3 April 2025
Transcript
Michael, to you, the board and the Institute, thank you very much for the invitation to be with you today, I’m very grateful.
In my view, the Lowy Institute is an exemplar in a long form, respectful contest of ideas and I think that’s a great credit to the Institute. I am very honoured to be here today.
Two years ago this month the epoch-defining, independently-conducted Defence Strategic Review was published. We are honoured to have one of its architects here in Sir Angus Houston.
Epoch defining in the same way that the 1987 Defence White Paper shaped defence policy, strategy and the employment of the ADF for the proceeding three and a half decades.
The DSR as it is known … and reflected in the National Defence Strategy of 2024 … concludes that we face the most challenging strategic circumstances since the end of the Second World War.
Australia must - for the first time in more than 80 years - consider seriously how to manage the risk of major conflict in our region.
Of course, our contemporary circumstances are entirely historically consistent. To quote Charles Edel and Hal Brands from their book, ‘The Lessons of Tragedy’, ‘for centuries, leading thinkers and statesmen have periodically concluded that humanity is finally leaving behind the dark shadows of geopolitical strife, and entering the sunlit uplands of international harmony’.
Well, the geopolitics of today instead bear more resemblance to those described by Thucydides some two and a half millennia ago - than they do the proclamations of Francis Fukuyama and the like just three decades ago.
The last few years are evidence enough. The growing authoritarian partnership between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is now manifest … witness North Korean troops fighting in Eastern Europe, and a renewed proxy war in the Middle East. Global and regional norms – including those governing arms control – are being stressed.
The world is an increasingly uncertain, anxious and dangerous place. As the late, great Allan Gyngell observed in 2018, ‘I can’t think of a more challenging time to be a policy-maker in Australia’. Now I wonder what he would make of things nearly a decade on?
So, what does this mean for me as the accountable steward of the Australian Army today?
I am by nature an optimist and with good reason. The Army that I am privileged to lead today is by nearly every measure better than one that I joined in 1987.
The young Australians volunteering to serve in our Army, your Army, today are the very best generation to wear our nation’s uniform. They inspire my confidence.
But it is my professional obligation to be, at once, a realist, a constructive pessimist, and to cultivate what Aristotle poetically described as a ‘tragic sensibility’.
In short, I must prepare the Army for the worst and pray for the best.
The Government’s direction to me is clear and transformative: quite simply, optimise the Army for littoral manoeuvre and long-range strike, as part of an integrated and focussed ADF in support of a national strategy of deterrence. And do it quickly.
The Army has moved very quickly to set the conditions for this transformation this last twenty three months. I am confident we will achieve our 2025 milestones.
We have already adapted our concepts, our command and control, our capability, and indeed our culture.
I could not be more proud of what our soldiers have achieved.
However, a transformation of such consequence demands a comprehensive approach to every dimension of our Army – which is at once a National Institution, a Profession and as a Fighting Force.
Today I will again focus on the Army Profession – the moral and intellectual foundations that define us as an Army, importantly, in relation to the society from which we are drawn and for whom we exist to serve.
Indeed, as Napoleon posited, in war ‘the moral is to the physical as three is to one’.
My remarks today form the third in a series of four addresses on the state of the Army profession that began in September last year.
In the first address I baselined the profession through the lenses of history, context and culture.
In the second I proposed a diagnosis of the contemporary challenges to the Army profession.
Today I intend to describe how we are executing the task of assessing the state of our profession over the coming year.
To assist us we have adopted a framework of three pillars that provide a common benchmark for all professions.
The first pillar is our ‘jurisdiction’, that is, how we define the unique service that we provide to the society we serve.
The second pillar is our ‘expertise’, the distinct professional body of knowledge for which we are accountable.
And thirdly our capacity for ‘self-regulation’ as a profession: our ability to not only maintain good order, discipline… but also accountability in the face of the corrupting nature of war.
These three pillars will provide the structure to my remarks today, just as they will throughout our review over the coming year.
So, if I may begin with ‘jurisdiction’. When I spoke at the ANU’s National Security College in November last year I highlighted this as the primary pillar, that which defines us and our purpose.
