Burning Bright: Defence Policy, Strategy and the Imagination
Abstract
The author examines some of the profound drivers of Australian defence and strategic logic by seeking the divide between imagination and reality. The nature of strategic debates in Australia has recently been vigorous, with the decades-old orthodoxy being contested in light of new and emergent threats such as terrorism. The imagination of the nation, of the people, and of the Department of Defence all shape threat perception; the author argues that this has led to over-estimating the dangers facing the nation and thus the correct responses to extant threats.
They became what they beheld
- William Blake — Jerusalem1
In his poem, The Tyger, William Blake presents a vision of the Tyger as a monster that in its majesty seems to transcend categories of good and evil. The poem’s speaker describes the Tyger through a series of questions that build a picture of the creature. In doing so, the speaker creates a vision that seems to challenge fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. This vision terrifies him, and he ends up silent, cowering before it, fearful.
Blake’s great theme was the imagination. In this poem he enacts a consciousness terrified at the creative power of its own imagination. The Tyger is no more than a creation, ultimately of words, and has no reality outside this. Yet it terrifies. The drawing published with the poem shows a rather benign-looking cat.2 This emphasises how ironic the poem is, and how weak the consciousness of the poem’s speaker is in the face of its own creation. When we stand with Blake in eternity to read the poem, we can see its power and irony, and Blake’s rhetorical sophistication as he analyses one aspect of the relationship between imagination and reality.
How do we know the imagination? The short answer is, by its works. These may be words, or they may be deeds. In the Department of Defence we see its manifestation everywhere, but indirectly. We barely understand it, and because of this we can be blind to the full meaning and dimensions of our policy and strategic thinking. If we do not understand our imagination, we cannot understand ourselves. Nor can we understand the organisations in which we live and work.
What do we mean when we talk about imagination? Can we read our policies, strategies and programs as products of an imagination? What do our policies and strategies tell us about our imagination? Does it make sense to talk about an Australian strategic imagination?
In his book, Assassin’s Gate, George Packer discusses the recent origins and unfolding of the Second Iraq War.3 He repeatedly refers to a failure of imagination. He uses this idea in many contexts and with reference to quite different events, but at the core of his argument is the idea that the strategic and operational failures in Iraq originated in the inability of policy-makers to step into another version of reality and to look out, including back at themselves. The world they saw was the one they had constructed, sometimes over many years, and it was powerful enough to exclude everything that did not conform to its patterns and representations of reality. They were fully in that world, and worked within the context it sanctioned. We saw at work here something stronger than ideology; there was a fully formed, coherent vision of the world, a vision that had great explanatory power. But like all worlds, fundamentally, it was an imagined one. It was a world sufficiently imagined to be powerful enough to exclude other worlds.
In this subtle, but very important sense, Iraq was an imagined construct. Once the shape and dimensions of that construct were fashioned, and this version of Iraq was positioned within a broader imagined universe, a further cascade of decisions, well known and amply discussed by Packer and others, were inevitable. This is not to argue for a crude determinism, nor to diminish the policy and strategic issues that made Iraq such an urgent concern. Nor is it to question the good faith of those involved in decisions associated with Iraq. Rather, it is to recognise that decisions are made by people and people are governed by their perceptions of what is real and meaningful, and that these in turn are constructions of their imagination.
The vision of Iraq animating the perceptions and actions of US policy-makers has been contested in Iraq and elsewhere, and this in turn has evolved into a struggle that is taking many different forms—insurgency, terrorism, and political disputation. Behind this, a more fundamental struggle is taking place. It is an imaginative struggle, or perhaps more precisely, a struggle between imaginations. This struggle is manifested in different conceptions of Iraq and attempts, often violently, to ensure the supremacy and hence reality of a particular conception of what Iraq is and what it should be.
So, what is imagination? There are many definitions, all of which make sense in their context, but lose their explanatory power once one begins to generalise. My personal favorite is that of Thomas Hobbes, who described it as a kind of decayed memory.4 The Macquarie Dictionary defines it as ‘the action of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.’5 My own working definition is more personal and impressionistic. Imagination lives most powerfully in dreams, memories, barely conscious urgings, in those instincts that run deep through our lives and drive us to take what materials we can and fashion from them a world that defines us and in which we might be able to live. It is imagination that allows us to create, to turn visions, dreams and desires into something real enough to make us breath differently and be able to say that we live in a place we have made our own. It is through our imagination that we connect with the world and create more meaning and more life out of the crude materials it gives us. This is a large definition, but imagination is a large thing, capable of spawning worlds.
