Defence Strategies for Australia
Control and ProtectSeptember 2010
For more than one hundred years Australian defence strategy has been based on so-called ‘expeditionary’ operations – that is, on wars of invasion. If we are going to learn anything from the disasters of the last fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it should be that that model has become untenable. It has failed politically, socially, and militarily; and it has become ethically unacceptable.
Read the Defence Strategy for the 21st Century
Counterfeit COINFebruary 2011
The sine qua non for a successful military campaign is getting the strategy right. For more than half a century, Western defence forces have tried to conduct so-called ‘counter-insurgency’ (COIN) operations in a variety of countries. While the settings may have varied, the outcomes have not. Most notably in Vietnam and Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, COIN has proven to be a counterfeit concept. Read Al Stephens' article
Australian Military StrategyFebruary 2011
Since Federation in 1901, Australia’s grand strategy has been to try to shelter under the umbrella of a great and powerful friend, first the United Kingdom, and then the United States. None of those commitments required a distinctive Australian military strategy. Instead, our forces simply complied with the overall approach of our senior partner.