I posited that the unique purpose of the Australian Army was perhaps unclear to the nation it serves. The place of the Army profession in society, including central concepts like ‘the contract of unlimited liability’, is indistinct, and as a result I argued that we need to address it. The obvious question is, ‘how’?
In 1989 the theorist Carl H. Builder wrote the following in his book The Masks of War …
‘An Army requires a theory of an Army … there must exist something in addition to its soldiers and tanks and guns – a concept, a strategy, a notion of who it is and what it wants to be, of what it is about and what it wants to be about’.
Wise words. They capture a central question for both the Australian Army and the society we serve. What sort of Army does Australia need in the middle decades of the 21st Century?
Some examples might be helpful here. The Royal Navy in the Second World War developed the theory of the ‘two-power standard’, a navy that had to be stronger than the next two largest navies in the world in order to be effective.
The US Army in the post-Vietnam era developed the ‘theory’ of an Army that could, in the words of the great reformer General Don Starry, ‘win while outnumbered’ through expertise in manoeuvre warfare, operational art, and the application of exquisite technology.
The history of the ‘theory of the Australian Army’ is fairly simple. We have traditionally been an expeditionary Army committed to securing Australia’s principal alliance interests by fighting overseas.
A simple but compelling theory because putting soldiers on the ground and in harm’s way has always been and remains the most profound expression of national will and commitment.
Recall Prime Minister Billy Hughes, nicknamed the ‘Little Digger’, who justified his and Australia’s presence at the Versailles Conference in 1919 with the words, ‘I speak for 60,000 dead’.
Our most-recent commitments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mark continuity in this sine-wave of Australia’s history … visible, tangible commitments to shared interests and values with our principal ally and our partners.
But how do we see the future of our ‘theory’?
Some fundamentals are likely to endure.
It seems clear that we will continue to place a premium on partnerships, remaining militarily-engaged overseas. As Rory Medcalf remarks in his book Conquest for the Indo- Pacific, ‘in this multipolar age, nations will not succeed in securing their interests if they pursue strategies in isolation … the region is too vast and complex for any country to protect its interests alone’.
But it is also clear that we require a new theory, one that is equal to the demands of this new era. The future is deeply uncertain. We have little historical context for an Indo-Pacific beset by multipolar great power competition. To paraphrase HR McMaster, ‘we have a perfect record in predicting future wars … that record is zero percent’. We will need to think anew, if we are indeed to act anew.
The Army has taken the first steps towards defining this transformational theory. Last year we published a revised capstone document titled ‘The Australian Army Contribution to the National Defence Strategy 2024’, copies of which are available in the room today.
This tells the story of a rapidly adapting Army, one confident in its history, but clear in its need to continually adapt.
It depicts a focused Army, re-discovering its ability to fight and prevail in the littorals … that is the shallows, beaches, rivers, jungles and coastal towns that characterise our region.
It is a good start, but the emergent ‘theory’ is not yet sufficiently clear. Definition is our focus this year.
Much of this work is the Army’s responsibility. Our society, however, also has an indispensable part to play. As I noted in November, an Army cannot define its own jurisdiction.
In an era of great power competition where defence and security is, once again, a national endeavour, this task is a collaboration between the soldier, the citizen, and the state. This is the essence of what is known as ‘civil / military relations’.
The questions here are pressing. Throughout our history as a nation we have relied on the protection afforded by our geography, and the assumption of ‘warning time’ for conflict.
In times of war we have leveraged these protections and assumptions to build the Army – indeed our Defence Force – and the national resilience we have needed to defend Australia and our interests.
But as the National Defence Strategy makes clear, those assumptions of distance and time are no longer valid.
A war in our region would be an immediate and significant risk to our national security and prosperity. It could come with limited warning, and would certainly have far-reaching consequences.
We can learn much from our own history, and indeed from the history of warfare. The siren’s song of ‘inter-war thinking’ is enticing: ‘inter-war’ thinking being the idea that the next war will be quick, decisive, fought at increasing distance, and everywhere but on the land and among people.
But such thinking is profoundly ahistorical. This is a tragedy as much as it is a truth.
We are, like many, studying what is happening in Ukraine closely. From my foxhole, the lessons of national resilience are those from which we can learn the most.