Countries, crowds, organisations—like people—have an imagination. One hesitates to name it as a quality, but you know it when you see it, or perhaps more to the point, feel it. Sometimes we identify it with a dead metaphor, such as when we say that an organisation has ‘a life of its own’. We invoke it when our language attributes a personality and an implied consciousness to an organisation, such as when we say, ‘Defence believes’ or ‘Defence thinks’, or feels or wants or has any number of desires, actions and emotions. For me imagination exists, I suppose, as a kind of background murmur, a whispering that shapes and guides, cajoles and sometimes mourns. In an organisation, it might seem like a personality, a kind of life that one knows in its traces—in the passion behind an argument about policy, or in rituals and codes, or the physical arrangement of things. A characteristic of imagination is that it is in constant turmoil, change and growth as it contends with the world and with other imaginations. The life of a large and complex organisation is always interesting because invariably, at the level of imagination, we are witness to a process of contention, rejection, absorption, change and growth. Conversely, when an organisation loses its imagination it dies, though that death may take time to become evident.
To understand the imagination of an organisation, how it is created and sustained, how it evolves, is to understand that organisation and its life in the world in profound and complete ways. It is to understand relations and patterns, the deeper connections between things, not always evident in their surface manifestation. Imagination most often speaks to us on what the nameless narrator in Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, calls ‘the lower frequencies’6
Many of our problems in the Department of Defence are problems of imagination, which we frame as administrative, management or even policy problems in an attempt to deal with them. Yet so many of our choices, our responses to events, emanate from who and what we are, and from what we and our organisations are and aspire to be. Our choices are not in any complete sense the result of rational and disinterested processes, though we hold to this idea—as we must. These choices are, at a certain level, products of our imagination. In saying this, I am not arguing for a kind of organisational unconscious, though I do suspect the existence of such a creature. Rather, our dreams, ideas, and emotions are all different manifestations of our imagination, which through our action and talk we put into play, and through this shape what is possible, what is allowed to exist. This in turn shapes policy and strategy.
Perhaps we come closest to acknowledging the reality of something like an organisational imagination when we talk of values and seek to incorporate them into our decision-making processes. This is not because values are a surrogate for imagination, though they can be this. In accepting values, we give credence to the idea that non-rational human and contingent constructs can be brought into existence through the agreement of a community, and that these can shape and influence decisions in an organisational culture built on the ideal of rational decision-making.
Management literature does not often speak of imagination. It is too incongruous with the rational, purposive ideology underpinning most thinking about the nature and purpose of organisations. When the literature does stray into this area, it is usually in the context of discussion on leadership and tends to be framed around the importance of vision. Even so, such discussion is usually truncated in the sense that most writing on vision is a surrogate for exploring strategies to achieve alignment and control, rather than as a vehicle for, and expression of, an organisation’s imagination.
Every leader, whether by accident or design, consciously or unconsciously, interacts with and helps shape an organisation’s imagination. In my view this is the most important and the most fundamental of leadership tasks. It is a staggeringly complex activity, undertaken in as many different ways as there are individual leaders, and manifested in the multitude of actions and decisions that leaders make every day. The core question any leader must ask—or find a way of asking—is ‘how have I shaped this organisation’s imagination?’ Is my imagination large enough? Leaders defeat themselves when they fail to understand the imaginative forces that swirl around them, or their role in shaping and guiding those forces.
The most strenuous, challenging and lonely leadership situations occur when a leader’s imagination confronts that of their organisation. This has occurred in Defence and is always a crisis, but also the most fruitful path to renewal. Defence, like any other big and complex organisation, is many things, but it is primarily a work of the imagination. Or rather, the imagination of Defence is the ongoing work of many imaginations. Sir Arthur Tange knew this, and like all significant leaders, knew how the imagination speaks to an organisation. His work in building the Department of Defence, recognisably the organisation we have now, involved challenging deeply held conceptions about the nature of defence in the Australian strategic context, and how this should find expression in policy and administration. His work was not just an administrative challenge, but an imaginative challenge. It meant imagining and conceptualising a new world and asking people to live and work in it. For this reason the emotional and intellectual cost to all involved was high.7
Before it is anything else, Defence is an arena where imaginations contend. This begs the question, contend in relation to what? Where is the arena for this contention? What is an ‘imaginative’ struggle as opposed to other kinds? My answer is that at the heart of Defence work is a process of imagining the world, the adversaries that might populate it, the way the future might unfold, and the position we as a nation might want to occupy. To undertake Defence’s work we need to be able to summon these things into consciousness, to give them a reality and then to struggle with them to create the means by which we might counter or defeat them, might, so to speak, defend against them. To do this well we need to struggle imaginatively against ourselves, as well as those we work with.
