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191. Economic coercion in Indo-Pacific island states: Building resilience

Author:
Richard Herr and David Brewster
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
Indo-Pacific island states face diverse challenges as they grapple with their own unique vulnerabilities to the geopolitical consequences of growing strategic competition in the region. This report explores the vulnerability of island states to economic coercion and the risks they face in navigating the growing economic power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this report, the authors examine four perceived examples of economic coercion within the region that challenge the Quad’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. China’s increasing interest in the island states of the Indo-Pacific has led to concern that the imbalance in those relationships is so large that both domestic and broader regional stability are at risk. This report offers a number of policy recommendations to protect Indo-Pacific island states from economic coercion, including: Island states must be better invested in the rules-based international economic order; Establishing codes of conduct to limit economic duress, limit undue economic influence and strengthen the rules-based international system; Strengthening government institutions so they can resist economic coercion; International partners should work with Indo-Pacific island states to help strengthen the ability of local businesses to take collective action against economic coercion.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, National Security, Economy, and Resilience
Political Geography:
China, Australia, and Asia-Pacific

192. Delivering a stronger Navy, faster

Author:
Marcus Hellyer
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
Serious risks are being realised in the Royal Australian Navy’s twin transitions in its surface combatant and submarine fleets. As Australia’s strategic circumstances become more dangerous, Defence needs to adopt hedging measures to actively address the capability risks in its acquisition plans. The government’s recent announcement regarding the acquisition of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) is about addressing capability risk in the long term, but with delivery of the first future submarine now delayed probably to the late 2030s, in the short to medium term the proposal exacerbates those risks.1 To address those risks, this paper details an approach that will: deliver valuable additional maritime capability to the Navy significantly earlier than the current plan; sustain, and indeed grow, the workforce that will be essential to our long-term ship and submarine plans; develop the industrial ecosystem needed for naval construction in Adelaide and nationally; and provide a timely return on the funding that the Australian government has already planned to invest in naval capability this decade without requiring additional funding.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Armed Forces, Navy, and Maritime
Political Geography:
Australia

193. Myanmar’s coup, ASEAN’s crisis: And the implications for Australia

Author:
Huong Le Thu, David Engel, and Hillary Mansour
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
The rapidly unfolding Myanmar crisis is presenting Southeast Asia with one of its most severe security and stability threats in the past three decades. While the region is certainly familiar with military coups and violent changes of government, the ongoing crisis in Myanmar carries risks far more acute than previous coups d’etat in the region. One of them is the risk to the sustained modus operandi of the region’s key institution—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The outcome of ASEAN’s involvement in the Myanmar crisis is consequential not only for the Myanmar people, but also for the association’s ability to credibly lead efforts to preserve peace and security in the region into the future. In this report, we assess the security situation in Myanmar, ASEAN’s collective response and the individual roles of key ASEAN member states in the mediating process. We focus on the effect that the Myanmar crisis has on the overall ASEAN political and security situation, and highlight Indonesia’s leadership, and limitations, in the process. We also detail the legal instruments and responsibility of ASEAN—in the form of the ASEAN Charter—to uphold the rule of law. The report concludes with some policy implications for the wider region, particularly Australia.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, National Security, Coup, and ASEAN
Political Geography:
Australia, Southeast Asia, and Myanmar

