but cultural intimacy with, the Anglo-Saxon heartlands has been at the heart of Australia’s modern security dilemma. This Janus-faced dilemma has often been portrayed in the language of danger, dread and even of paranoia.33 Yet, while these elements have been present, it is far more useful, as Richard A. Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal have suggested, to conceive of Australia in terms of being a liminal, or ‘threshold’, state. In international relations theory, the concept of liminality refers to a country that has an ‘in-between location’ and is suspended between two different worlds in which there is access to both, but in which permanence in either appears to be elusive.34
It is important not to confuse the liminal, or ‘threshold’, concept with the notion of Australia as a ‘torn country’ The latter is found in Samuel P. Huntington’s influential 1996 book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order.35 According to Huntington, ‘a torn country is one that has a single predominant culture which places it in one civilization but its leaders want to shift it to another civilization’.36 Moreover, a torn country is one in which identity is difficult to define.37 Australia is not a torn country because the basic foundations of its Anglo-Celtic civilisation are not seriously contested and there is no widespread desire among the electorate to abandon Western identity. 38
For the above reasons, the more restricted notion of liminality, with its ‘in-between’ connotation, is a more appropriate analytical term to employ than the emotive idea of a culturally torn country. Applied to Australia, the idea of liminality provides a useful analytical tool to describe the nation’s enduring geopolitical dilemma. Like Turkey, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s Muslim-majority state, Australia is Asia’s ‘European-majority state.’39 Both Turkey and Australia are shaped by the politics of liminal status, being simultaneously both ‘odd-man in’ and ‘odd-man out’ with their immediate geographical regions. Australia’s ‘natural’ geostrategic environments are regional: South-East Asia and the South Pacific; yet for reasons of politics and cultural heritage, its major strategic allies since 1901 have been the United Kingdom and the United States, both of whom have been, or are, global powers.
The significance of liminality in Australia’s strategic culture is that it has created a permanent oscillation between the imperatives of a defence policy defined by Eastern strategic geography on the one hand, and by Western historical values on the other hand. The tension has been between ‘continental defence’ versus ‘forward defence, between the use of limited human and economic resources in either the protection of territory or the use of offshore forces to help preserve a favourable global balance of power. It is important to note that Australia’s liminal status is a permanent condition that cannot be resolved; it can only be managed by carefully balancing a static geographic position with a nimble and activist diplomacy.40
The strategic challenge of maintaining a balance between geographical position and historical legacy has not changed in nearly a century. In 1914, Prime Minister Joseph Cook described preserving the balance as ‘the art and the problem of highest statesmanship’.41 Similarly, at the beginning of the 21st century, the current Prime Minister, John Howard, has observed that the acid test of Australian statesmanship remains in ‘not having to make a choice between your geography and your history’.42 Preserving the balance between geography and history is a challenge worthy of an Australian Bismarck or Kissinger and, because Australia has seldom produced such towering figures, policy has often oscillated between the defence of geography on the one hand and the defence of interests on the other hand.