This struggle shapes our imagination, even as we use imagination to do it. In many ways, this work is potentially hazardous—to the spirit, to one’s moral being, to one’s sense of harmony with the world. For the imagination, ‘defence’ is dangerous and treacherous ground. The imagination is tempted by apocalypse, by spectacle and violence, as Osama Bin Laden knows, as do those US defence intellectuals who promoted the concept of ‘shock and awe’. The power of this subject matter can and often does loosen the imagination from its moorings in the physical, touchable world. Hugh White has written on this searchingly in his essay ‘Primal Fears, Primal Ambition’.8 His argument, put very crudely, is that our current sense of threat is disproportionate to the reality of that threat. There is, so to speak, an imaginative surplus that is having real consequences in terms of security policy decision-making. He argues for discipline and rationality, for rigorous process and for a sense of limits. In my view he is arguing that we need to control our imagination, especially our imagination of disaster. The essay is a revealing insight into our contemporary situation and reflects a sceptic’s sense of limits and a deep awareness of the danger of undisciplined imagination.
Disaster has always been the currency of popular culture. The shock of 11 September 2001 was in part its realisation of disaster beyond all but the wildest conception in book and film. As a culture, we have struggled to absorb this realisation. No contingency is too far fetched. No scheme or plot or horror lies outside the realm of possibility, even probability. Avian influenza, nuclear terrorism, bioterrorism, suicide bombing in our cities and suburbs, threats to the food supply, invasion by armadas of refugees, global warming—all these take their place as an evolving reality in a new, timeless and non-hierarchical world of undifferentiated and existential threats. One watches the film War of the Worlds with a sense of relief that at least that contingency still seems unlikely.
In the realm of imagination, relations between words and deeds are always mutable. One does not necessarily have more meaning or more power than the other. Their relations evolve, subordinate to the imagination’s primacy as the shaper and decider of reality. When imagination loses control, when it separates from what is tangible, when it fails to discriminate in its interactions with different orders of reality, when it becomes the unconstrained arbiter of what is real, the danger then is that it can create an environment for decisions or judgements that are wrong, dangerous, or worse.
Before 11 September, our guide to the future was history. It grounded our imagination, sketched the circumference of the possible, and provided a sense of limit, which was a kind of security, at least ontologically. The events of 11 September 2001 subverted this. By enacting the unthinkable, something beyond normal imagining, it opened infinite possibilities, all dreadful. Words and things, the real and the possible, have become one, a continuum of potential threat upon which our imagination feeds as it calibrates future disaster and dares not leave any possibility unattended. That day in September 2001 proposes that there is no security, no defence. This tends to make all threats existential. The sense that 11 September represents a discontinuity undermines one’s sense that history is a reliable guide for handling the future. The contemplation of the spectacle overwhelms any analysis built on the foundations of proportion and priority. It takes us outside history and places us into the timeless realm of myth. Indeed, bin Laden wields the power of imagination, including the power of the Western imagination, with great assurance and effect. His ongoing strategic advantage has been his capacity to sustain himself as a myth, eternal and outside the constraints of time and place, the embodiment of his own imagination.
Perhaps more than in any other area of life, the imagination, when it deals with defence, needs to ground itself. This is one reason, in my view perhaps the most important reason, why geography matters. It is both a trope for reality and, in the Australian strategic context, the surest path to an understanding of limits. For Australians, geography is the beginning of realism. History, especially in our contemporary environment, has become a perilous adventure—its materials are words and memory. Too often, in the light of the imagination and an emotionally charged public discourse characterised by rhetorical excess, history sheds its factual skin and emerges as myth. Pondering it, we lose ourselves in the contemplation of splendour and catastrophe.
In Defence, we try to put in place elaborate processes to control imagination, to socialise and constrain it. We do this through administrative practice, through conceptual work, through the use of rational, abstract language. The fruits of this socialisation, this constraint, this subjugation of desire to the rigours of process give birth to that artifice we call policy, and sometimes strategy. Some of these methods are more successful than others. Policy and strategy are always the crippled progeny of a more pure, ungoverned imagination. They represent our accommodation of limits. They whisper subversively of our compromises and of what they might have been if we had been courageous. As imagination asserts itself, we renounce these children as we seek versions that are more complete.
