Fatal Distraction: Unready for War

Australia—no nation acquits itself so valiantly in war; no nation takes so little pains in peacetime. — Editorial, Times, London, April 18, 1954

One of the riddles of Australian life is the unwillingness, or refusal, of the nation to address national defence preparedness with the seriousness the task obviously requires. In the national psyche there exists a “she’ll be right” preference for complacency and a belief that a combination of alliances and geographical isolation will spare Australia from the ravages of modern war on its own soil. Australia’s curious lack of defence preparation is a cultural peculiarity noted by both novelists and historians. In his 1995 novel Highways to a War, Christopher Koch has a protagonist observe, “the reason Australia’s half-asleep is that it’s outside history. The Japanese nearly woke us up, but they didn’t quite get there. So, we went on sleeping. I wonder who will wake us up?” The historian John Hirst noted how a persistent division on defence has characterised Australian history—as symbolised by the bitter conscription debates of 1916-17 and 1942 and by later domestic tensions over military involvement in conflicts from Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq in the early 2000s. In his 2002 study, Australia’s Democracy, Hirst concludes that there is no national consensus on defence as a single project representing responsible sovereignty. “Defence,” he observes gloomily, “has been the empty core of Australian nationhood.”

Overseas historians have also been puzzled by Australian attitudes to defence. For example, in his 2007 book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45, the British military historian Sir Max Hastings confesses to being perplexed when, despite being faced by the Japanese military on its doorstep, many Australians resorted to dissent over conscription and trade union activism to disrupt the war effort. He writes in astonishment, “refusal to adapt to participation in a war of national survival, when Japan aspired to make them [Australians] subjects of its empire, was extraordinary”.

Today, despite cries of alarm from inside both Coalition and Labor parties on the worsening strategic circumstances Australia faces in the 2020s, community division in Australia over increased defence preparation continues unabated. What some academics are fond of calling “the China Threat discourse” has become a lightning rod for domestic disagreement on defence policy. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating is far from alone in his March 2023 public intervention dismissing any military threat to Australia by Beijing as belonging to a twilight zone of delusion that will waste billions of dollars. Tellingly, Keating reached back into Australia’s divisive defence history to describe the Albanese government’s participation in the September 2021 AUKUS Agreement as “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor Government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War One”.

Keating’s views on a benign Beijing tend to be shared by some leading figures in the Australian business community. Earlier this year, mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest discounted the idea of a China threat to Australia as “complete rubbish”. Anyone familiar with Australian universities understands that Forrest’s view is shared by large numbers of Millennials and Generation Z (the Zoomers aged between sixteen and twenty-four). While our campuses seethe with hatred against democratic Israel, authoritarian Communist China receives a free pass. For many Millennials and Zoomers, climate change is a far greater threat to Australia’s future than any military challenge posed by China.

In many ways, the Australia of the 2020s resembles the French Third Republic in the 1930s, a polity so utterly divided morally, it proved incapable of a mounting a credible defence against Nazi Germany in 1940. The support for Hamas in the Gaza war with Israel and the baleful rise of anti-Semitism in Australia today are reminiscent of those in France whose slogan was “better Hitler than Blum”. When a nation loses not only its political unity, but its moral compass in such a manner, history suggests it risks capitulating in a war of survival. To the fall of France in 1940, we might add the centuries-old Austro-Hungarian empire during the First World War, an edifice so riven by the scourge of ethnic identity politics that it disappeared under the strain of war within four years. The catastrophes suffered by France and Austria-Hungary are dire warnings from our European civilisational past for the Australia of the 2020s.

Keating, Forrest, and the useful idiots of the Hamas lobby notwithstanding, we now confront a highly dangerous global strategic landscape. Consider current realities: China is seeking long-term geostrategic revision in Asia; Russia is upending the European balance by waging a war of conquest against Ukraine; and Iran is supporting and exploiting a Hamas proxy war on Israel to further its Middle East ambitions. It is wilful myopia to believe that these events will not affect Australia’s security in the long term. Already, they have placed the American-led Western liberal order to which Australia belongs on the psychological defensive, stretching its resources and exposing a series of domestic fault lines in the fabric of the allied democracies. As Xi Jinping remarked gleefully to Vladimir Putin in March 2023 outside the Kremlin, “right now, there are [geopolitical] changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we [China and Russia] are the ones driving these changes together”.