We need to remember that the army a nation begins a war with will not be the army that ends it. A Ukrainian General recently observed that while he started the war with a full-time professional force, the brigades he commanded were now composed largely of mobilised soldiers.
Faced with new dilemmas, how do we … the Army and the society we serve … work more closely together to resolve thorny questions on the ‘theory of the Army’, on national resilience, and on how we might sustain an army at war?
It is for this reason that I have chosen the topic of ‘The Army in Society’ for the annual Chief of Army’s Symposium this year, to be held at Parliament House in August. Where better to host a discourse on the future ‘jurisdiction’ of our Army than in the people’s house.
Our ‘jurisdiction’ is intrinsically connected to our ‘expertise’, the second of the three pillars of our profession.
The maintenance of our distinctive body of professional knowledge, and the ability to teach it and evolve it and adapt it, is central to our ability to fight and win.
The foundations of this body of knowledge are not fully fit for purpose in our changed circumstances, in my opinion.
My guidance to the Army is therefore to strengthen our ‘expertise’ in three very practical ways: through balance, through focus and through adaptability.
Firstly, on ‘balance’. The enduring obligation for all military professionals is to make judgements about the balance between war’s enduringly human nature and its ever-changing character.
War’s changing character dominates our daily consciousness. The impact of technology is of an unprecedented scale and tempo. The advent of Artificial Intelligence in warfare may usher in a new age, as for the first time non-human entities may make decisions about the application of political violence.
The Army clearly needs deep experts in leading-edge technologies. We are blessed to have soldiers with PhDs in AI and quantum computing, and experts in diverse fields as hypersonics and space.
It is quite clear that the ability to wield technology in war is a ‘new basic’ requirement in soldiering.
Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir, recently observed that ‘warfighters need to know how to code, not because they will build industrial strength platforms … but because software is the most important and malleable weapon system. Knowing how to bend the software to your will is how you will bend the enemy to your will’.
There may be a slight element of hyperbole there, but I think his fundamental point is correct.
The moulding of code will be as ubiquitous for our soldiers as the employment of their weapons. These are, I believe, some of the future chapters in the canon of our professional body of knowledge.
But ‘balance’ means acknowledging the timeless continuities of war’s nature as well as embracing the new. Technology does not replace the very human aspects of war, it is instead additive to how we go about leverage them. The two must be considered together. It is very much an ‘and’, not an ‘or’ proposition.
So, the Army certainly needs technologists and futurists. But we also need historians, philosophers, ethicists and strategists in equal measure. The challenge I have set for our team is to find the right balance between the two.
The second factor is ‘focus’. This seems somewhat incongruous when placed alongside ‘balance’, but such are the contradictions of war.
The National Defence Strategy directed the ADF to shift to being an ‘integrated and focused force’.
This direction to ‘focus’ is very clear, and the Army is transforming in turn. Our focus – perhaps uncontroversially – will be the battlefield: where soldiers engage in land combat in the most demanding of human endeavours, physically, intellectually and spiritually.
More so, we will focus on the battlefield of the littoral. The history of Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna, and Sanananda tell us just how harrowing this battlefield can be. This is what we must prepare for.
What does this look like in practical terms in the 21st Century? At the coal face of our Army our training will be more challenging, certainly wetter, and more focused on conditioning for the battlefield. It will be wickedly complex. It will demand resilient soldiers and cohesive teams. But it will be ‘good soldiering’ – the sort of service that most of our young Australians are joining for today.
‘Adaptability’ is the third factor.
An army must be able to adapt at pace, and at a pace that is relevant to the war to which it is committed.
The French Army in both 1911 and 1939 was a professional force, with a strong body of knowledge and all of the institutions to teach it. But they were unable to adapt when war’s character was revealed.
They sought to fight the war as they wished it would be, rather than as it was.
Conversely, the Armed Forces of Ukraine hard-wired adaptability into their force following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. This allowed them to withstand the initial Russian attacks in 2022, and to prevail today.
Professor Sir Michael Howard once wrote that, ‘no matter how clearly one thinks, it is impossible to anticipate precisely the character of future conflict. The key is to not be so far off the mark that it becomes impossible to adapt once that character is revealed’.
So, if we are to review the Army’s capacity to adapt, to ensure that we are fit for purpose, we must review in the knowledge and the expectation that we must be able to fight Australia’s wars as they are, not as we may imagine or wish them to be.
The key metric of success is the adversary. It has always been thus, and there are no prizes for second place. We must be able to adapt faster, to be more relevant and more credible, than those that would seek to do us harm.
The final pillar is our ability to ‘self-regulate’ as a profession.
I define this as our ability to uphold professional standards in our conduct, both in peace and war.
This is perhaps the hardest of the three pillars to address. It is also the one where I am most determined to make a difference.
My view remains that the concept of ‘command’, and the accountability that comes with it, must be the wellspring of our professional self-regulation.
I assessed last year that the command relationship between our Army and the individual has not thrived these last two decades. Our failures have been as evident as our successes.
This must be resolved, and it must be resolved before we once again face the corrupting influence of war. The time is now. The question is, ‘how’?
The start-point, I believe, is to ensure we are doing everything we can to support our commanders in meeting our accountabilities to those we are privileged to lead. This is the Army’s institutional duty.
We must carefully match the accountabilities of our commanders with the authorities and resources that they are assigned. The equation must be in balance.
We ought to be confident in our commanders. We select them from our very best, and this warrants trust from the outset. Command decisions are often true dilemmas, particularly among the frictions of war.
Our commanders should be confident to execute their duties, clear on their responsibilities, and filled with a sense of trust and support both up and down the chain of command.
Moreover, they must feel safe to fail fast in training, and to learn: a key part of adaptation in war.
But where things go wrong – where failure is intolerable – accountability is binary. This is as much about trust and confidence in the idea of command itself, as it is about the individual or individual failings.
There are already formal disciplinary and administrative ways to do this. But strong command accountability is as much about honour and culture as it is about applying laws and legislation.
The way in which we execute command is the most prominent expression of the professional virtue-ethic that ties our Army together. It has ever been thus, given the inescapable and enduring human nature of war.
Commanders in an Army with a strong virtue-ethic willingly recognise and embrace their accountabilities. They hold themselves to account first, in how they think, speak and act every day.
So, along with our senior leadership team, we are reviewing and strengthening our virtue-ethic … the core philosophy we hold towards our unique role as the assigned custodians of political violence.
Starting at the top, if we can get this right, better command … and better command accountability at all levels … will naturally follow.
So, to conclude. Jurisdiction. Expertise. And the ability to self-regulate.The frame for our review is now set, and the work has certainly begun … led, as it should be, by Army’s senior leaders.
Where will it conclude? Well, that is a good question. The 14th of August this year will mark the 80th anniversary of the allied victory in the Second World War, the end of three years of brutal fighting across the Pacific.
The Australian Army that fought to achieve that victory had not even been imagined four years earlier. In 1941 the troops of the 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions were fighting in the deserts of North Africa, as far away from Kokoda as one might imagine.
They had never set foot in a landing craft, never been trained in the jungle, never hauled themselves off a beach under fire.
The transformation of our Army to fight the Pacific war was quite simply remarkable … perhaps one of the finest hours of our profession, and perhaps our nation. Perhaps most impressively was that this was all done ‘in contact’. Their example is both inspiring and instructive.
The scale of the transformation of the Australian Army today is imbued with the same spirit, if not the same scale and circumstance. The key difference is that we have the luxury of doing it, as one might say, ‘out of contact’.
We have the opportunity to be more considered in our approach. To consider our profession in width, depth and context, and to learn from the experience of those who went before us.
But time is not on our side. As the National Defence Strategy concludes, ‘Australia no longer enjoys the benefit of a ten-year window of strategic warning time for conflict’.
We must be, and are indeed, energetic and determined. We must use every moment available to us to ensure we can adapt should the character of war be revealed.
Next year the Australian Army will mark its 125th birthday. By then I intend that we will have the answers to the questions I have posed today. I look forward to sharing these answers with you and with our fellow citizens, so that you may be fully engaged in writing the next chapter in the story of your Army.
Thank you.