Kim Beazley was appointed as Minister for Defence on 13 December 1984. He oversaw a revolution in Australian defence, as profoundly important in shaping the nation as were the economic reforms of the time. His enduring legacy is the idea of self-reliance in the defence of Australia. The 1987 Defence White Paper that Beazley delivered, taken together with the 1986 Review that he commissioned (prepared by Paul Dibb), stand—like Newton’s Principia—as the foundational model for defending Australia.
Beazley acknowledges humbly that he benefited from the work of others, including Dibb, and academics such as Tom Millar, Hedley Bull, Bob O’Neill, Coral Bell, Des Ball, and Ross Babbage. This credit is well due. However, only an actively engaged minister, intellectually as well as politically committed to the task, could have brought forth such a revolution at the time in thought and practice.
Australian defence strategy during the 1950s and 1960s had been framed around forward defence. At the time, Australia was a strategic backwater, where no questions of geopolitical significance were going to be settled militarily, or otherwise. The establishment of the joint facilities at North West Cape, Nurrungar, and Pine Gap, over the period 1963-69, did nothing to change this. Their profound implications for Australia’s defence, and its alliance with the United States, were not crystallised until the 1980s. Again, Beazley played the pivotal role, something to be examined at another time.
Australia received a number of strategic shocks in the late 1960s. First, the United Kingdom announced in July 1967 that it was withdrawing from ‘East of Suez’. Then, more significantly, Richard Nixon announced in July 1969 what became known as the ‘Guam Doctrine’. In Asia, allies of the United States would be expected to take up the principal burden of defending themselves, with minimal US support, unless they were threatened by nuclear-armed adversaries, and where the United States had applicable alliance commitments or interests which would warrant direct combat involvement.
Policy thinking within the Department of Defence had already started to shift in the direction of self-reliant defence. (Stephan Fruehling’s research on this quiet shift is the benchmark.) However, it was the Guam Doctrine and the commencement under Nixon of the long US withdrawal from Vietnam that tolled the bell for forward defence. The Fraser Government announced self-reliant defence as policy in the 1976 Defence White Paper, without however changing military strategy, or force structure priorities.
This is the situation that Beazley inherited in 1984. In the face of the Department of Defence and the three services—the army, navy and air force—not being able to agree on what the ‘defence of Australia’ actually meant in terms of military strategy, force structure, and funding, Beazley commissioned Dibb in February 1985 to examine Australia’s defence capabilities. Dibb was able to draw upon the groundbreaking work of the Strategic Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University—one of the most consequential contributions to policy by the Australian academy.
Based on Dibb’s 1986 Review, the 1987 White Paper established the self-reliant defence of Australia as the organising principle of our defence strategy. Given the prevailing strategic environment, it concluded that the ability to deal with ‘low level’ and ‘escalated low level’ threats, which could be mounted with little warning, would drive decisions on force structure.
The 1987 White Paper did not exclude the possibility of Australia’s having in future to contend with the possibility of more substantial conflict. Australia could prepare for such a contingency by means of ‘strategic warning time’. It could use time effectively to expand the force to meet a growing threat. It was judged that the Soviet Union would not likely mount a conventional attack on Australia (but would target Australia during a strategic nuclear exchange), and that regional powers would require at least a decade to develop the capabilities which would be needed to mount a substantial attack. During that time, Australia would be able to expand its force in anticipation.
Self-reliant defence did not mean armed neutrality or isolationism. The alliance with the United States retained its salience in Australian grand strategy, but the 1987 White Paper declared that Australia would not seek, or expect, unrealistic—and therefore non-credible—levels of commitment to the defence of Australia by US combat forces, save for the protection afforded by US nuclear weapons through extended deterrence. Further, Australia would contribute to US security, and global stability, by way of hosting the joint facilities. Self-reliant defence and the Australia-US alliance cohered in this model.
The 1987 White Paper expounded the ‘law’ of defence in depth, which meant, crucially, denial of access by an adversary through the sea-air approaches to Australia. This ‘law’ functioned as the overriding discipline on the development of the force. This approach turned into a strength the vast expanse of northern Australia, the extensive sea-air surrounds of the continent, and the archipelagic arc that extends from Sumatra to Fiji, a strategic barrier through which any adversary would have to project force against Australia, creating defensively advantageous choke points and operating areas.
Two decades later, the 2009 Defence White Paper sought to apply and update this model in light of China’s strategic and military rise. From around 2006, worrying disturbances had begun to be discerned in Australia’s strategic environment, of the kind that would warrant consideration of force expansion. At the same time, the United States, concerned about China’s growing military heft, was formulating military strategies in response, such as Air Sea Battle.
The 2009 White Paper was a systematic attempt by the Rudd Government to tackle the following strategic problem: the warning clock had started to tick; Australia might in future face the prospect of being in armed conflict with a major power; consequentially, a larger force would need to be built over time as a hedge. The maritime-focused ‘Force 2030’ was the result (note the choice of year). Force 2030 was to be the initial base upon which force expansion could further occur, as judged necessary over the 2010s and beyond.
Careful and deliberate consideration was given to the military strategic implications of ‘more substantial conflict’, to use the 1987 formula. The 2009 White Paper directed that an enlarged ‘primary operating environment’ for the ADF be adopted, expanded further north and west, in order to more effectively seek to deny access through the sea-air approaches against a major power adversary. Force projection as far forward as maritime Southeast Asia was contemplated, an evolution of the 1987 model—not its repudiation.
The 2009 White Paper stands in the arc of Australian defence strategy as the road not taken, when we still had time. A further 15 years on, Australia today has to contend with the very prospect of ‘more substantial conflict’ that was contemplated theoretically in the 1987 White Paper, and considered specifically in the 2009 White Paper.
Ironies aside, Beazley also has a keen sense of the tragic in world history. He is a strategic pessimist, seeing the world as it is. This includes an appreciation that there is an even darker possibility. If a well-armed major power, unchecked by the United States, were to decide that access to our resources or land, or both, would be in its interests, and that Australia would be useful to it in other ways, we would not necessarily have the strategic, economic, demographic and military means to preserve our sovereignty or stave off national subjugation. How we would defend ourselves were US primacy to fade gradually, or shatter suddenly, and how much military heft would Australia require in such a world? Beazley’s Principia would be the starting point for arriving at an answer, but perhaps we would need an Einstein to build on the Newtonian model, as Australia grappled with a completely different, and more hostile, power relativity.
No amount of astute diplomacy, skilful statecraft, or the building of regional architectures would offset the strategic shock and adverse ramifications of a world where US primacy was a memory, like that of British naval mastery and strategic preponderance in the nineteenth-century.