Despite a pro-Chinese lobby in our community, then, Australia cannot escape the implications of Beijing’s strategic revisionism nor the Sino-American strategic rivalry that ensues. We must understand ourselves, so we make the right strategic choices. We may be in Asia, but we are not of Asia; Australia exists in the Asia-Pacific as a classic trade-dependent maritime state whose prosperity and interests are tied to a favourable global balance of power. Our geopolitical circumstances make us a liminal or “in-between” country, trapped between an Indo-Pacific geography and an Anglo-Celtic history. In this situation, we resemble Turkiye whose geography and history is similarly caught between Europe and the Middle East. If Turkiye is the NATO’s Muslim-majority country, Australia is the East Asia Summit’s European-majority country. Yet, just as the Turks are denied entry into the European Union, so too is Australia denied entry into the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Like the Turks, Australians are cultural outsiders in their geographical region. As John Howard noted in 2005, while Australia inhabits a “special intersection” between geography and history, we are an outsider people with an Anglo-Celtic civilisational heritage that must be treasured and preserved.

We know far more about America than we do about China, and many of us are more comfortable on the streets of San Francisco than those of Shanghai. Historically, we have always been part of the West and, for all the talk of building a self-reliant defence since the 1980s, we have always been an allied strategy taker, not a lone-ranger strategy maker. Being of Anglo-Celtic cultural heritage but inhabiting a continental-island with a small population, our default strategic position has always been to “fight forward” to uphold an American-led order that since 1945 offsets our geographical-historical liminality.

In this approach to defence, we have correctly understood that major strategic threats often develop from distant disruptions of the balance of global power. Such threats include two world wars, the Cold War era, the long wars against political Islam—and now the contemporary wars in Europe and the Middle East—alongside the ominous shadow of China’s relentless military rise. Successive generations of Australian policy-makers have realised that Australia would find its sovereignty impossible to maintain in an international order dominated by hostile authoritarian powers. By adding military weight to the compatible side of liberal democracy, Australia has always sought to uphold its vital interests and secure its physical independence. When it comes to dealing with China on matters involving defence policy, the reality for Australia is that we are in the allied camp pursuing an anti-China counterstrategy of “balance and deter”, not a pro-China or neutral camp of “bandwagon and defer”. This is the very meaning of AUKUS.

This grim reality has concentrated official minds in Canberra over the past four years, but has also exposed Australia as society of sleepwalkers when it comes to defence preparation. We have “returned to history” at a time when our society has never been more ignorant of its past. Everywhere one cares to look in Australian defence preparation there are weaknesses that are the result of public complacency and political neglect and organisational incompetence by successive governments. As a nation we face unresolved deficiencies in strategy formulation, operational readiness, capability acquisition, personnel recruitment-retention and, of course, funding and political will. We have lost any semblance of warning time to prepare for the outbreak of major conflict; our technological edge has long since disappeared; we have an inadequate force structure; and our Defence Department is risk-averse and often incompetent when it comes to acquiring capability. Adding to our woes is the stark fact that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is neither ready nor equipped for high-level warfare in the Indo-Pacific. We lack the platforms, weapons systems, munitions, logistics and societal resilience to contemplate such warfare.

Yet, caveat emptor applies, because it is far easier to identify the weaknesses in our Defence enterprise than to summon the resolution and will to bring about timely change. As the late Senator Jim Molan, a former major-general, was fond of saying, Defence officials are Olympic gold medallists in the “sport of admiring problems in committees that achieve paralysis by analysis”. Similarly, our political establishment has a long tradition of “Defence by document” in which officials construct a preferred future. The latter tradition is marked by bursts of frenetic document writing—especially by new governments—accompanied by pious media declarations of defence reform and change. Defence documents always seem sophisticated to the laity because they contain a blitz of techno-jargon on weapons and capabilities. Yet such language often obfuscates rather than enlightens the reader. The production of defence documents is invariably followed by an alarming lack of concrete policy action and the frequent practice of cutting, or deferring, funding. Defence by document proves politically useful to Australian governments in that it provides the nation with an illusion of progress while stagnation and regression are the realities. An example of this pathology at work is the Rudd–Gillard government’s neglect of the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins submarine force which, at one point between 2009 and 2013, lacked a deployable boat. In effect, for four years Australia possessed no submarine defence, a record of operational incompetence that should give us serious pause when politicians and officials make confident declarations on acquiring a navy of nuclear submarines by the 2030s.

