Articles

Season 2 of the Australian Naval History video & podcast series has commenced with two episodes on the famous World War II cruiser...

The Federal Government released a new Defence Export Strategy on 29 January 2018. The Strategy builds upon the Government's defence industry policy by setting out a comprehensive system to plan, guide, and measure defence export outcomes.

The second edition of the Australian Naval Review has been published and is being posted to members. It contains the 2017 Vernon Parker Oration...

It is planned to erect a Battle of the Atlantic Memorial (BOAM) in Liverpool, UK. A charity has been established to raise money...

By Mike Fogarty* The rise of modern naval strategy can be analysed through several themes: including; imperial rivalry, colonial expansion, technological change, ship design, construction,...

* By Allan Gyngell AO FAIIA In 2017, Australians had to acknowledge that the global order that had shaped the world since the end of...

By Allan Behm* Sadly, hermeneutic s— or exegesis as it was formerly known — is not much in vogue these days. Maybe that reflects the fact that most of us rely on translation for our glimpses into the texts written in ancient (and dead) languages. And the word ‘hermeneutics’ itself needs a bit of exegesis: most understand it as ‘interpretation’, though Aristotle’s Peri Hermēneias actually deals with ‘explanation’. But if one is to coin a term like ‘Thucydides Trap’, declaring that war between Athens and Sparta was ‘inevitable’, and blame Thucydides for the invention, one should surely check the original text to confirm that ‘inevitability’ is what Thucydides wrote and meant. This is a task that Professor Graham Allison should have undertaken before he pronounced on the contest between Athens and Sparta, and applied it to the more contemporary relationship between China and the United States.

By Graeme Dobell* Come back with me to a wonderful time when the Cold War had been won and Australia was cashing in the peace dividend. Spend money on the military? Naaah! Squeeze ’em. The release by the National Archives of the 1994 and 1995 cabinet records of the Keating Labor government is our annual compare and contrast moment. This is defence, so, as always, start with the money. The archives show that the ‘peace dividend’ moment in the mid-1990s was when Canberra really started to argue about what’s since become a totemic issue: whether Defence should get 2% of GDP.

Last month, Sri Lanka, unable to pay the onerous debt to China it has accumulated, formally handed over its strategically located Hambantota port to...

[caption id="attachment_2162" align="alignleft" width="118"] Clausewitz[/caption]By Mike Fogarty:Errors at the tactical and operational level may be redeemable, but those at the strategic level are usually catastrophic. This observation has been sourced from readings below. Consider Liddell Hart. ‘As regards the relation of strategy to tactics, while in execution the borderline is often shadowy, and it is difficult to decide exactly where a strategical movement ends and a tactical movement begins, yet in conception the two are distinct. Tactics lies in and fills the province of fighting. Strategy not only stops on the frontier, but has for its purpose the reduction of fighting to the slenderest possible proportions.’ This over-states ‘indirect strategy.’