Perhaps it is our good fortune that we have a Defence decision-making culture that is bureaucratic, technical, and rational in its aspiration, instrumentalist in its processes and fundamentally pragmatic and practical in its orientation. Yet this culture can fail us if we administer decisions without awareness of the imaginative life animating ideas and proposals, and do not recognise that, as an organisation, we deal in some of the nation’s deepest anxieties and phobias. We hold in custody the nation’s dream of security. The decisions we make, the things we do, the language we speak have a direct impact on the culture, helping to build the nation’s story in ways disproportionate to our size as an organisation. Whether we want to or not, we deal in forces that are a powerful magic in the culture.
The heart of all Defence work is a struggle as old as Homer’s Iliad. It is the contest with an adversary, a contest that never ends, and ranges across every domain and embraces every element of reality. It never stops. It is a contest for meaning, life, space, security, supremacy, whatever we require to allow us to believe that we are—for however long we can make this moment last—safe. So we imagine worlds, terrible worlds, because we must, inhabited by monsters as potent and malign as any nightmare creature of mythology. Thus, we build policy and strategy to control these threatening imaginings, to make them manageable and to forestall their realisation. How often are we like Blake’s speaker, in awe of and frightened into submission by the Tygers we create?
The Australian strategic imagination is shaped by geography and history. It is inextricably entwined with national identity. Its expression in grand strategy has been relatively constant over the decades; at least, in my view, since the end of the First World War.
As a settler society, Australian identity has been shaped by two large forces: the struggle to come to terms with a new and difficult landscape and the emotional ties to a predominately Anglo-Celtic source culture. Landscape, country, geography—these have functioned as a governing trope for what is unique and difficult in Australia. Australian identity, shaped by natural forces of adversity, embodies a profound ambivalence towards landscape, a sense of both belonging and alienation. This ambivalence is reflected in Australian literature and art, in the design of our cities, in our attitude towards everything from aboriginal dispossession to environmental conservation. Calling us away from land is the lure of the source culture which, as the world changes, continues, ironically enough, to be re-imagined to meet the needs of our alienation. What was once empire is now the US alliance and globalisation that, as empire once did, takes us into larger communities, imagined communities of shared culture and strategic interest. Such communities’ place us in a metaphysical space built out of values, relationships, and shared interests. This offsets the need to place ourselves in this landscape and come to terms with our country.
The Australian strategic imagination seeks to straddle this divide. It seeks to answer two questions: ‘what is Australia’ and ‘what is an Australian’ in order to answer the secondary question of how Australia and Australianess might be best defended. This is as much about identity as it is about the harsh realities of threat and response. National identity is never finally settled, and the Australian identity in particular is still maturing. By world standards, it is very young and still in formation. This creates an uncertainty and fragility in the Australian self that is reinforced by the vastness and hostility of the land, its ambiguous provision of bounty combined with its unforgiving treatment of those who underestimate it. Yet the source culture, however constructed, offers only ambiguous refuge, as Henry Handel Richardson dissects with such relentless and scrupulous care in her treatment of her character, Richard Mahoney, in her trilogy, Australia Felix.9 The experience of Australia changes the source culture so that it can no longer be home, even as Australia continues to be a place of alienation. Mahoney goes mad, an exile with no place to go, his imagination unable to reconcile geography with his history.
These ambiguities, this unstable relationship between place and history in the formation of identity becomes richer when one considers the relationship between people and country created through sacrifice in war, particularly wars where Australians died overseas, to defend their possession of this country. At an abstract level, these deaths, these wars, pursued to maintain a global strategic order favourable to Australia, become, through the sacrifice involved, a means by which our possession of the country is legitimated. The landscape becomes sacred. It acquires more meaning and therefore more value. It becomes imaginatively potent, though not necessarily in ways that the official rhetoric of security and strategic policy can accommodate easily.