The Triumph of Continental Awareness Over Island-Consciousness
In 1964, the leading geographer, Saul B. Cohen, described Australia as a classic ‘trade-dependent maritime state’ whose interests were tied to a larger offshore Asian and Oceanic geostrategic region.43 Yet Australian strategic culture is dominated by a powerful sense of landscape in which the country is seen first and foremost as a continent and not as an island. The powerful sense of continental awareness in Australian strategy has ensured that, over the past century, with the exception of the period between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s—a period of prolonged security crisis—Australia has sought to pursue its peacetime defence policy based around its physical geography.44
The dominance of continental awareness over island-consciousness was evident from the moment Prime Minister Edmund Barton described the 1901 Federation as representing ‘a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’. In many respects, much of Australia’s defence policy in the 20th century was based on a strategic interpretation of Barton’s formula. Thus, while the Anzac sacrifice on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915—the greatest amphibious operation of World War I—dominates Australia’s conception of modern nationhood, neither Gallipoli nor a genuine maritime consciousness have ever dominated the mainstream of Australian strategic thought. Even the grim experience of a maritime strategy campaign against Japan for national survival in the South-West Pacific during World War II has not proven a lasting influence on Australian strategic culture.45
Australia’s antipathy towards a maritime approach to strategy has not gone unnoticed. In 1930, Frederick Eggleston, one of the pioneers of modern Australian strategic analysis, wrote: ‘We do not have that sense of the sea and our surroundings which is generally developed in an island people’.46 In his important 1965 study of Australian defence, the scholar, T. B. Millar, was moved to remind his readers that ‘the first point to remember about the Australian island–continent is not that it is a continent but that it is an island’.47 In 1977, yet another defence analyst, B. N. Primrose, observed that one of the greatest intellectual weaknesses in Australia’s perception of strategy was the absence of a maritime tradition.48 Indeed, part of the intellectual justification for adopting a strategic policy based on continental defence in the 1980s may have been based on an assumption that a maritime tradition was alien to the Australian strategic experience. For example, in November 1987, Kim Beazley, then Minister for Defence, stated: ‘Australia is not a maritime nation and its people do not sustain much of an interest in Australian maritime strategy’.49
Australia has always tended to be drawn towards a continental-style doctrine of sea power. As Alan Robertson has observed, much of what passes for sea power doctrine in Australian strategy has been based on ‘a continentalist’s idea of maritime strategy’—an intellectual approach that owes more to a reading of Theodore Ropp than to Julian Corbett.50 In Australian strategic culture, then, the sea has consistently been viewed as a defensive moat and not as a maritime manoeuvre space—a ‘sea–air gap’ that separates the continental landmass from the South-East Asian archipelagos.
Such a strategic approach ignores the reality of a maritime environment in which the northern archipelagos comprise a large number of islands, and essentially form what is a ‘sea–air–land gap’ that requires the use of joint military forces. Since the late 1990s, when Australia belatedly rediscovered the value of a maritime concept of strategy, its advocates have spent much of their energy struggling to escape from the straitjacket of a narrow conception of continental defence.51
The Irrelevance of Strategic Theory in Australian Military Practice
Closely linked to liminal geopolitical status and a continental consciousness in Australian strategic culture is the irrelevance of strategic theory to Australian military practice. In the 20th century, the dilemma caused by liminality and the influence of continentalism in Australia’s strategic culture created a schism between the theoretical importance of defending geography and the reality of warfighting practice in times of crisis. While strategic doctrine should never be a fixed blueprint, it should provide at least some guidelines to military practice. Yet no-one can study Australian military history and not be struck by the fact that Australia’s peacetime strategic culture has seldom matched the reality of its way of war. In Australian strategic history—again with the exception perhaps of the forward-defence era of the 1950s and 1960s—peacetime strategic theory has usually tended to be the exact opposite of military operational practice. Indeed, the disparity between theory and practice amounts almost to a form of strategic dissonance.52
In peacetime, Australia’s vast continental geography has always suggested that the best strategy is one that mobilises the nation around a fortress strategy. In the 20th century, this approach gave Australia three great fortress strategies: the Federation era strategy of continental naval defence between 1901 and 1914; the Singapore bastion strategy of the 1920s and 1930s; and the Defence of Australia ‘sea–air gap’ strategy of the 1980s and 1990s. Paradoxically, none of these strategies proved indicative of the reality of war, while each in its time became a strategic orthodoxy that could only be altered by the lessons of military practice. The truth is that, in times of conflict and crisis—from the World Wars through Korea and Vietnam to East Timor in the 20th century to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Solomons in the 21st century—the requirements of statecraft have always demanded that Australia fight overseas.53
In 2003, observing the curious disjunction between theory and practice in Australia’s continental fortress doctrine adopted in 1987—and with its essentials reaffirmed in 2000—the leading American strategic analyst, Eliot Cohen, commented:
[Geographical] ‘Defence of Australia’ remains intact in theory, but abandoned in practice, as Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen patrol East Timor, restore order in the Solomons, fight alongside American commandos in Afghanistan and Iraq, and prepare to intercept dubious merchant ships off the Korean coast. Governments rarely explicitly foreswear their strategic doctrines: rather they modify them quietly in theory, or simply abandon them in practice.54
In practical terms, the defence of Australian national values and the upholding of political interests in order to help secure a favourable political balance of power have always been more important than a defence built around immutable geography. Modern Australian defence planners have often ignored Nicholas Spykman’s famous 1944 warning against allowing geographic determinism to dominate strategy and statecraft: ‘geographic facts will not change but their meaning for foreign policy will’.55
Fusing Statecraft and Strategy in Times of War or Security Crisis
Because strategic theory has been such a poor guide to military practice, Australia has been most successful in managing the competing demands of its liminal geopolitical status in times of crisis when it has sought to integrate its statecraft with its strategy. As Alan Renouf put it in 1979, ‘the first objective of Australia’s foreign policy should [always] be to preserve the country from attack and from the threat of attack.’56 The fusion of diplomacy with defence permitted Australia to overcome its liminal geopolitical dilemma through alliances based on expeditionary warfare in times of war or security crisis. From the Transvaal veldt in the early 20th century to the sands of Bagram at the beginning of the 21st century, the use of offshore warfare became an operational expression of the remarkable strategic fusion between Australia’s statecraft and strategy in the quest for national security.
Brigadier F. P. Serong, perhaps the most important 20th-century Australian theorist of unconventional warfare, has noted that Australia’s military impact—particularly in the second half of the 20th century—has often tended to be applied on a minimalist basis. Any operations, wrote Serong, were, and should continue to be, ‘essentially a military deployment in support of a diplomatic position—never the reverse’.57
The combination of statecraft with strategy, of diplomacy with alliance politics and offshore warfare, provided the principal means for Australia to counter 20th-century threats of German militarism, Japanese imperialism and Chinese communism.
It is likely that the same combination of factors will be the principal method by which Australia will prosecute the 21st-century war against Islamo-fascism over the next decade. Overall, then, in the wars and security crises of the 20th century, particularly from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, Australia’s fusion of statecraft and strategy proved remarkably successful. The country was able to ensure that defence spending did not become a drain on domestic economic development and therefore impede the spread of prosperity under the 1901 Australian Settlement.
The Australian Way of War
Effectively, the Australian way of war has been based on fusing strategy and statecraft through the agency of offshore warfare using volunteer forces in coalition operations. This approach to national warfighting was used both in the unlimited struggles of the World Wars and in the limited wars that have occurred since 1945. In most of these struggles, because of the predominance of infantry in Australia’s various military contributions, the Anzac tradition has acted as an important transmission belt for the interpretation of national values in an overseas military setting.