194. The Sydney Dialogue: Playbook

Author:
Fergus Hanson, Danielle Cave, and Madeleine Nyst
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
Major advances in technology have always been disruptive. But when they occur against a backdrop of great power competition, the stable development and deployment of these technologies becomes fraught. Few have grasped the enormity of the disruption coming our way as more and more new technologies – from increasingly sophisticated surveillance to quantum and biotechnologies – are deployed across the world. While governments grapple with foreseeing the full impacts and setting policy direction, there’s a growing realisation that emerging and critical technologies will be extraordinarily important for societies, economies and national security. We launched The Sydney Dialogue to support a more stable roll-out of the next wave of transformational technologies. It is a forum allowing for frank debate about the rapidly changing strategic landscape, and a space for governments, business and civil society to come together to focus on solutions, cooperation and policy options. The Sydney Dialogue came about because we saw big gaps in forums on technology, especially in the Indo-Pacific. There were industry events that showcased the latest technical advances and products, but they tended to eschew policy debates, and did not encompass government and civil society. There were important government multilateral discussion and policymaking forums, but these usually lagged well behind technological advances, and because they were primarily for governments, key global players – including those making the technology – weren’t part of the discussion. And there were excellent civil society initiatives, but these often focused on individual topics that were only one piece of a larger puzzle. Few of these initiatives focused on or resonated in the Indo-Pacific – the region that incubates much of the world’s technological innovation and has become a hotbed of strategic technological competition. These gaps drove us towards a dynamic where all the key actors were speaking past one another, while rarely all being in the same room. Tech companies are developing and deploying products that are revolutionary and hugely disruptive. A decade later, governments are scrambling to retrospectively legislate to address issues they did not foresee, and civil society is critiquing from the sidelines. Right now, three major problems must be addressed to ensure the stable development of advanced technologies. First, there’s the large lag between the deployment of new technologies and regulation governing them. With social media, this lag was about a decade. As we’ve seen, this doesn’t lead to good outcomes for individuals, or for societies. Second, there’s a delay between states’ use of new technologies and their consideration of the ethical questions raised by its use. Examples of this can be seen in the global surveillance industry, which has allowed its products to support some of the most egregious human rights abuses of our times. Third, a tense relationship between governments and technology companies is playing out around the world. The negative dynamic that has taken hold is hindering progress and genuine cooperation, leaving democracies at risk of being left behind. The Sydney Dialogue seeks to fill a gap and contribute towards these big challenges. By bringing world leaders, tech company CEOs and the world’s top civil society voices together for an annual dialogue, we hope the roll-out of the next wave of revolutionary technologies over the coming decade can be better managed. This collection of striking essays from some of the world’s top strategic thinkers from across business, government and civil society is a fitting way to start this dialogue. It explores timely debates at the forefront of technology and examines points of crisis and tension in the nexus of society, government and technology. Crucially, it offers innovative ideas to solve these challenges and bring about a brighter, fairer Indo-Pacific. The following pieces bring us all a much-needed dose of optimism and show that in many cases, the solutions already exist – we just need to work together to bring them to life.
Topic:
National Security, Science and Technology, Economy, Surveillance, and Society
Political Geography:
Australia and Global Focus

195. What is AUKUS and what is it not?

Author:
Michael Shoebridge
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
What IS the new AUKUS partnership between the US, the UK and Australia? How does it fit with the Quad, ASEAN and other new forums like the government-tech Sydney Dialogue? This new ASPI Insight sets out what AUKUS is—a technology accelerator that’s’ about shifting the military balance in the Indo Pacific. Just as importantly, it sets out what AUKUS it isn’t, to reset some of the discussion that has made some assumptions here. AUKUS isn’t a new alliance structure, a competitor to the Quad between Australia, India, Japan and the US, or a signal of decreased commitment to ASEAN forums by the AUKUS members. And the Insight proposes some focus areas for implementation of this new ‘minilateral’ technology accelerator, including having a single empowered person in each nation charged with implementation and ‘obstacle busting’. This is to break through the institutional, political and corporate permafrost that has prevented such rapid technological adoption by our militaries in recent decades. As is the case with James Miller in the US, this person should report to their national leader, not from inside the defence bureaucracies of the three nations. On purpose and urgency, the report identifies a simple performance metric for AUKUS implementers over the next three years. On 20 January 2025, when the Australian prime minister calls whoever is the US president on that day, AUKUS has become such a successful piece of the furniture, with tangible results that have generated broad institutional, political and corporate support that, regardless of how warm or testy this leaders’ phone call is (think Turnbull-Trump in January 2016), AUKUS’s momentum continues.
Topic:
Defense Policy, National Security, Alliance, AUKUS, and Quad Alliance
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Australia, United States of America, and Indo-Pacific

