Articles

Mike Scrafton: There’s a problem now with Australia’s strategic logic. It isn’t a criticism of previous strategic guidance documents that they failed to anticipate seminal events that affected the international environment: the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union; the 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan; 9/11 and the subsequent long war on terror. Few anywhere predicted these events. But there might be less an excuse for recent Australian white papers ignoring the fragility of the liberal international order.

There’s a wide range of threats and threat actors in cyberspace, including criminals, terrorists who predominantly use the internet to communicate and plan and some nation states who cause disruption and steal sensitive commercial and other information. Cyberspace is also a new domain of warfare where over 100 countries are developing offensive capability.

  Outgoing Deputy Chief of Navy Rear Admiral (RADM) Mike Noonan presents incoming DCN, RADM Mark Hammond with the "weight" during a small ceremony at...

The WA Defence Review has recently a two part interview with the Henderson Alliance Spokesperson, Mr Darryl Hockey, who outlines the current and...

Australian Naval History Video & Podcast Series The second of the three compelling episodes on the RAN Helicopter Flight Vietnam has been released on the Naval Studies Group webpage at https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/australian-centre-for-the-study-of-armed-conflict-and-society/naval-studies-group/australian-naval-history-podcast and on all podcast apps.

As the United States Navy looks to space and cyber as new domains for warfare, it also ought to look deeper: to the seafloor. Increased competition for vital resources and the intent to control critical sea lines of communication will drive nations and their navies to the seabed. There are three serious operational challenges ahead for the U.S. Navy that will require both technical and intellectual investment to properly establish security on the seafloor.

While Amazon continues to pilot its fully autonomous drone delivery system, Amazon PrimeAir, an autonomous delivery system millions of times larger is occurring at sea. And whether you are the passenger on-board a cruise ship or you hire a shipping company to transport your belongings overseas, in a few years, you will increasingly be at the mercy of a self-driving ship.

By Paul Keating* The US, for 24 years has gone without a strategy. If you’re running the world and you’re Number 1, and you don’t have a strategy for a quarter of a century, you have a problem.

By Brahma Chellaney* Security dynamics are changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific. The region is home not only to the world’s fastest-growing economies, but also to the fastest-increasing military expenditures and naval capabilities, the fiercest competition over natural resources, and the most dangerous strategic hot spots. One might even say that it holds the key to global security.

When it comes to walking the walk, though, Australia tends to do the ASEAN shuffle. In the words of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Australia rejects ‘any unilateral action that would create tensions and we want to ensure that freedom of over-flight and freedom of navigation in accordance with international law is maintained and the ASEANs all back that same position’. In the way the runes are read in Canberra, the foreign minister’s abhorrence of any unilateral-tension-creating-action includes the Australian navy sailing closer than 12 miles to China’s terra-formed sand castles in the South China Sea.