25 November 2024
Address by Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, AO, DSC at
The Australian National University National Security College
‘The Challenges to the Australian Army Profession’
Vice Chancellor, members of the ANU academic community, military colleagues, honoured guests. It is a great pleasure to address you all this morning.
Rory, thank you to you and the National Security College for your hospitality. This is increasingly the venue if one wishes to engage in a respectful and informed contest of ideas.
My congratulations also to the University on the launch of the new ANU Defence Institute.
The dialogue you are collectively building… and the long-form discussion you are encouraging … are vital and reflective of what is at stake.
The recent Defence Strategic Review categorised the present era as the most challenging since the end of the Second World War.
It further concluded that the Australian Defence Force was not fully fit for purpose.
Obviously, such a finding demands an energetic response from the ADF. Indeed in an era of great power competition, where defence and security are once again a national endeavor, it demands an energetic response across our nation.
The Australian Army is responding faithfully and at pace. We are transforming for the era, in what I believe to be an historic inflection point for our Army … for your Army.
In the nineteen months since the Defence Strategic Review we have made significant progress.
We have fundamentally revised our concepts to place littoral warfighting as the Army’s contribution to the integrated force.
We have re-set our command and control to lead as we would fight in war, elevating the Division as our unit of action.
We have adapted our approach to capability. We have reorganised, changed disposition, fundamentally changed our training and our tactics, and we are rehearsing for operations before the capital equipment arrives; indeed the ‘kit’ is the last piece to complete the puzzle. A seismic shift in capability delivery.
We are seizing the opportunity to enhance our culture, shifting our collective mindset for a future that is clearly more dangerous than the recent past.
Our transformation is founded on the work of past generations of Army leaders.
I would like to both recognise and thank the former Chiefs and Regimental Sergeants Major of the Army, some of whom are with us today.
Thanks to their stewardship, we are well on the path to becoming ‘fit for purpose’, within the resources allocated.
I could not be more proud of how our soldiers and our teams are responding to this challenge.
But being ‘fit for purpose’ is more than the ‘physics’ of acquisition, doctrine or recruiting.
Our ‘purpose’ is to fight and win our nation’s wars. And our Army is at once a national institution, a profession, and a fighting force. All three constituents of our identity require care and attention.
At the Chief of Army’s Symposium in September this year, I issued an initial ‘call to action’ for an honest assessment of the state of the Army profession ... our profession.
My aim today is to take the necessary next step: to diagnose the contemporary challenges for the Army profession, as I see them.
To be clear, our focus is on the Army profession rather than the broader ‘profession of arms’.
This distinction is important for three reasons:
Firstly, I do not presume to speak on behalf of my colleagues and counterparts across the ADF.
Secondly, the contribution and impact of our generational experience of war is distinct from that of our brothers and sisters in arms … no better nor worse … just different.
And thirdly, I am accountable today for our Army in all of its dimensions. It is my obligation to set the conditions for our future.
I have styled today’s address as a lecture to make it accessible in the longer-term as a statement of intent; to stimulate discussion among soldiers past, present and future, and among the society we serve.
I intend to frame my remarks in turn through the three pillars of the modern Army profession. Firstly our ‘jurisdiction’, the unique service we provide to society as its army; secondly, our ‘expertise’, the distinctive professional body of knowledge we maintain; and thirdly our capacity to ‘self-regulate’ as a profession.
Many in the room will recognise the scholarship behind these pillars, in the foundational texts of Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, and of course General Sir John Hackett.
Huntington established in 1957 how the modern military profession – by definition and action – carries distinct obligations and traits linked to its unique role of the ‘mastery of violence for socially-determined ends’. This, he said, is what makes it a profession.
Hackett then eloquently captured in 1962 the idea that the professional soldier accepts a unique ‘contract of unlimited liability’, a contract that may entail sacrificing their life in the service of the nation.
Huntington and Hackett laid the foundations, for which we are grateful. But we must remember that context is important. They wrote some sixty-five years ago, at the height of the Cold War.
They were products of their time, not prophets.
The character of war is always shaped by the unique coalescence of geopolitics, societal norms, and technology of the time: by what Clausewitz called the ‘spirit of the age’.
Our profession must adapt to the realities of today’s era, not adhere to the dogmas of the past.
Can Huntington’s 1950s assertion, for example, that ‘professionalism’ is synonymous with ‘officership’ really stand today?
Or must we consider every soldier to be part of the profession, subject to its standards and regulations?
Hackett spoke of ‘unlimited liability’ as being the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the state. Today we might add to this the ‘liability’ of taking life for the state.
The moral burden of killing seems somehow magnified in today’s society, shaped as it is by a gratifying aversion to violence.
So, why now for this review? The return of great power competition compels urgency. The future looks far different from what was predicted. The so-called ‘end of history’ and the ‘wars of choice’ must be consigned as ‘interwar thinking’.
Instead, we face a world all too familiar to those who study history: a contest with echoes as far back as two and a half millennia and the Peloponnesian Wars.
Not since the Pacific Campaigns of the early 1940s has our Army had to seriously consider fighting conventional adversaries in the littoral geography of our region: perhaps one of the most remote, dispersed and challenging battlefields.
As President Lincoln said, ‘the occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion’. I am still framing this problem and I do not purport to have all the answers today.
But it is clear to me that there are essential, intangible, moral and ethical imperatives that demand a response from me as the accountable steward of our profession.
I hope that, together, we might find the right way ahead.
So, the first pillar of the Army profession is our ‘jurisdiction’ in society.
This should rightly be seen as the primary pillar, that which defines us and our purpose.
The Army exists only to serve society, and we can only provide our unique service when our society requires and directs us to do so.
This relationship is well-established, now more than 75 years old in its current form. But there are very real contemporary challenges to it.
Professor Mike Evans, until recently the Hassett Chair at the Australian Defence College, has considered these challenges more than most.
Professor Evans worries that the profession of arms is being questioned by what theorist Andrew Krepinevich has called the ‘democratisation of destruction’.
For generations the armed forces of a state held the monopoly on the ethical application of violence. But recently this has been diminished by the growth of irregular state forces, the proliferation of ‘off-the-shelf’ lethal technologies, the endemic use of military contractors, and the growth of new domains of warfare.
Military expertise, Evans argues, is in danger of being subsumed by security expertise.
This blurs the distinction between the role of the military element of national power and others whose practice may be similar in character.
It was American theorist James Burk who refined this as the concept of ‘jurisdiction’ in the Army profession.
I found this useful and persuasive, and have leaned on Burk heavily ever since.
Burk’s idea of professional ‘jurisdiction’ sets boundaries around an Army’s role, defining the space within which the military’s unique expert knowledge is applied.
Burk argues that the ‘jurisdiction’ of the US Army, for example, changed throughout the 20th century.
Initially it was the ‘management of war’ through the World Wars. It then shifted to the ‘management of defense’ during the Cold War. Since then, it has focussed on the ‘management of peace’. The last of these, Burk argues, has been the hardest within which to maintain a clear ‘jurisdiction’.
I argue today that we should add the ‘management of adaptation’ to Burk’s list. The character of war is changing faster than ever, challenging traditional ‘jurisdictions’.
Classical concepts of ‘strategy’ as being limited to just armies, navies and air forces are insufficient. Cyber and space are now clearly domains in their own right, requiring new thinking and ‘jurisdictions’.
In the modern era of great power competition, ‘strategy’ becomes a whole of government, and indeed whole of nation endeavour: the alignment of all elements of our national power to assure our defence and security.
The civil / military conversation around ‘jurisdiction’ becomes vital in such an era.
We must each be clear on our roles, and importantly how we must collaborate, and how we must integrate.
How evident is the ‘jurisdiction’ of the Australian Army today? I believe we would elicit a remarkably wide range of answers if we asked a thousand of our fellow Australian citizens this question.
Is such a lack of clarity ‘fit for purpose’ in today’s uncertain age?
In my view, our recent campaigns, offshore and domestic, are a primary cause of this lack of clarity.
Our colleague Professor John Blaxland is right to label our most recent wars as ‘niche wars’.
These so-called ‘wars of choice’ didn’t touch Australia’s shores, or the vast majority of Australians, in any tangible sense.
Of course, our nation turned to mourn those Australian soldiers whom were lost.
But the long-duration of these wars, their remoteness, and their drifting intensity meant that the link between our society, our strategy and our military was incrementally diminished.
These wars increasingly defined the Army, by dint of circumstance, rather than by design.
Disconnection was then exacerbated by the successive domestic challenges of the last five years. We as an Army remain proud of the support we were able to provide to our community in their time of need, from bushfires to the many floods to the COVID pandemic.
But perhaps the imprint this left on society’s image of their Army risks eroding our ‘jurisdiction’ away from the nation’s most consequential need in an era of great power competition … an Army ready to fight and win wars in the defence of Australia and its interest: essential if we are to contribute to successful deterrence.
In line with this, Professor Evans also worries we have overly diffused the roles of our soldiers over the last thirty years.
We have asked them to be, and I quote, ‘an alchemical blend of multiple archetypes’ … encompassing soldier, emergency services officer, quasi-diplomat, police officer and social worker.
In this model, the soldier risks being the jack of all trades, and the master of none.
And I offer we must be masters of our most consequential trade, if we are to bear the moral cost.
An Army cannot self-select its ‘jurisdiction’. Addressing such a fundamental topic can only be a collaboration between our Government, our society and our military. This is an essential outcome of the healthy practise of civil / military relations.
It involves some deep questions. The history of the Australian Army is part of the foundational story of our nation.
But as James Brown argued in his excellent book ‘The Long Shadow of Anzac’, our society’s image of its Army is deep-rooted in a long-standing First World War paradigm.
This image feels outdated – and increasingly outpaced – by a future beset by regional instability, accelerating technology, and the pressing need to deter conflict.
My sense is that the nation’s image of its Army is going to have to evolve as well, if we are to keep pace with the spirit of today’s age.
Having looked at ‘jurisdiction’ in broad terms, I want to turn briefly to the people – the soldiers – who are our Army.
We are of our nation: indeed we rely wholly on the Australian citizenry for our people.
Much has been made in recent years of the growth of ‘individualism’ in Western society. Many have argued that it has been a positive phenomenon, with benefits in productivity, in innovation, and overall quality of life.
But others like Australian political scientist Hugh Smith have argued that ‘individualism’ risks degrading social cohesion, undermining the concepts of civic virtues and service in a way that presents challenges for military recruitment.
Smith describes this as a ‘post-deferential’ society.
The idea of ‘unlimited liability’, for example, is seen through this lens as the antithesis of individualism. By accepting ‘unlimited liability’, one states a willingness to give one’s life for the nation and for one’s mates. You offer the ultimate sacrifice.
Service is therefore, by definition, placing purpose and people before oneself.
There is debate – and at times doubt is expressed – as to whether young Australians will take up this mantle.
I do not agree. I believe service reflects a higher cause, one that certainly demands sacrifice, but one that also provides soldiers with intrinsic rewards such as pride and a sense of purpose.
I believe we can inspire more young Australians to serve. The problem is that we – both the Army and the society we serve – are finding it hard to explain the intangible benefits of service.
Perhaps we have collectively lost the art of building social license.
We can do much more to explain to young Australians how service can make you a more capable, a more confident and a more resilient individual … but also a better citizen, closer connected to community and to nation.
We can better explain how our Army pursues ‘excellence’ rather than ‘exceptionalism’, and ‘humble pride’ over ‘hubristic elitism’.
The intrinsic nature of purpose, identity, and belonging or mateship are central to the Army profession, and indeed to service. We must do more to tell this story if our Army is to thrive.
I now turn to the second pillar of our profession: our ‘expertise’, or our professional body of knowledge.
Our body of knowledge is the repository of over a hundred years of our own institutional learning, let alone that which comes from the millennia before: built on the bloody lessons of our past wars, and on the sacrifice of the more than 80,000 soldiers’ names who are etched on the Wall of Remembrance.
This underpins our capacity to educate, to train and to experience Army professionals, throughout their careers.
It is our body of knowledge that helps us meet one of the central challenges of the profession today: and that is to balance war’s enduring human nature with its ever-changing character.
We must ask ourselves, however, whether our professional body of knowledge – and our training and education systems – are indeed fit for purpose for the 21st Century?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – now in its 1006th day – reminds us that war is indeed a battle for adaptation.
Both sides seek to adapt their structures, tactics, and equipment to reflect the character of the war as it is revealed; to reflect the ‘spirit of the age’. The side that adapts the fastest gains an edge.
Dr Jack Watling’s view – perhaps tragically – is that the Russian Armed Forces are currently winning this battle for adaptation in the war in Ukraine, despite the moral vacuum of their actions. This is a salutary lesson for us all.
The Australian Army has a well-practised system in place for adaptation. We have a ‘best-in-class’ training system, and expert instructors, coaches and mentors.
But I am not assured that our systems are yet enough to win the battle of adaptation in the face of a major war in our region.
We must ask ourselves searching questions. Can we genuinely bring in new equipment, tactics and doctrine at a pace that is relevant? Are we intellectually ready to be imaginative, surprising, asymmetric … to outpace ruthless and determined adversaries?
The answers to these questions are not yet clear.
My view is that the start-point is to assess the balance between our study of the art of war and the science of war.
Like most armies in the contemporary age, the Australian Army has little to no serving experience of operations in the context of great power competition, of littoral or amphibious combat operations in the modern Indo-Pacific, or of protracted large-scale combat operations.
In the absence of personal experience, context can only be found in history, and in the study of the classical theories of warfare.
In this I agree with Huntington, who argued that, and I quote, ‘the military ethic places unusual value on the ordered, purposive study of history, [which] is used to develop principles which may be capable of future application’.
Teaching the art of war must then be carefully balanced with new discourse in the science of warfare: we must seize all the advantages offered by technology, but without becoming dismissive of war’s enduring human nature.
Once we have achieved something better approximating balance, we must then check whether our curriculum of professional development is sufficiently rigorous … whether we hold ourselves to a high-enough standard.
We have always professed to invest deeply in our training and education continuums. Our soldiers, NCOs and officers pass through many professional gateways.
The majority of these courses, however, are based on attendance and participation rather than grading. It may be argued that our professional assessment is neither markedly rigorous nor sufficiently demanding for the test of modern, large-scale operations.
Nor indeed are they an adequate reflection of the cost of professional failure.
Soldiers, NCOs and officers not actively progressing through our command and leadership pathways can in some instances serve for years without undertaking further professional courses, continuous professional development, or professional assessment.
This stands in stark contrast to other professions, such as law or medicine, that require an annual re-assessment to assure continued professional practise.
Underpinning all of this is our belief in our profession. The British academic Professor Richard Holmes once wrote that doctrine ‘is not just what is taught, or what is published, but what is believed’.
How do we leverage our professional body of knowledge to ensure that every soldier, regardless of rank, believes they are a professional, and believes in our profession?
Because with belief comes pride. And it is pride that ensures that our Army profession is a life-long affirmation for our people.
As the stewards of the Army today, we own the inheritance of those who will follow. The rigour we apply to our profession must meet the demands not just of today, but as best as we can those of tomorrow. Success here is within our gift, and will save lives. The time to act is now.
The third and final pillar is one that I consider to be perhaps the most pressing for our Army; our ability to self-regulate as a profession.
I define ‘self-regulation’ as our ability to establish and uphold professional standards. It is through such regulation that we sustain our ‘jurisdiction’ within the society we serve.
To explain why self-regulation matters, I’m afraid I need to again touch on the nature of war. I promise I will be brief!
Clausewitz captured war’s nature with precision. ‘War’, he tells us, is always ‘composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force’.
Now, Clausewitz was not cutting new ground. Two hundred years earlier, Thomas Hobbes described the ‘state of nature’ in the Leviathan as ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’, or ‘the war of all against itself’.
And it was in this state of nature, he argued perhaps rather dismally, that the life of man would always become ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
Hobbes and Clausewitz were aligned in their belief that war’s nature was to corrupt human behaviour. The evidence for this stacks up: from the slaughter of the Melians by the supposedly-enlightened Athenians to the massacre at My Lai, it is difficult to find any instance of warfare in history where the worst of human nature has not emerged.
The corrupting nature of war is one of the reasons why the battlefield is the most demanding of human endeavours, physically, intellectually and spiritually.
Why is this brief retrospective on the nature of war relevant? Because to resist the corruption of war is a fundamental duty for the Army of any liberal democracy.
Our moral authority to apply violence ethically on behalf of society relies on trust.
The society we serve must trust that we will apply violence in accordance with their expectations, within the requirements of international law, and consistent with the just war traditions.
As Colin Gray once wrote, in modern strategy, ‘ethics are a survival necessity, and not a luxury’.
It is clear to me that we must be capable of self-regulation against the corruptive nature of war. Our ethical foundations as ‘managers of violence’ must be at once uncompromising and uncompromised.
How ready are we for this challenge? My view is, ‘never ready enough’. The last twenty-five years have tested our Army’s capacity for self-regulation in a profound manner.
I am very proud of all our Army achieved in places like East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan since 1999. Soldiers who served in these theatres can and should rightly be proud of their service.
But our failures are as evident as our successes. We must do more to learn the lessons from the times where our capacity to self-regulate has been found wanting.
I am accountable – and we are collectively obliged – to look harder, deeper, and always with an eye for improvement.
My own reflections from the last several decades, which are by no means inherently ‘right’, unsurprisingly coalesce around two topics. These are ‘command accountability’, and ‘culture’.
The concept of ‘command’ is often under-recognised as being unique to the profession of arms.
No other profession is given the legal authority to order other humans to kill outside of self-defence, or to demand that they accept acts of near-certain death or harm to achieve a military outcome.
‘Command’ is a foundation of the ‘contract of unlimited liability’. Our commanders vicariously accept the liability offered by our soldiers; both their liability to risk injury and death, and to accept the moral burden of killing.
This responsibility is of such gravity as to demand exceptionally-careful regulation. The effective execution of ‘command’ requires an intimate professional relationship between the Army as an institution, and those accepting the weight of command.
The Army’s responsibilities in this relationship are clear. We must explicitly articulate a commander’s responsibilities, and then we must give them sufficient resources to achieve success.
In return the commander must fully accept the burden of command. They must accept that they are accountable for the outcomes … for both success and for failure.
Commanders must accept that they will be held to account, scrutinised not only by the institution but by the society that has invested them with trust and with confidence.
Like a shaky marriage in need of counselling, the ‘command’ relationship between the Army and the individual has not thrived these past decades.
In the Afghanistan war, clarity of responsibility, and sufficient support, are areas that demand further examination.
A key example of this is found in the practise of ‘command and control’.
When my colleague Major General Andrew Hocking studied the lessons of the Afghanistan campaign in 2022, he found that we had established command and control arrangements that were, I quote, ‘excessively complex’ … arrangements which blurred the vital principles of ‘unity’ and ‘clarity’ of command, and which clouded the accountability of our commanders.
It was common for tactical commanders to be answerable to several different chains of command; some national, some from other nations, and some from within the coalition.
Our two largest force elements, despite being co-located in the same base, had no formal unifying Australian tactical command relationship to facilitate a national approach.
As a result ADF rules and standards – which explicitly regulate our behaviour – were applied in different ways between forces located adjacent to one another.
Our coalition partners, always a useful litmus test for effectiveness, described our arrangements as both ‘bemusing’ and ‘confusing’. The resulting command and control risks, General Hocking concluded, were ‘extremely high’.
These risks clearly manifested … with damage that continues to cast a ‘long shadow’ on our Army today.
But the institution cannot bear the whole burden of our discordant command relationships.
Could we have been more attentive, more courageous, more articulate in characterising and expressing these risks? What if we had been more aware and more determined to prevent deviance from being normalised over time? Did we apply the level of curiosity our command accountability demanded?
These are questions I ask myself often, and I believe we must engage with the answers institutionally. It is our obligation to do so in a way that prevents their recurrence.
To repeat, the effective execution of command is vital to the regulation of our profession. We must get the relationship between society, our Army, and our accountable commanders right. This relationship needs to thrive, so that all parties want to be part of it, and believe in it.
The alternative is too worrying to contemplate: an ugly and acrimonious divorce where everyone suffers, including the defence and security of our nation.
So what then of ‘culture’? ‘Command accountability’ is one facet – albeit a prominent one – of the broader issue of Army’s ‘culture’ as a tool of self-regulation.
When considering this, we need to broaden our thinking beyond the common use of the term ‘culture’. To quote Colin Gray again, ‘some terms are so familiar that they escape close scrutiny’.
Culture is one of these … often invoked, but rarely contemplated in any tangible depth.
When I speak of the ‘culture’ of our profession, I am not speaking in a corporate context, but of our central philosophical approach … our relationship with war and the ethical application of violence.
If we broaden our thinking … if we draw ourselves back as far as Plato and Marcus Aurelius … we are led to concepts of ‘virtue-ethics’ and ‘stoicism’; normative forms of ethics that guide our behaviour in the crucible of combat.
Our group culture – guided by the ‘virtue-ethic’ of the Australian Army – is intensely powerful.
Done well, it is the greatest protector against unethical and unprofessional behaviour in war.
But history … and indeed recent experience … tells us that, done poorly, a ‘virtue-ethic’ can be just as powerful a gateway to failure as it is a barrier.
It can allow elitism, power, and revenge to take hold: all of which are part of war’s enduring human nature, to corrupt.
Addressing our culture … our philosophy of war … is fundamental to our command accountabilities. It requires sustained rigour and introspection in both thought and application.
The moral philosopher Shannon French wrote that ‘officers must take seriously their responsibility to protect their troops as much as possible from unrecoverable losses, physical or otherwise. At the extreme, these potential losses include the loss of their humanity. This is a sacrifice that no service member should be asked to make’.
A more elegant and poignant distillation is difficult to imagine. We must foster a culture in our Army that ensures our soldiers are resilient in combat, not just to the physical and mental impacts of war, but also morally, against war’s inherently corruptive nature.
In this way we safeguard their humanity with as much care and attention as we seek to protect their lives.
Conclusion
This last point on culture draws me usefully back to where I began, and to the conclusion of my remarks.
War is the most challenging of human endeavors, physically, mentally and spiritually.
History tells us this has been a truth for millennia. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine tells us that nothing has changed in this regard.
Despite all the moral and technological sophistication of our modern age, there will always be some who see war as a viable tool of policy.
As General Sherman aptly said, ‘war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it’.
I believe our nation deserves … and expects … no less than a professional approach by its Army to the problem of political violence.
We do not have the luxury of time to make ready for tomorrow’s war. Warning time we are sure is a thing of the past.
As my friend General Charlie Flynn is fond of saying … the time is now, and we are it. We must be ready to fight tonight.
If we are to meet these challenges, we need to cultivate and nurture the Army profession across all three of our pillars: ‘jurisdiction’, ‘expertise’, and ‘self-regulation’.
The Australian Army can – and will – do much of this ourselves, but the task cannot be achieved alone. It must be a healthy collaboration between the Army as a profession and the society we exist to serve.
The starting point lies, I believe, in re-defining the ‘jurisdiction’ of the Army profession. This is the foundational pillar, the one upon which all else rests. For without clear ‘jurisdiction’, and the social license that stems from it, the Army cannot focus on our profession.
Without a clear ‘jurisdiction’, our body of knowledge risks misplaced application or at worst irrelevance.
Our culture risks misalignment to the realities of the nature of war.
At worst, we risk the possibility that we fail in our endeavours before we have even begun.
So, thank you for your patience and perseverance in giving me your time today. ‘Trust’ is the central strategic priority that I have set for our Army, and I believe trust is built on authenticity, credibility and transparency.
This is why I have been so upfront in outlining and sharing with you what I see as the challenges to our profession.
But I also remain supremely confident in our people, and in our Army in all its dimensions. I am constantly struck by the initiative, quiet determination, compassion and pragmatic leadership across our Army.
I am very proud to be part of, and to lead, an institution that owns its failures, and is determined to do something about them.
They are more than equal to the task. But they will need our help if they are to rise with the challenges of our age.
For now, I wish you god speed, and good soldiering. I will speak again early next year to discuss what I believe we may need to do to strengthen our profession.
I look forward to engaging with you again.
Thank you.