What then is to be done about the parlous state of Australia’s defence enterprise in the 2020s? The first requirement is simply for clear thinking free of bureaucratic verbiage, techno-jargon and political obfuscation. Clear thinking reveals five major problems that require resolution. The first problem is endemic defence policy weakness and organisational dysfunction; the second is the gathering pace of ADF force structure challenges. Third is the continued inadequate funding to support Australia’s defence requirements into the 2030s. A fourth challenge is the harsh reality that focusing on Defence alone is unlikely to keep Australia safe. We need a broader national security approach. Finally, the shortcomings in ADF’s moral ethos and the crisis faced in recruiting a younger generation into the armed forces require attention. The ADF faces an ideological public educational system that favours indoctrination over inquiry in a manner that is inimical to honourable military service. In combination, these five problems help explain the failure of the nation’s defence preparedness.

Policy weakness and organisational dysfunction

The first deficiency plaguing Australian defence enterprise is ingrained policy weakness. Policy must not only be conceived, it must also be consistently directed and executed by ministers who are prepared for a long and unglamorous wrestling match with Defence officials. A three-year term of government is hardly conducive to long-term defence policy development. Over the last quarter of a century, there have been fourteen defence ministers with an average tenure of eighteen months. Short ministerial tenures allow the Defence Department bureaucracy to operate like the Borg in television’s Star Trek. Defence officialdom is expert at absorbing politicians into the collective will of the bureaucratic machine. Ministers are buried in vast amounts of detail from a sprawling jungle of committees, while officials rely on the election cycle to hamper the ambitions of any minister brave enough to be an activist.

Policy weakness, in turn, contributes to organisational dysfunction. Because the Department of Defence is a self-serving machine, it is often under constant review. There have been a staggering thirty-five Defence efficiency reviews since 1982—almost one every sixteen months—making institutional input rather than external output the focus of official activity. Like Rodgers and Hart’s lyrics from Pal Joey, the Defence Department is perpetually “bewitched, bothered and bewildered” by its own internal processes—and dances, Dervish-like, to music of its own choice. As a former Minister for Defence, Linda Reynolds, noted ruefully in 2019, Defence is a masterful exponent of the Groundhog Day organisational politics of running on the spot. The Defence Department, Reynolds observed, is an organisation bent on “looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies over and over again”.

Contributing to Defence’s organisational dysfunction is a perpetual mismatch between the numbers of executives and staff. Between 1998 and 2015, senior executives increased by 85 per cent, but junior and middle ranks rose by only 7 per cent. The ADF is chronically over-officered with a star-ranked officer for every 245 personnel compared to 1526 and 1250 in the American and British militaries respectively. Following the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, the proportion of senior positions exploded yet again. Today in the newly formed Australian Submarine Agency, there are forty senior executives at APS band one or ADF one-star level—representing some 25 per cent of the workforce. Not only is this a waste of high salaries, it is also a way of avoiding accountability by fostering groupthink under the guise of team effort. If all the senior executives and officers fail, then no individual can ever be held accountable—indeed one may be promoted by the very success of failure. Like the Barnacle family in the Circumlocution Office in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Defence officialdom marches onward and upward “equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong”.

The current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, has publicly bewailed the “lack of a culture of excellence” inside Defence. Like Jim Hacker in the BBC’s sitcom, Yes Minister, Marles belatedly realises that his department is a gigantic version of the legendary hospital replete with managers but no patients. Yet, Marles is unlikely to have either sufficient time in office or the political capital to instigate the root-and-branch reform that is required. The starting point for reform needs to be the abolition of the fifty-year-old civil-military diarchy—in my view the single biggest institutional reason why Defence is so chronically dysfunctional. The evidence of thirty-five reviews under the regime of a diarchy is a damning statistic.

Yet the organisation merely tinkers with its governance processes, flatters to deceive, and continues as before. Defence maintains a bewildering bureaucratic system of committees, stovepipes and assorted fiefdoms that are relics of the twentieth century. For so long as a bloated diarchy of senior ADF officers and replicated public servants dance a bureaucratic jig at the apex of a department that always has more chiefs than Indians, no amount of taxpayer money will ever be sufficient to ensure military effectiveness.