In the canon of Australian strategic thinking and writing, geography is the central organising idea. The history of strategic policy, since the Vietnam War in particular, has been the increasing centrality of geography as the foundation of the Australian strategic imagination. This is summed up in that phrase of extraordinary cultural and political resonance, ‘Defence of Australia’. Geography emerges as the means by which nationalism and a particular vision of Australian identity, expressed in defence and strategic thinking and action, asserts itself. Defence is about the land, the physical reality that one can feel and touch. It demonstrates how much of our national identity is bound up with our feelings for and our imagination of the landscape. It is why the work of people such as Arthur Tange, Kim Beazley, Paul Dibb and their successors continues to have such resonance and centrality. My view is that the 1986 Dibb Report is the central document, the one in which geography as an organising trope for the Australian strategic imagination achieves its apotheosis. It is a seminal work that, to my reading, constructs Australia as a physical entity that can and must be defended:
Australia must have the military capacity to prevent any enemy from attacking us successfully in our sea and air approaches, gaining a foothold on our soil, or extracting political concessions from us through the use of military force. To do this we must develop our own solution to our unique strategic circumstances.10
Soil is the interesting word—rich in association, with an emotional and metaphorical resonance beyond its function as a referent for land. It is the only time that I am aware of that the word has been used in any Australian strategic policy or planning document. Its uniqueness tells us that something very important is being said, and, perhaps, even more is being implied. The emphasis on ‘unique strategic circumstances’ also functions as a trope for the idea of an inimitable Australian strategic response and, by implication, an Australian strategic culture and identity. Taken together, there is the sense that our strategic identity arises out of our geographical circumstances and is bounded by this.
I think we get a suggestion of this when we consider Kim Beazley’s speeches about Australian security and defence needs, particularly when he contemplates Prime Minister Curtin’s decision in 1942 to bring the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) back to Australia to defend against a possible Japanese invasion.11 As one reads his speeches over many years, one feels in his words a sense of the importance of land, of our physical relationship with Australia as the source of our wealth and identity and, more intangibly, the potential fragility of our possession. There is a suggestion that in a profound way the integrity of collective selfhood, our legitimacy as a people, of our entitlement to be here, is bound up in our relationship with the land and our willingness to defend it. To surrender close, almost physical stewardship in the name of empire, alliance or globalisation is to breach a kind of covenant. To the extent that Beazley is a representative of the main currents of the Australian strategic imagination, it becomes clear how land and geography are its foundation. In this context, it is fascinating to read him on the US–Australia alliance. He is a sophisticated commentator, but one senses that his intellectual and emotional starting point is always Australia, and Australia as a physical reality located in a particular place. His strategic imagination is grounded in a sense of Australia as primarily a geographical entity, a place.12
The Dibb Report resonates with metaphors of self containment, of clear boundaries and borders. At a deeper level, it is an expression of national identity and of a powerful strategic imagination, grappling with questions of what Australia is and of what must be defended. The power of the Dibb Report is, in my view, out of proportion to the analytical and factual content of the document. It traffics in the uncanny because of the particular imaginative resonance of the central trope of geography in Australian culture. The detail of policy has moved on from the Dibb Report, and the report still trails the residue of its birth within a strategic order constructed out of a global superpower rivalry at a time when the world created by that rivalry was ending and a new one had not yet emerged. Subsequent work, particularly the 2000 White Paper, has refined and adjusted the Dibb vision, but never overturned it. Dibb’s central idea that geography must be the foundation of Australian defence strategy remains potent, not just because it is sound strategic theory, but because of the centrality of landscape, country and soil in the Australian imagination.
One could write a history of strategic policy over the past decade that focuses on the attempt to overthrow geography as the primary organising idea in the Australian strategic imagination. This attempt has failed for the time being, but the failure tells us interesting things.
In some recent strategic policy, particularly as expressed in many of the speeches by then-Minister for Defence, Senator Robert Hill, there has been a tendency to use globalisation and its manifestations as an alternative organising idea for strategic policy.13 The events of 11 September 2001, Australia’s position as a trading nation integrated into the global system, our alliance with the United States, our other strategic relationships, and the emergence of serious non-state transnational threats have all at one time or another been deployed to support an argument that says to use geography as the organising idea for defence policy and strategy is to misread the contemporary security environment and its demands. Whether this argument is correct or not is less interesting than its function as a critique of one conception of Australian identity and its challenge to the mainstream of Australian strategic thinking. The problem with this critique is that it has never had the power to overthrow the conception of Australia that underpins what in shorthand construct we call ‘Defence of Australia’.
The vision of Australia and of Australian identity implied in Minister Hill’s speeches does not have the imaginative power of Dibb’s conception. This is not a question of rhetoric or analysis. The Hill critique, for want of a better term, was always secondary and had less persuasive power because it was not, in my view, as congruent with deeper forces shaping Australian culture and identity. It lacked, crucially, the imaginative power of the Dibb formulation, a power evident in the images of solitude, fragility and destiny conjured by Beazley in many of his speeches. Beazley’s genius was his ability to connect country, culture and strategy in a way that spoke directly of who we are. Hill’s rhetoric and the imaginative underpinnings of it never presented a vision of Australia and of Australian security that, to use a metaphor, touched the soil. It never dealt, even in a negative way, with the link between land and identity. For geography it attempted to substitute the abstract language of values and interests. It put forward a globalised vision of Australian culture that remains contestable. It was less concerned with geographic proximity as a driver of strategic decision-making. It had a tendency to believe that alliances and technology could substitute for space and place. It tended to prefer relationships over national autonomy or self reliance.
But in advocating this vision of Australian strategy, Hill and his supporters are also saying something important about Australian identity, who our history says we are, in particular our links to source cultures. This is why the view they advocate has continuing resonance. But how congruent is their reading of Australia’s strategic history with the way that history is read in the wider community? Put very crudely, the fight has never been primarily for ideas or systems; it has been for land and identity, even if the fight takes place on the other side of the world. Some have argued that we express identity through values and that we fight to preserve values and a way of life. To some extent this is true, which is why the expression of strategy in actual decisions and deployments always embodies compromise. If nothing else, politics takes care of that. But as time passes, the legitimacy of deployments is measured by their relationship with the defence of Australia as, above all, a physical entity. Notwithstanding current debates on the policy and strategic significance of Iraq, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands and East Timor, the reality is that the ultimate legitimacy of a strategy is determined by the extent to which it is congruent with the imagination and identity of the nation sustaining it. Whether a strategy works is not necessarily, in this context, a first-order issue. In the Australian context, any strategy or expression of strategy that seeks to break free of the realities of geography is struggling against major countervailing cultural forces. Our history has many examples of the way the meaning of operational events is transformed in the re-telling to create a strategic significance that may not have been apparent at the time. Gallipoli is a distant place that, through a complex process of re-imagining, is being turned into Australian soil. Anzac is a legend that establishes Australian identity and, through memorials and the memory of absent men, has changed our perception of the Australian landscape and our relationship with it.
In my view, broader cultural anxieties about Australian identity work over time to change the meaning of our deployments. The Australian landscape is our destiny and thus the final reference point for the deep legitimacy of our defence strategy and, ultimately, of our deployments, no matter where our soldiers might be or the stated reasons why they are there. No war or deployment can be understood without understanding how it interacts with anxieties about identity. The Dibb strategic construct creates a greater sense of security because it reinforces ideas about Australian identity congruent with our primary cultural experience. It more closely aligns strategy with culture that, as I have suggested, arises predominately out of our experience of the landscape. The alternative approach challenges Australian identity because it works, whether it intends this or not, to separate the idea of Australia from the place we call Australia. I have myself called Australia an evolving idea in a global community. But is an idea in a community real enough to sacrifice blood and treasure for? As a nation, we have said ‘yes’ to this, but the consensus has always been fragile. I think it is true to say that the greater the distance from our shores, the lower the public’s tolerance for Australian deaths on operations, and the greater the hysteria when they do occur.
The critique mounted by Hill and his supporters could adjust, but could not usurp, the governing Defence of Australia framework. Whether this critique develops and grows as Australia moves through the twenty-first century will be a fascinating story. It will be a story about the globalisation of Australian culture and where that might take us, about the national imagination and the evolution of identity in a global community. Will this supplant geography as the governing idea of the Australian strategic imagination? Perhaps, but this will also mean that we will be in a different culture. Cultures change slowly, so it would need a very large discontinuity, which globalisation might be in time, to change Australian culture. We do not know the future, but we do know these forces will shape our national imagination and in time policy, strategy and force structure.
Perhaps the most interesting challenge to Defence of Australia has been from Army, an institution I greatly admire. Elements of Army’s contemporary vision, as set out in Complex Warfighting, present a sort of post-apocalyptic world of undifferentiated threat.14 The document is rhetorically compelling, but in some ways curiously self-referential. If one is prepared to enter the imaginative world animating the document, a world dominated by the pathologies of globalisation, coagulated into an anarchic and infinitely threatening, predominately urban environment, the unfolding logic makes a kind of sense. This logic culminates in the need for capabilities appropriate to what the document calls complex environments. Thus, we have the origin of the Hardened and Networked Army. This world is persuasive, which shows its imaginative strength. But how real is it? Does it make sense in an Australian context? The document’s status as a draft and as a vehicle for advancing a hypothesis about future warfare indicates that Army is still considering this.
Armies—and the Australian Army is no different—are about land. Armies come from the land, work in the land, and are of the land; their mission is to seize and hold land. Complex Warfighting knows this at a profound level.
In a subtle, weirdly ironic way, the document is shadowed by land, most specifically, by the Australian landscape, which exists as a kind of absence, particularly as the kind of warfare envisaged is almost inconceivable in Australia and, in my view, is problematic in the context of our immediate neighbourhood. To my reading this document reflects an attempt by Army to resolve the tension between history and geography by creating an imaginary geography, a landscape legitimised by a particular reading of history and global strategic trends. Army, more than any other Service, has experiences and traditions that go to the heart of our national story. Army’s story is embedded in myths of sacrifice for the soil, to invoke Dibb’s word. Army has a profound connection with the land. Army has traditions of arising from the people, as we see in the legend of citizen soldiers and of such men as General Monash. This arising from the people, and perhaps out of the Australian landscape, is a large part, for example, of the Gallipoli and Kokoda stories. Even today we see these myths animating elements of the Reserve. Yet Army’s warfighting history has been expeditionary and in coalition. These forces pull Army in different directions. In this respect the ambiguities of Army’s experience mirror broader Australian national experiences. Army’s struggle, the struggle of Army’s imagination, has been to develop a conception of itself large enough to reconcile these forces. Complex Warfighting does not achieve this, and to be fair, this is a burden beyond the scope of any single document, no matter how comprehensive. But the document does reflect a set of confusions, or perhaps anxieties, that mirror a broader ambivalence in Australian culture about the relationship between geography and history, between whom we are and who we might want to be.
Army’s story shows the importance of not underestimating the power of an organisation’s imagination to create and shape that organisation and its relationship with the world. We need to be able to ask the question about any organisation, what does it dream at night? Army’s story, including its relationship with the rest of the ADF and Defence, reflects a larger story about Australia and its identity in a globalising world. Because of Army’s particular significance in Australian culture, decisions about Army always provoke anxiety because they reflect deeper cultural anxieties. Do we have the imaginative capacity in our thinking about defence and strategy to resolve these anxieties?
The decision to acquire the Abrams tank that, perhaps unfairly, is increasingly the avatar of the Hardened and Networked Army, is interesting, not simply in terms of the debate about its merits and the utility of that capability. The level of debate it has provoked reflects deeper anxieties about identity and the future.15 To this extent the Abrams represents more than just a capability. It represents ideas about what Army is and might become. This is why the arguments about the Abrams, when conducted in terms of capability, never quite settle the question of whether it should have been acquired. The decision contains any number of potential meanings as it is interpreted against an evolving strategic, cultural and political environment. Like any significant capability, in some contexts it makes sense, in others it does not. The reality is that we do not know what the long term consequences of this decision will be. What will be interesting is how over time and in response to events and culture the Australian strategic imagination evolves and in doing so re-interprets the nature and meaning of this particular capability. Will the tanks represent a state the Army passes through as it continues to imagine itself and undertake operations and struggle with the soil from which it has grown? Will they change core elements of Army’s identity and culture? Will they function as a manifestation of Army’s desire to transform itself into something, a different sort of force, to liberate it from Australia’s strategic geography? What will they say in time about the quality of Army’s imagination? I do not know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that the answers will be shaped by the continuing development of Army’s imagination as it works and is challenged by events and ideas, and as it experiences the reality of operations.
The American imagination is vast. To paraphrase one of its great poets, Walt Whitman, it contains multitudes. Perhaps the most important thing we could do is to study it, for it influences us profoundly. Taxonomy of the American strategic imagination and its expression in defence policy is beyond the scope of this essay, but its effects are well known. There is the restless quest to re-make the world, the idea that force, especially military force, can shape redemptive outcomes, the desire for geographical transcendence, the belief that technology can liberate strategy from the constraint of time and space. These ideas, pathologies in some contexts, are deeply rooted in American history and culture.
