Blog 3 - An Australian Trident Part 1

An Australian Trident Part 1

Retreading the Steps of Australian Maritime Strategic Thinking

Foreword

The geographic factors which influence the Australian Defence Force requirements have been set out and the circumstantial factors which can affect that geography have been established. This article will analyse the force structure and capabilities the wider Australian Defence Force and the Royal Australian Navy in particular need to secure Australia’s interests. Australia’s defence debate has not yet put forward theses on the optimal combination of capabilities to defend Australia as no holistic analysis has been possible without an assertation of the geography within which Australia ought to defend itself. The following analysis builds on the assertions that Australia defends itself in the geographic context of broader, interconnected maritime theatres and that the contingencies the ADF must prepare for are shaped by the political interconnectivity of Australia’s near geographic neighbours and areas of interest further abroad. This essay will, therefore, attempt to discern the guiding principles which ought to be applied to the force structure and long term procurement policies of the ADF in anticipation of such capabilities becoming necessary in order to secure Australia’s areas of strategic interest.

Introduction

The Defence of Australia doctrine has held pre-eminence in Australian strategic thought since 1987, and this doctrine firmly focussed the military and diplomatic tools of Australian defence on the Northern Approaches from Indonesia to New Zealand. The recognition that Australia now faces threats from China in the Southwest Pacific which are not wholly isolated from China’s similar revisionist dispositions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits has created a pull away from this localised focus. At the same time, increased competition in Australia’s Southwest Pacific neighbourhood has ensured that the bulk of Australia’s strategic resources cannot be diverted from guarding the Southwest Pacific against revisionist and destabilising operations. Australia’s defence outlook thus currently suffers from overextension and strategic drift, caught between the need to address immediate security concerns by confronting China in the Southwest Pacific and more fundamental issues between Australia and China’s vision for the world by participating in a regional deterrence against China further North. Although the DSR correctly identified a need to concentrate Australia’s defence force into a focussed force it failed to actually designate the geography which Australia should focus on, leaving a lingering aim to defend the Northern Approaches which has already brought Australia’s military and diplomacy to its current state of overextension. The effort to defend Australia must therefore be concentrated around the Area of Decisive Effect as detailed in Blogs 1 and 2. Within this more exact definition of Australia’s vulnerable Northern Approaches in the 21st century Australian strategists must also reconcile the need to defend Australia from threats in the Southwest Pacific with the interconnectedness of Australia’s own strategic backyard with the wider military and political balance of power in the Asia-Pacific.

Pacific Warfare

The Area of Decisive Effect as described in previous blogs sits in the chokepoint between the Asian Maritime Condominium and the Southwest Pacific archipelagoes at the Bismarck Sea Littoral region in Northern Papua New Guinea. This is also the place where, in the event of regional or Southwest Pacific conflict, sea power advancing down the Asian Maritime Condominium would have to make its furthest leap over open ocean into a littoral which may be occupied by hostile forces with support from their own consolidated land based positions limited by the distances of the Philippine Sea. Australian strategic planners and decision makers would also be hard pressed to ensure that there would be no territories elsewhere in the Southwest Pacific ready to receive Chinese expeditionary forces. Littoral manoeuvre requires strategic depth, as shown by the failure of the Dardanelles Campaign and the success of the allied Island Hopping Campaign during the World Wars and the inherent advantages and disadvantages of defence in fortification and of offense in concentration and logistic burden have not changed in the decades since. Defenders who can face the enemy in force with prepared defences have a great chance of succeeding in a littoral manoeuvre campaign, but so too do attackers who can bypass points of strength and establish logistic surpluses in poorly defended positions.

Australian defence planners must therefore place ultimate importance on ensuring that Chinese expeditionary forces advancing towards the Southwest Pacific in a conflict scenario do not have prearranged bases or positions which could compromise the integrity of Australia’s maritime strategic depth. This will require the ADF be ready to seize any Chinese footholds in the Southwest Pacific in quick succession to the outbreak of hostilities, while the imperative for the Australian Defence Force to exploit the inherently defensible nature of the Bismarck Sea Littoral will also require the Defence Force to mass all available capabilities in that area in time to meet the expected expeditionary force China must send into the Southwest Pacific if it hopes to force Australia from a conflict and compromise America’s own grand strategic depth in the Indo-Pacific. Australian defence planners must also take account for the variable strength of such an expedition – and here the place of the Area of Decisive Effect within the Asian Maritime Condominium is again important – because the Chinese military cannot spare as great a force for operations in the Southwest Pacific if it is still opposed in East Asian waters. Diluting China’s ability to control its maritime periphery is therefore in Australia’s interest and the ADF must pursue a force structure able to contribute capability to broader regional military efforts without diluting its own capacity to operate in the Southwest Pacific.