196. Implementing Australia’s nuclear submarine program

Author:
Andrew Nicholls, Jackson Dowie, and Marcus Hellyer
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
On 16 September 2021, the Australian Government announced that it would acquire a nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) capability with support from the UK and the US as the first measure of business under the AUKUS technology sharing partnership. At the same time, it announced that it had established the Nuclear-Powered Submarine Taskforce, which would devote 18 months to determining the ‘optimal pathway’ to establishing this new capability. The taskforce has its work cut out for it, and the signing of an initial nuclear information sharing agreement only two months after AUKUS was announced suggests things are moving fast. Nevertheless this new enterprise will be a massive undertaking and probably the largest and most complex endeavour Australia has embarked upon. The challenges, costs and risks will be enormous. It’s likely to be at least two decades and tens of billions of dollars in sunk costs before Australia has a useful nuclear-powered military capability. Many commentators have suggested that the work of the taskforce is primarily about making a recommendation on the choice of submarine—either the US Virginia class or the UK Astute class. That’s misleading on two counts. First, the most important decision isn’t so much about the submarine, but about the strategic partner most able to work with us on our new SSN capability. Second, Australia will need to make many choices—about the strategic partner, about the submarine design, about the build strategy, about schedule, and more. Those choices will involve hard prioritisation decisions about what’s most important. Is it capability, schedule, Australian industry content, or something else? This report examines the decision space available to the government. The most important decision is the choice of our primary strategic partner. While both the US and the UK will need to provide us with assistance regardless of which submarine design we choose, there’s no point picking a boat if its parent nation doesn’t have the capacity to assist us with all of the fundamental inputs to capability needed to deliver military effects, or its industrial base doesn’t have the capacity to deliver. While we shouldn’t pre-empt the work of the taskforce, initial analysis suggests that the US has more capacity to assist us. Even once we choose a partner, we still have some difficult choices about the submarine design. Do we prioritise schedule and build our partner’s current design, with the result that we’re left with an orphaned and outdated fleet? Do we wait to get into step with our partner’s next class, exacerbating the risk of a capability gap? Or do we start with the current design and transition later to the partner’s future design, with the result that we have multiple classes of boat in our small fleet? Another area of choice is the amount of modification we do to the design. While some modifications will be necessary due to Australia’s regulatory and safety regimes—unless we recognise our partner’s regulatory approaches as fit for purpose and accommodate ours to theirs—others will be discretionary. Every effort must be made to limit the changes, whether they’re motivated by capability or Australian industry content, as every change drives cost and schedule risk regardless of how well intentioned it is. A fundamental choice is the build strategy. The government has stated that the SSNs will be built in Adelaide; however, it hasn’t committed to a continuous build. A continuous-build approach (one driven by a schedule designed to replace the first boat after around 30 years with no break in production) is appealing to Australian industry and current and future workers but would face many challenges—boats would be delivered on an inefficient three- or even four-year drumbeat, driving up cost and increasing the capability gap. Alternatively, an ‘economic’ approach that focused on the most efficient possible approach would deliver capability faster but require massive annual spending and produce the prospect of a ‘valley of death’ at the end of production. Either approach replicates a nuclear-submarine production capability in Australia as our own sovereign cottage-industry version of what the UK and the US already have. Underpinning all of those choices is the issue of schedule. We’re facing the looming spectre of a submarine capability gap as the Collins-class fleet ages out. The government’s stated schedule, delivering at least the first boat by the late 2030s, is feasible, if optimistic, if we build all the boats in Australia. But that may be too late to avoid a capability gap. An alternative that could accelerate delivery would be to open up the aperture of what ‘built in Adelaide’ should look like. One approach we consider is to build the initial boats overseas to accelerate delivery but also to train Australian workers on a mature production line to avoid a ‘cold start’ to local production. But there are also options that approach this enterprise as the embodiment of our AUKUS and alliance partnerships rather than as a large, but traditional, construction project. This could involve a ‘JSF’ (Joint Strike Fighter) approach of feeding components into a joint submarine enterprise that Australia enters with our primary enterprise partner. Such a joint enterprise would span more than just construction and enable Australia to be a ‘first line’ sustainment hub for our AUKUS partners’ submarines as well as for our own. When we consider that just the maintenance of Australia’s SSNs will be likely to require more workforce than the Attack-class build and Collins-class full-cycle dockings combined, there are ways to deliver submarines faster, sustain sovereign capability, contribute to our partnerships and still create jobs that don’t involve assembling submarines here. And this can’t be stated clearly or often enough: successful transition isn’t just about delivering boats but all of the elements of the capability. So, the choice of boat and build approaches aren’t just matters of capability or industry but must be informed by broader inputs to capability. Perhaps the most important of those is the challenge of how the Navy ramps up its uniformed workforce; solving that problem is just as crucial as delivering boats on time. Again, AUKUS has much to offer here. Finally, we’ve provided an estimate of the cost of the enterprise. Such an exercise is inherently hazardous at this stage of the process, with so many assumptions still open and untested. The government has been open in stating that the SSN program will cost more than the Attack-class program, which would have cost around $56–57 billion in current-day constant dollars. We agree: at an absolute minimum, an eight-boat SSN program will cost around $70 billion constant (or $116 billion in out-turned dollars, which account for inflation). However, it’s highly likely that it will cost substantially more once the cost drivers are more clearly understood. Those include both the US and UK moving to bigger submarine designs, our choice of build strategy, and the broader support system and infrastructure needed to operate nuclear submarines. To channel Donald Rumsfeld, there are things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know; both will drive up the estimate.
Topic:
Defense Policy, National Security, Nuclear Weapons, and Military
Political Geography:
Australia