However, the Anzac tradition reflects Australia’s social nationalism rather than the principles of military professionalism. The Anzac tradition emphasises pragmatism, egalitarianism and mateship—all of which derive from the features of Australian political culture discussed earlier and all of which predate World War I. Moreover, it is important to remember that Anzac is a military tradition of ‘defence without militarism’.58 The Anzac ideal is as much about the compassion of John Simpson and his donkey at Gallipoli as it is about Albert Jacka’s ferocious combat exploits on the Western Front. Writing about the military impact of Gallipoli, the Western Front and Kokoda on Australian nationalism, Rosencranz observes:
These historic exploits have not transformed Australian nationalism. The significant fact of present-day nationalism is its social character. Australian soldiers of two world wars were called ‘diggers’, the lineal descendants of gold-camp radicals and the wars did not make heroes of Generals Monash and Blamey.59
The overseas character of the Australian way of war continues. In August 2002, in the wake of Afghanistan and the build-up to Australian participation in the campaign to oust the Hussein regime in Iraq, Australia’s leading political analyst, Paul Kelly, surveyed Australian defence policy between 1945 and 2002. Kelly noted the persistent expeditionary character of the Australian military tradition and the vital linkage in it between statecraft and strategy. He described the Australian way of war as being based on a careful integration of maximum political support with limited military liability within an alliance framework. In an echo of Serong’s minimalist strategy of ‘military deployment in support of a diplomatic position’. Kelly remarked perceptively:
For half a century [since World War II] the Australian way of war has been obvious: it is a clever, cynical, calculated, modest series of contributions as part of US-led coalitions in which Americans bore the main burden. This technique reveals a junior partner skilled in utilising the great and powerful while imposing firm limits on its own sacrifices.60
Culture, Politics and Strategy: Towards an Australian Way of War for the 21st Century
At the beginning of the 21st century, Australia finds itself in the midst of a transformation of its political culture—a transformation that will almost certainly influence, and perhaps change, its strategic culture and its way of war in the first quarter of the new millennium. The changes to the political economy of Australia over the past quarter of a century have been profound. Between the 1980s and the advent of the 21st century, most of the pillars of the Australian Settlement of 1901 were swept away by the combination of the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Marxism–Leninism, and the coming of a new age of market liberalism and globalisation.
In the new century, state paternalism—’socialism without doctrines’, the main feature of utilitarian political philosophy—has been replaced by a neo-liberal ideology emphasising that the proper role of the state is to provide opportunity for the individual. The 20th-century system of industry protection has essentially collapsed, giving way to free-market capitalism and to Australia’s developing a competitive economy open to the international money market. The edifice of wage arbitration that once symbolised the essence of Australian egalitarianism has been largely replaced by the concept of enterprise bargaining, heralding the final victory of market forces over organised labour. The doctrines of White Australia, restricted immigration and ethnic conformity have long been replaced by a national policy of multiculturalism. Finally, reliance on imperial benevolence has diminished since Asia has ceased to be seen only as a region of threat and has instead become a zone of economic opportunity and a place of constructive security engagement.61
The disintegration of a political culture built around the Australian Settlement has had an equally powerful impact on Australia’s strategic culture. This situation can be best illustrated by examining the attempt, once again, to institutionalise Australia’s peacetime strategy around the primacy of continental geography in the quarter of a century between 1972 and 1997. During this long period, there was a concerted attempt by peacetime defence planners to meet the requirements of Australia’s liminal geopolitical position by emphasising the development of military capabilities to serve strategic geography.
The supremacy of the geostrategic approach in Australian defence—as symbolised by the 1986 Dibb Report and the 1987 and 1994 Defence White Papers, and confirmed by the essentials of the Defence 2000 White Paper—was made possible due to four factors.62 First, the traditional fusion between statecraft and strategy in Australia’s approach to war appeared to be discredited by involvement in the long and unsuccessful Vietnam War of the 1960s. There was a corresponding loss of confidence among defence planners in the value and relevance of offshore operations. This situation created a vacuum that was filled by geostrategists such as Paul Dibb whose focus was firmly on refining a doctrine of continental defence. Second, the relative predictability of the late Cold War strategic environment, with its lack of military commitments, favoured the theory of continental defence. For much of the period between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, strategic theory ruled without a serious challenge from the acid test of operational practice.
Third, the fact that the 1970s and 1980s became the most peaceful decades in Australia’s military history since the 1920s and 1930s provided a long period of time in which the imperatives of continental defence could be absorbed by a generation of Australian military professionals and civilian policy-makers. A narrow geographic defence of Australia became almost an orthodoxy, and this status was reflected by Dibb’s description of the 2000 White Paper as encapsulating the ‘St James version’ of Australian defence policy.63 The final factor in the primacy of continental defence was the remarkable economic transformation of the ‘tiger states’ of the Asia-Pacific between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. The economic development of the Asia-Pacific region suggested the dawn of an age of regional stability that seemed to vindicate the principles of geographic defence over those of operational readiness for offshore operations.
Unfortunately, politics, unlike geography, do not stand still. As the post–Cold War world was transformed by the twin forces of the information revolution and economic globalisation, Australian policy-makers discovered that the attempt to align national strategic culture narrowly around geography could not serve political interests in a fluid and unpredictable international system. The transnational conditions of globalised security in the 1990s respected no borders, while the Asian economic crisis of 1997 suggested the onset of a period of sustained regional instability. As a result of these new forces, Australia soon found itself facing the familiar dissonance between its declaratory strategic theory and its actual military practice.
During the long era of continental defence, operations in the service of political interests and national values—such as the operations in the Gulf War, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda and East Timor—were usually declared to be marginal to the primary role of defending strategic geography. In reality, however, these offshore operations gradually became central to the functioning of Australian defence policy. Moreover, beginning with East Timor in 1999, as such operations increased in size and intensity, they rapidly exposed the limitations of force structure capabilities designed to reflect the use of military force as an instrument not of Clausewitzian politics, but of a type of neo-Mackinderite geographic determinism. In the early 21st century, the interconnected security environment, the rise of global terrorism and the proliferation of weapons technology mean that threats are now against societies rather than frontiers, and cannot easily be quarantined by distance and terrain. Threats now form an indivisible mosaic, increasingly bypassing the security that physical borders once afforded. 64
Given the new realities of the 21st century, the Australian way of war needs to reflect three factors. First, a national way of war must recognise the intimate connections between politics, strategic culture and warfighting. In particular, those concerned with devising an Australian approach to warfighting must acknowledge the shaping power of Australia’s liminal geopolitical position and the need to manage this status with a judicious mixture of statecraft and strategy. Second, Australian strategists will have to recognise the compelling need to address the theory–practice mismatch between military planning and military experience. The current Minister for Defence, Senator Robert Hill, has described the theory–practice mismatch in the following terms:
I do think there is... a disconnect between [strategic] doctrine and reality. Our primary responsibility is the direct defence of Australia yet our troops are more heavily engaged than at any time [since] at least Vietnam in a multitude of tasks around the world.65
Ultimately, the dissonance between theory and practice in Australian strategy can only be addressed by the encouragement of an education in strategic affairs that emphasises a connection between breadth and knowledge of military history, the impact of technology and the importance of political economy.
In an age of globalised security, there is no longer any such phenomenon as convenient warning time. As a result, Australian defence planners have no choice but to align the nation’s declaratory strategy directly with real-world operational requirements. In the 21st century, Australian strategic culture must provide a womb in which to nurture a way of war. Australian strategists must, like their political counterparts, become theorists of praxis. They must pay heed to Clausewitz’s famous warning that strategic theory without reference to historical experience is ‘about as relevant to combat as the craft of the sword-smith is to the art of fencing’.66 In short, unless Australia’s strategic ideas become embedded in military practice, they will cease to serve any meaningful purpose.
The urgent challenge for the present generation of Australian defence planners is therefore to become fencing masters rather than merely swordsmiths. However, strategists can only master the use of the sword if they learn to appreciate the historical nexus between culture, politics and strategy. In 2004, an observer cannot help but notice the contrast between the strength of a number of new Australian operational concepts and the relative lack of innovative strategic ideas. Such useful operational concepts as multidimensional manoeuvre, littoral operations, networkcentric warfare and complex warfighting are yet to be situated in a new strategic calculus that defines the direction and type of force structure that the Australian Defence Force will require over the next decade.67
Third, and finally, Australia must grasp, and rigorously capitalise on, the post–11 September 2001 rise of a ‘whole of government’ approach to national security. In some respects, this process has begun with the publication of the 2003 Defence Update, the 2003 Foreign Affairs White Paper and the 2004 papers on Transnational Terrorism and National Counter-Terrorism Policy,68 All four of these publications indicate a growing congruence of understanding on such important issues as the globalisation of security, the indivisibility of threats, the strategic threat of mass-casualty terrorism and the predominance of interests over geography. The development of an integrated approach to national security promises to assist in balancing Australia’s liminal geopolitics while institutionalising the previously ad hoc fusion between statecraft and strategy. Any national security strategy that emerges will be vital in integrating the competing needs of national, regional and global security interests.
Conclusion
Frederick Eggleston once wrote that Australia possessed ‘politics without doctrines’, by which he was suggesting that the most important ideas were already embedded in everyday practice.69 The same has not been true of Australian strategy, which has often been preoccupied with theoretical ideas based on a narrow geographical determinism. In terms of defence policy, Australia has often possessed ‘strategy with doctrines’, but such doctrines have seldom been embedded in military practice. In peacetime, the Australian ideal has been to try to develop a way of war as an expression of a fortress strategy, so exploiting the geographic fastness of the continent.
Yet, in every war and security crisis faced since 1914, the geographical ideal has always been eclipsed by political reality. Australia has always taken up arms in defence not of its geography, but of its liberal Western values. Accordingly, any credible Australian way of war over the next decade must reflect Australia’s longstanding Western philosophical and cultural traditions. Australia’s political system has a Benthamite tradition; its foreign policy is Cartesian; its diplomacy remains Westphalian; and its defence policy is essentially Hobbesian.70
It is precisely because Australia is so firmly trapped between Western history and Eastern geography that the country must focus energetically on understanding the international system. As the leading political scientist, Hugh Collins, has perceptively observed, Australia is a country that historically has relied for its security and prosperity on a favourable balance of world order:
[Australia’s] interests and identity cannot be enclosed within a consistent set of boundaries. Australia is a country without a region. Its future and its fate lie on the complex networks of global interdependence. The conditions of world order are the immediate conditions of Australian security and prosperity. This gives the country a high stake in defining these international conditions, but also means that changes in international norms and transnational regimes will have direct impact upon domestic politics.71
Australia may not be able to resolve its liminal geopolitical status. However, its military planners and civilian policy-makers can surely improve their grasp of the art of strategic balance from a sophisticated study of the complex interactions between geography and history, strategy and statecraft, and between national, regional and international security requirements.
In an age of strategic unpredictability marked by the rise of transnational threats, Australia needs a multifaceted security outlook—one that is simultaneously globally attuned, regionally focused and allianceoriented. To achieve such a complex balance requires a mixture of historical awareness, geographical realism and nimble statecraft. In this respect, the study of Australia’s warfighting practice, of its political culture and of its strategic culture are not abstract tasks divorced from questions of policy. Rather, such study helps us to improve our understanding of how the shape of the future is conditioned by the way in which the past impinges on the realities of the present. In this sense, self-knowledge becomes the greatest form of strategic wisdom.
Endnotes
1 Department of Defence, The Australian Approach to Warfare, Public Affairs & Corporate Communication, Canberra, June 2002, esp. pp. 23–30.
2 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
3 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1961, p. 1.
4 B. H. Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare: Adaptability and Mobility, Faber, London, 1932; and Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, Macmillan, New York, 1973.
5 Victor Davis Hanson, Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam, Faber and Faber, New York, 2001; and John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2003.
6 See Lucian W. Pye, ‘Culture and Political Science: Problems in the Evaluation of the Concept of Political Culture,’ in Louis Schneider and Charles M. Bonjean (eds), The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, London, 1973, pp. 65–77.
7 Ibid., p. 68.
8 See Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, 1977; Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, Holmes and Meier, New York, 1979; Colin S. Gray, ‘Comparative Strategic Culture’, Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College, Winter 1984, vol. XIV, no. 4, pp. 26–33; and Carnes Lord, ‘American Strategic Culture’, in Fred E. Baumann and Kenneth M. Jensen (eds), American Defense Policy and Liberal Democracy, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1989, pp. 44–63.
9 Ken Booth, ‘The Concept of Strategic Culture Affirmed’, in C. Jacobsen (ed.), Strategic Power: USA/USSR, Macmillan, London, 1990, p. 121.
10 Lord, ‘American Strategic Culture’, p. 45.
11 For a discussion see Colin S. Gray, Explorations in Strategy, Praeger, Westport, CT, 1996, p. 84.
12 US Army Field Manual FM 100-5, Operations, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, June 1993, pp. 1-2 – 1-3.
13 Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1964.
14 Quoted in Gavin Souter, Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1992 edn, p. 21.
15 Ian McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 21–9. See also Colin A. Hughes, ‘Political Culture’, in Henry Mayer and Helen Nelson (eds), Australian Politics, Cheshire Publishing, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 133–42; and Geoff Stokes, ‘Political Culture: A Concept and its Ideologues’, in Graeme Duncan (ed.), Critical Essays in Australian Politics, Edward Arnold, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 5–27.
16 Richard N. Rosencranz, ‘The Radical Culture of Australia’, in Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, pp. 291–2.
17 Ibid., p. 289; and McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia, pp. 22–3.
18 McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia, p. 23.
19 Sir Frederic W. Eggleston, ‘The Australian Nation’, in George Caiger (ed.), The Australian Way of Life, Columbia University Press, New York, 1953, p. 12.
20 Peter Loveday, ‘Australian Political Thought’, in Richard Lucy (ed.), The Pieces of Politics, 3rd edn, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 5–30.
21 McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia, pp. 26–9.
22 Rosencranz, ‘The Radical Culture of Australia’, p. 311.
23 W. K. Hancock, Australia, Ernest Benn, London, 1930, p. 39.
24 McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia, p. 26.
25 Sol Encel, ‘The Concept of the State in Australian Politics’, in Colin Hughes (ed.), Readings in Australian Government, St Lucia Press, Brisbane, 1968, p. 45; and Gregory Melleuish, ‘Australian Individualism and Australian Liberty’, in Livio Dobrez (ed.), Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, Australian National University, Canberra, 1994, pp. 151–64.
26 Albert Metin, Socialism Without Doctrines, trans. W. Wood, Alternative Publishing Cooperative, Sydney, 1977.
27 Hancock, Australia, p. 72.
28 Cited in Sol Encel, ‘Politicians’, in Richard Nile (ed.), Australian Civilisation, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 145.
29 Eggleston, ‘The Australian Nation’, p. 12.
30 Brian Head, ‘Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society’, in Brian Head and James Walter (eds), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 14.
31 Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, pp. 1–16.
32 Ibid.
33 See for example, Graeme Cheeseman, ‘Australia: The White Experience of Fear and Dependence’, in Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds), Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region, Macmillan, London, 1999, pp. 273–98.
34 See Richard A. Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal, ‘The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating Australia in the Asia Pacific’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 1997, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 169–85; and Craig A. Snyder, ‘Australia’s Pursuit of Regional Security into the 21st Century’, Journal of Strategic Studies, December 1998, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1–17.
35 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.
36 Ibid., p. 138.
37 Ibid., p. 139.
38 D. A. Low, ‘Australia in the Eastern Hemisphere’, Australian Studies, November 1990, no. 4, pp. 60–76.
39 In terms of geopolitics, New Zealand is more properly a Pacific state.
40 Higgott and Nossal, ‘The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating Australia in the Asia Pacific’, pp. 169–85.
41 Quoted in Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976, p. 265.
42 On John Howard’s approach see James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004, ch. 6.
43 Quoted in Dennis Rumley, The Geopolitics of Australia’s Regional Relations, Kluwer Academic Publications, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1999, p. 17.
44 See Michael Evans, From Deakin to Dibb: The Army and the Making of Australian Strategy in the 20th Century, Working Paper No. 113, Land Warfare Studies Centre, Canberra, June 2001.