Force structure challenges

A second problem that faces Defence in general, and the ADF in particular, is a quest to move from a balanced to a focused force structure. Such a transition, it is argued, is necessary to execute the Strategy of Denial at the heart of the April 2024 National Defence Strategy. The Strategy of Denial combines “deterrence with defence” to serve as our official approach to upholding the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific. The aim of denial is to seek asymmetric military advantage over an adversary or, to use the strangled bureaucratese of Richard Marles, to achieve “impactful projection across the full spectrum of proportionate response”.

When such a bizarre slogan replaces coherent strategic thought, we have fair warning of Defence’s incapacity to understand the dynamics of modern warfare. A necessary component of a Strategy of Denial is forward-based collective deterrence involving distributed basing, precision strike networks, fuel and munition stockpiles and integrated air defence across the region. Quite how, and where, an under-equipped and unready ADF can fit into an allied theatre strategy remains a matter of conjecture. What matters in any denial strategy is an immediacy of force weight, or “power in theatre”, not aggregate or latent power to be achieved sometime in the 2030s. To achieve such power in theatre, Australia needs to concentrate on creating a mosaic, not a monolith, force structure—one that favours the “small and many” (sensors, shooters and expendable platforms) over the “big and few” (exquisite platforms such as submarines and aircraft). Since we have opted for a slow “focused” monolith over an agile mosaic force structure, we will possess little immediate military power in the Indo-Pacific theatre for years to come. For the remainder of the 2020s, we can only hope and pray we receive timely assistance from American forces in the event of a strategic crisis.

The ADF needs to think forensically through the implications of modern warfighting across the island-chains of the Indo-Pacific. Given that Australia is a continental-island with a littoral maritime environment containing 20,000 islands, it makes sense that we maintain a balanced force, particularly in the Navy and the Army. For proper effectiveness, we need naval and land assets, both crewed and uncrewed, to operate successfully across the five modern domains of land, air, sea, space and cyber. Defence strategists have mistakenly conflated focused missions with focused force design and confused the Strategy of Denial—which requires breadth and depth of deterrent capability—with narrow sea denial of our northern approaches based on future submarines. There is an absence of strategic risk-analysis regarding the ADF’s need for local sea control by surface vessels to allow the navy to secure all the nation’s maritime interests across the world’s largest Exclusive Economic Zone. Australia requires a balanced fleet of surface and undersea vessels if it is to protect our seaborne trade and perform littoral manoeuvre operations by moving land forces into, and around, the Indo-Pacific archipelagos. Another risk factor is that a focused force structure risks turning our most deployable service, the Australian Army, into a one-dimensional version of a pre-Federation coastal artillery force. Under the Strategy of Denial, the Army is to assume a “stand-in-force” role as a “detect and engage” force armed with precision missiles. The risk in this super-artillery role is that a denial posture may come to threaten the integrity of what lies at the heart of any modern army, namely mastery of combined arms and the art of close combat.

Into the late 2020s and 2030s, we require a multi-domain and balanced ADF that is deployable and sustainable rather than a singular or focused force based around future submarines that may take two decades or more to eventuate. A focused force—to be constructed by the 2030s—may lead to a situation in which key land and air force elements required for amphibious operations, or for littoral campaigns in the island-chains to our north and east, are neglected or abandoned due to the heavy fiscal demands of developing an undersea navy. Here, a careful study of the 1942–45 South-West Pacific campaign should guide the ADF rather than relying on the kind of abstract deterrence-by-denial theory that suits the vastly larger and more powerful forces of the United States military.

A related ADF challenge between contending ideas of a focused versus a balanced force structure is obstructive national sea blindness. As the British naval historian Andrew Lambert points out in his 2018 study, Seapower States, an Australian maritime identity cannot be conjured overnight, for it is as much a cultural as a strategic creation. Australia lacks a culture of maritime identity that can support and nourish the transition towards a submarine-dominated ADF pursuing a sea denial concept of strategy. We are dingoes, not sharks, in our geographical sensibility, more familiar with the outback than the ocean. A terrestrial outlook is reinforced by our historical experience of war, which has been forged by soldiers, not sailors. It is the Digger in the slouch-hat who defines the Australian military tradition, and the cultural power of that tradition should not be underestimated.