A Three Bladed Weapon

The Australian Defence Force must be able to achieve three distinct mission sets in a short amount of time to secure Australia against Chinese force projection. First, the ADF must launch force projection of its own against any Chinese military positions present in the Southwest Pacific on the eve of conflict, it must then consolidate and fortify the Bismarck Sea Littoral, and finally it must be able to defeat a Chinese expeditionary force advancing into the region. This audacious blueprint for Australian defence would require the Australian Defence Forces be able to overrun or neutralise the regional Chinese military footprint very quickly to allow time for the second phase to begin in advance of the expeditionary force arriving. The capacity to fortify and consolidate positions in the Bismarck Sea Littoral would require that the Australian Defence Force had not destroyed its sealift capacity during its force projection operations. Australian planners should anticipate China will, with or without forces stationed in the Southwest Pacific on the eve of war, try to sever the Sea Lines of Communication between Australia and its other Pacific allies to force it out of the war and deny use of Australia as a forward staging area for a massive US military response to Chinese aggression. The requirement to finally defeat a Chinese expedition, therefore, should be considered as the most important goal of Australian Defence Force planning and preparation.

Australia can ensure that such missions are within the capability of its defence forces by diluting Chinese capability in two ways. The threat of Chinese military buildup in the Southwest Pacific before the outbreak of conflict can be managed through effective cooperation with Southwest Pacific nations. In particular Papua New Guinea and Fiji, which are closest to both the Area of Decisive Effect and the Solomon Islands where Chinese security forces have made the deepest inroads to date, should be considered important stakeholders in regional security which could support or constrict Australia’s capacity to use military force in the region. New Zealand and Papua New Guinea both have the strategic heft to cooperate with Australia on the most important Southwest Pacific security issues. The Australian Defence Force can best achieve the second stage of its defence of the Southwest Pacific if it is able to store construction and logistic equipment in Papua New Guinea to be used to fortify the Bismarck Archipelago in the case of war. Australia should leverage the trust and capability of the New Zealand Defence Force in the region and the intra-territorial capabilities of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force to jointly defend the Southwest Pacific against a destabilising and aggressive Chinese expeditionary force which competent Australian diplomacy should frame as a hostile and unpredictable threat to all who stand in its path.

Australia can also reduce the capability China could bring to bear in such a maritime offensive by ensuring that it contributes to the attrition of Chinese forces in any wider regional contingency, especially if control of Taiwan is in play at the head of the Asian Maritime Condominium. This capability must be granted by platforms with asymmetric character to the conventional forces China is easily able to destroy in its near abroad. Besides being highly survivable in a contested battlespace these capabilities must possess long range and strategic mobility so that they can participate in operations against Chinese forces in East Asian waters during the outbreak of conflict and still participate in the massing of forces in the Area of Decisive Effect when Chinese expeditionary forces arrive in Australia’s near abroad.

The Creswell Doctrine in 1911

The founding fathers of the Royal Australian Navy once dealt with a very similar strategic predicament. Germany had taken control over large portions of the Southwest Pacific in the 19th century, including Samoa and Northern Papua New Guinea, and in doing so revealed itself as a revisionist power pursuing territorial aggrandisement near Australian shores. Sir William Creswell, an influential colonial officer, won the support of Australian politicians such as Alfred Deakin for the acquisition of a naval squadron by the newly federated Australian Commonwealth. Creswell faced the prospect of leading the emerging Royal Australian Navy into battle against German naval forces stationed in the Far East, which included two large armoured cruisers and numerous smaller cruisers and destroyers. These forces were usually stationed in Qingao, in China, but increasingly in the early 20th century the German East Asia Squadron called into Rabaul in the Bismarck Sea in a show of force against Australian objections to the German presence in the area. Creswell developed a force structure tailored to meet this threat within the wider context of Anglo-German tensions across the world, at a time when the Imperial German Navy was growing in strength and occupying the focus and strength of the Royal Navy in the North Sea. Creswell thus sought and attained British support for a Royal Australian Navy fit to take on the mantle of contesting the waters of the Far East independently of the Royal Navy’s order of battle. The Royal Australian Navy would, however, be dependent on British designs, industry and inter-military training to attain its required strength, though Britain would benefit immensely from the safeguard of its Eastern possessions by a dominion navy which would allow the Royal Navy to remain massed in the North Sea.

Creswell’s navy steamed into Syndey Harbour in 1911 with a British built battlecruiser and three cruisers, as Australian shipyards began building their first ever large warships with British technical assistance to complete the new fleet with a destroyer escort. That Creswell acquired a battlecruiser – a small capital ship – rather than a number of armoured cruisers or a more expensive battleship speaks to the coherent philosophy of his vision. Armoured cruisers may not have been able to overmatch their German counterparts while a full sized battleship would be too large and costly for the Royal Australian Navy to maintain without returning to a counterproductive reliance on the Royal Navy. Creswell thus advocated for and helped deliver a Royal Australian Navy fit for purpose of opposing German fleet units in the Far Eastern Theatre which deterred the German Navy from anchoring any ships in Rabaul by the 1910s. When the Great War broke out and Australia participated alongside Britain against the German Empire, the German East Asia Squadron evacuated Qingdao and the Far East, as the German fleet commanders recognised that the Battlecruiser HMAS Australia could both outrun and outmatch their own ships if they ever came into contact. The Australian Army therefore conducted landings on German New Guinea while the New Zealand Army landed on Samoa without meeting any opposition from the German Navy. Had the German Navy dispatched additional warships or even a capital ship of its own to the Far East, Creswell had by 1914 overseen the additional procurement of Australia’s first submarines, which were to provide an asymmetric answer to the appearance of any fleet unit the battlecruiser HMAS Australia could not defeat. Creswell’s doctrine of force design reflected the foundational principle that the Royal Australian Navy should pursue regional superiority over hostile forces where possible and acquire asymmetric capabilities to counter any threats which crossed a threshold whereby the Royal Australian Navy could not overmatch them.

Creswell’s Razor

The Australian government also recognised that its colonial rivalry with Germany in the Southwest Pacific took place within a rivalry between the German and British empires. There was thus an imperative to not only oppose the immediate threat of German expansion in the Southwest Pacific but also to redress the wider problem of global balance of power by assisting the Royal Navy in its arms race with the Imperial German Navy in the North Sea. Creswell enforced his opinion that the Royal Australian Navy must prioritise its near seas to ensure that it could meet the most immediate and pressing threat to Australia in the outbreak of war. The Royal Australian Navy was, however, able to contribute to larger British formations once the German colonial threat had been subdued, and after pursuing the German East Asia squadron out of the Pacific Ocean, HMAS Australia and the Australian fleet spent the rest of the war supporting the Royal Navy in European waters. This reflected the reasoning of Creswell’s razor; that the Royal Australian Navy should be designed to independently fight its most immediate and pressing contingencies first, and then contribute its strength to coalition efforts to oppose larger, global threats that Australia could not defeat by itself. The ability of Australian forces to mass against a salient limb of the German colonial empire in the Far East, and in particular the Southwest Pacific, created an opportunity out of the tyranny of distance which allowed the young Commonwealth to overawe the navy of a far stronger power. Creswell’s doctrine showed Australian planners how to utilise the overextension of revisionist powers operating in the Southwest Pacific at great distances from their established power bases. Creswell’s razor is a recognition that Australia’s military can therefore, with adequate planning, overcome the foremost extensions of hostile influence quickly to secure its regional interests and may then, when the threat it is foremost designed to defeat is gone, contribute to coalition operations elsewhere in support of Australia’s global interests.

The Creswell Doctrine in 1987

The most foundational reappraisal of Australian Defence since the foundation of the navy and nation in the early 20th century was delivered in the decade and a half following the withdrawal from Vietnam. In 1987, Australia consummated its new strategy for defending itself by inaugurating the Defence of Australia doctrine, which sought to acquire a fleet of vessels including air defence and anti-submarine vessels which were acquired to defeat specific capabilities which threatened Australia. The Soviet Union at the time could readily reach into Australia’s Northern approaches with long range bombers and submarines. In the context of a wider global competition between Australia’s larger strategic partners and adversaries, the Australian Defence Force pursued a capacity to overmatch soviet air and undersea forces operating forwards in Australia’s areas of independent strategic interest, where the country could not expect its partners to provide support. The appearance of Soviet naval bases in Southern Yemen in the 1970s had made clear that Australia could be subjected to attack by small numbers of large soviet warships operating in the Indian Ocean, which was not an area of primary concern to any other Australian ally. In addition to making contribution to global coalition operations an afterthought, the Australian Defence Force thus also acquired submarines and supersonic bomber aircraft to ensure that the arrival of any hostile capability the Navy’s surface force could not overmatch would be met with asymmetric capabilities. Whether on purpose or by accident, the Defence of Australia doctrine returned to the principles Creswell established for the maritime defence of the nation in moments where global partners could not be relied on for full cooperation on defence matters.