197. North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist, Volume 4

Author:
John Coyne
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
The 27 essays in the collection demonstrate that Australia’s north—that great sweep of territory from Rockhampton in the east to Onslow in the west, taking in Townsville, Bamaga, Darwin and Broome—is about a whole lot more than even what makes its way into the national debate (borders, quarantine facilities, mining, agricultural and energy projects, and small but key defence facilities). Between them, the authors of this volume cover proposals for an Indigenous civil defence force to work domestically and in our near region, the opportunities for processing critical minerals and producing rare-earth magnets, a broader way of thinking about and doing nation-building that gets beyond waiting for one big first-mover investor or entrepreneur before anything happens, and, of course, the ways that Australia can better use this huge chunk of the globe’s strategic geography—along with key partners like Japan and the United States. As thinkers who understand the austere environment of our north, the authors are all distinguished by a sense of opportunity, optimism and even that much-maligned, now neglected word ‘vision’—which history shows is what’s needed to advance the development and prosperity of the north of our continent.
Topic:
Defense Policy, National Security, Natural Resources, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Australia and Asia-Pacific

198. Women, Peace and Security: A Competitive Edge for Australia and the US in the Indo-Pacific

Author:
Joan Johnson-Freese
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Pacific Forum
Abstract:
Australia and the United States face great power competition with China due to a narrowing of gaps between them—economically and militarily—in the Indo-Pacific region. This narrowing of gaps should not be a surprise to anyone who did not expect China to be content with static growth and technological inferiority. Great power competition is actually about a rise in parity among competitors. The “edge” previously held by Australia and the United States over China has become smaller; therefore “wins” will be by very thin margins. This means Australia and the United States need to find new advantages to widen their thin margins of excellence and maintain security. This paper will discuss why the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda offers an edge, and how implementing respective national action plans for WPS and partnering widely and strongly with other Indo-Pacific countries on WPS can offer such new advantages.
Topic:
Security, Women, Peace, and Competition
Political Geography:
Australia, United States of America, and Indo-Pacific

199. A Movement Between Parliamentary Politics and the Pathway to Violence and Terrorism: Germany’s Radical Right Narratives and Counter-narratives

Author:
Maximilian Kreter
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hedayah
Abstract:
This country report, written by Maximilian Kreter, is one of the outputs of the CARR-Hedayah Radical Right Counter Narratives Project, a year-long project under the STRIVE Global Program at Hedayah funded by the European Union and implemented by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). The overall project creates one of the first comprehensive online toolkits for practitioners and civil society engaged in radical right extremist counter narrative campaigns. It uses online research to map narratives in nine countries and regions, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. It also proposes counter narratives for these countries and regions and advises on how to conduct such campaigns in an effective manner.
Topic:
Civil Society, Far Right, Radical Right, Civil Society Organizations, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Canada, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand

200. Radical Right Narratives and Norwegian Counter-narratives in the Decade of Utøya and Bærum Solo-actor Attacks

Author:
Mette Wiggen
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hedayah
Abstract:
This country report, written by Dr. Mette Wiggen, is one of the outputs of the CARR-Hedayah Radical Right Counter Narratives Project, a year-long project under the STRIVE Global Program at Hedayah funded by the European Union and implemented by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). The overall project creates one of the first comprehensive online toolkits for practitioners and civil society engaged in radical right extremist counter narrative campaigns. It uses online research to map narratives in nine countries and regions, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. It also proposes counter narratives for these countries and regions and advises on how to conduct such campaigns in an effective manner.
Topic:
Civil Society, Terrorism, Violent Extremism, Counter-terrorism, Political Extremism, Civil Society Organizations, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Canada, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand