Articles

* 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.’

By Norman Friedman* In mid-December the Administration issued its first National Security Strategy, titled America First but widely described as principled realism. Such annual documents are required under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Typically they list goals without much effort to prioritize, and they are often disdained as poor reflections of actual policy. The title and the description place the new policy in the long history of U.S. security strategy, which reflects the struggle to reconcile national interest and ideology – the promotion of human rights and democracy as a primary factor in policy. With the defeat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the United States is the only truly ideological power in the world.

THE successful quest to relocate HMAS AE1 was very much a team effort building on previous search attempts. The Royal Australian Navy teamed up with a range of search groups in this latest expedition, funded by the Commonwealth Government and the Silentworld Foundation, with assistance from the Submarine Institute of Australia, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Fugro Survey and the Papua New Guinea Government. The expedition was embarked on the survey ship Fugro Equator which is equipped with advanced search technology.

Lecture to the Asset protection series, Manila 13 December 2017 By Nicole Forrest Green* TERRORISM is the intentional, unlawful, indiscriminant use of violence and intimidation, especially...

The US National Security Strategy released by the Trump administration this week comprehensively outlines the country’s approach to security threats in the 21st century....

Australia’s oldest naval mystery has been solved with the discovery of the wreck of Australia’s first submarine HMAS AE1 off the coast of the Duke of York Islands in Papua New Guinea. A new expedition to find the submarine commenced last week and the search vessel ‘Furgro Equator’ has now located the submarine in more than 300 metres of water, Defence Minister Senator Marise Payne announced (Dec 2017).