45 Michael Evans, ‘Strategic Culture and the Australian Way of Warfare: Perspectives’, in David Stevens and John Reeve (eds), Southern Trident: Strategy, History and the Rise of Australian Naval Power, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2002, pp. 83–98.
46 Warren G. Osmond, Frederick Eggleston: An Intellectual in Australian Politics, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 139.
47 T. B. Millar, Australia’s Defence, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965, p. 30.
48 B. N. Primrose, ‘Insurance, Deterrence, Faith: The Search for an Integrated Concept of Defence’, Australian Journal of Defence Studies, March 1977, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 36.
49 Kim C. Beazley, ‘The Development of Australian Maritime Strategy’, in Commonwealth of Australia, Selected Speeches 1985–1989 by the Hon. Kim C. Beazley, MP, Minister for Defence, Directorate of Departmental Publications, Canberra, 1989, p. 184.
50 Alan Robertson, Centre of the Ocean World: Australia and Maritime Strategy, Seaview Press, Adelaide, 2001, p. 52.
51 See Michael Evans, Developing Australia’s Maritime Concept of Strategy: Lessons from the Ambon Disaster of 1942, Study Paper No. 303, Land Warfare Studies Centre, Canberra, July 2000, pp. 69–90.
52 Evans, From Deakin to Dibb: The Army and the Making of Australian Strategy in the 20th Century, pp. 34–51.
53 Ibid. and Evans, ‘Strategic Culture and the Australian Way of Warfare’, pp. 83–96.
54 Eliot Cohen, ‘New Strategic Doctrines for a New Age’, paper delivered at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Global Strategic Review, Leesburg, VA, 12–14 September 2003, p. 2. Paper in author’s possession.
55 Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1944, p. 7.
56 Alan Renouf, The Frightened Country, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1979, p. 1.
57 Brigadier F. P. Serong, ‘An Australian View of Revolutionary War’, Conflict Studies, September 1971, no. 16, p. 16.
58 See Sol Encel, Militarism and the Citizen Tradition in Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1966, pp. 2–26.
59 Rosencranz, ‘The Radical Culture of Australia’, p. 296.
60 Paul Kelly, ‘No Lapdog, this Partner Has Clout’, Australian, 28 August 2002.
61 See Kelly, The End of Certainty, pp. 13–16; Martin Painter, ‘Economic Policy, Market Liberalism and “The End of Australian Politics”‘, Australian Journal of Political Science, November 1996, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 287–300; and Stephen Bell, ‘Globalisation, Neoliberalism and the Transformation of the Australian State’, Australian Journal of Political Science, November 1997, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 345–68.
62 Commonwealth of Australia, Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities: Report to the Minister for Defence by Mr Paul Dibb, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986; The Defence of Australia 1987, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1987; Defending Australia: Defence White Paper 1994, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994; and Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force, Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, 2000.
63 Paul Dibb, ‘Australia’s Best Defence White Paper?’, Australian Defence Force Journal, March–April 2001, no. 147, p. 30.
64 See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, chapters 10–12; 24–6.
65 Cameron Stewart, ‘Hill orders rethink on troop policy—9/11—one year on’, Australian, 9 September 2002.
66 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1976, p. 133.
67 Department of Defence, Force 2020, Public Affairs and Corporate Communication, Canberra, June 2002; Future Warfighting Concept, Policy Guidance and Analysis Division, Canberra, December 2002; and Enabling Future Warfighting: Network Centric Warfare, Australian Defence Doctrine Publication (ADDP-D 3.1), Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, February 2004.
68 Commonwealth of Australia, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2003; Advancing the National Interest: Australia’s Foreign and Trade Policy White Paper, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2003; Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2004; Protecting Australia Against Terrorism: Australia’s National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Arrangements, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, 2004.
69 Eggleston, ‘The Australian Nation’, p. 10.
70 Higgott and Nossal, ‘The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating Australia in the Asia Pacific’, p. 181.
71 Hugh Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, in Stephen R. Graubard, Australia: The Daedalus Symposium, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1985, p. 162.