Because our defence relationship with the United States is so close and the power of the American imagination so pervasive, particularly as it expresses itself in technology, one of the major challenges we face is establishing and maintaining our own strategic identity. We are influenced whether or not we want to be because our imagination is challenged and influenced. The extent to which we lack awareness of the nature of that influence means that we live and work in an imaginative reality that we don’t understand as completely as we need to. An interesting tension in recent years in strategic policy has been the interaction between the US strategic imagination, unbounded in its conception of reality by any limit, and the Australian strategic imagination with its careful construction of limits. The relationship with the United States has been an imaginative challenge that has found expression in policy and action. A subtext of recent debates about Defence of Australia versus the ADF as expeditionary force or, more broadly, the role of geography in shaping strategy, has in part been about the extent to which the American strategic imagination should be allowed to shape the reality we might choose to live in. The US alliance provokes anxieties and contradictory feelings both within the policy community and more broadly, because it challenges our imagination and hence our construction of what we are and might be. It’s most powerful and seductive challenge is to our sense of geographical realism.
There are many other examples of how imagination shapes in ways we do not necessarily understand. In Defence, imagination appears in many guises and has many voices, often contradictory or, as I suggested above, in contention. In this sense Defence is a conversation, an incomplete work, an evolving imagination in formation through the interaction of many imaginations. I have tried briefly to discuss Army from the perspective of eternity, but one could talk of the other Services or Defence or its agencies in the same way. The Defence Signals Directorate, for example, is an organisation with a powerful imagination. Navy and Air Force have their dreaming, as does the Public Service. We do not have, and perhaps do not need, a conceptual vocabulary to analyse and discuss the life of imagination in Defence. Yet we need to understand it, where it lives, and how to influence it. As I said above, this is the core leadership task. But beyond that we need to be able to stand outside and see it, to know what it is saying and might be making us say. If we are unable to do this, we end up as the speaker of Blake’s poem, The Tyger, frightened of our own creations.
As I reflect on this essay, it occurs to me that we are in most danger when we allow our imagination to separate from those realities in the world that establish limits. Geography, distance, time, limited numbers of people—the obstacles that have shaped us as a culture—these are the core elements that have shaped and make up the Australian strategic imagination. Our glory is our imagination’s struggle against them as we try to live fully in a global community. Our peril is the temptation to ignore what they have to say to us about the limits of what we are or might become.
The Tyger16
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And What shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?17
Endnotes
1 Available by download from: <http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=jerusale…;.
2 View the image at: <http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/images/songsie.z.p42.300.jpg>.
3 George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2005.
4 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Imagination’, Leviathan, Chapter 2, downloadable from: <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-a.html#CH…;.
5 Macquarie Concise Dictionary, Revised Third edition, 2004.
6 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1947.
7 See Peter Edwards, Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins, Allen and Unwin, 2006, for an excellent discussion of Tange as Defence reformer.
8 Hugh White, ‘Primal Fears, Primal Ambitions’, Arena Magazine, Number 76, April–May 2005.
9 Henry Handel Richardson, Australia Felix, a trilogy published in one volume in 1930.
10 Paul Dibb, Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, Report to the Minister for Defence, March 1986, p. 3.
11 See in particular Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities: Report and Ministerial Statement, Hansard, 3 June 1986. Many of Beazley’s speeches circle around the theme of self reliance, the relationship of geography to strategy, and the decision John Curtin made to return the AIF to Australia. The continuity of theme and thinking over nearly three decades has been strong. The speech referred to above is a particularly important one because of the link with Dibb’s work, commissioned by Beazley, and, through the reference to Curtin, the argument for an historical continuity in strategic thinking. In my view, Beazley’s speeches in totality represent the main canon of Australian strategic thought. Much of the argument of recent years has been attempts of varying success to challenge this status.
12 See Beyond Iraq, Address to the Lowy Institute Sydney, 10 August 2006, and The U.S. and Australian Alliance in an East Asian Context, delivered at the University of Sydney, June 30, 2001.
13 See Australia’s Defence and Security: Challenges & Opportunities at the Start of the 21st Century, 14 September 2005, ASPI Inaugural International Conference 2005.
14 Department of Defence, Future Land Operating Concept: Complex Warfighting (Draft Developing Concept), Australian Army, 1 June 2006, accessible from: <http://www.defence.gov.au/army/lwsc/Publications/Soldier_21stC.pdf>.
15 A recent example of such anxieties is the Bulletin article, The Wrong War, of 27 September 2006.
16 Downloaded from <http://www.poetry.com.au/classics/titles/t/tiger.html> on 1 November 2006.
17 For a comprehensive exploration of the poem and its interpretations, see <http://www.english.uga.edu/wblake/SIE/42/42borowsky.bib.html>.