Nothing illustrates the national indifference towards defence self-reliance more than the electorate’s tepid response to the AUKUS nuclear submarine project. There is no sign of a “dreadnought fever” or any other naval strategic imperative at work in the contemporary popular imagination to underpin Australia’s AUKUS ambitions. On the contrary, there is either little interest or a sense of scepticism in the community about maritime affairs. For example, Australian shipbuilding is seen by many in the electorate as merely a useful way of providing jobs in South Australia in a salvage operation for what remains of the nation’s manufacturing industry.

Budget and funding

The challenge of funding represents the third concern for Australia in building credible defence preparedness. Australia’s level of defence spending does not match the political rhetoric that the country now faces “the worst strategic circumstances since the end of the Second World War”. At a historical moment when warning time is now lost and our forces are ill-equipped for high-end operations, there needs to be an immediate injection of money for swift reforms. Yet here we encounter the problem of the chicken and the egg. It would be wise to ensure that, before billions of taxpayer dollars are poured into a dysfunctional Defence enterprise, the latter’s organisational system is dramatically overhauled. There is a reform opportunity here. because the bulk of new defence spending at $50.3 billion is being deferred into the 2030s with only $5.7 billion being available across the forward estimates to 2028. If the next four years are used to rid Defence of a bloated and defective diarchy in favour of a streamlined leadership with an effective capability production system, then, despite incurring strategic risk, fiscal delay might become a silver lining.

The harsh truth facing Australia is that, given our submarine ambitions and other ADF requirements, the defence budget needs to be increased to 3 per cent of GDP if we are to have a credible future ADF. In late July, at a major AUKUS conference in Perth, a panel of former defence ministers from both sides of politics agreed that between 3 and 3.5 per cent of GDP was necessary for Australia to have a credible military. In 2025, national defence will amount to 2.2 per cent and may reach 2.4 per cent of GDP by the early 2030s. The amount is insufficient, especially at a time when inflation is reducing purchasing power for capability acquisitions.

Fiscal scarcity will inevitably diminish the ADF’s overall operational strength if the quest for a focused force proceeds as planned. The bulk of money will be poured into Pillar 1 of AUKUS to acquire nuclear submarines. Indeed, this process has already begun with the decommissioning of the RAN’s de-mining and replenishment fleets, the abandonment of a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for the air force, a cutback in land force armoured vehicles and the abandonment of ballistic missile defence. The long-term risk for Australia is clear. On current fiscal trajectories, the nation may end up with a situation in which it can have a focused force largely based on a nuclear submarine navy, or it can have a balanced ADF that can fight across five domains—but it cannot have both.

National resilience and national security

A fourth weakness in Australia’s defence preparation is national resilience. Australia’s maritime supply chains and merchant marine remain too weak and vulnerable to interdiction by an adversary in a crisis. In an age of networks, our critical infrastructure is exposed to the threat of cyber disruption and sabotage. It is sobering to realise that the last official Australian document to discuss societal mobilisation in public was a 1990 report, The Defence Force and the Community (the Wrigley Report). In 2024, there is little or no official conversation with the Australian people to discuss how a post-industrial society might prepare itself for the challenge of a major war. With a few exceptions, our public debate is wedded to sensationalism and the dreary politics of race, class and gender. In Australia there is an urgent need for an informed dialogue between government, citizens, and the private sector, on defence and national security. Only through a national conversation can we strengthen the societal support base by linking the remnants of our manufacturing industry to considerations of workforce capacity and the security of critical infrastructure.

The first step in fostering any national dialogue is for the government to undertake a comprehensive needs-analysis to frame and guide a “whole-of-nation” strategic effort. The 2024 National Defence Strategy presents no plan for mobilising national power and lacks any consideration of a strategic-level methodology to guide an integrated national effort. Nor does the latest Defence document propose a co-operative organisational model or advance a doctrine of fusion through which the Department of Defence might consult with the inter-agency security community. It is hubris for the Department of Defence to promote what it calls the “holistic deployment of Australian national power” without any discussion whatsoever of the mechanisms required to embrace contributions from key departments such as Treasury, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Home Affairs, and Immigration. In short, the recent National Defence Strategy is bereft of any design to connect Defence with the inter-agency ecosystem in a manner than can bind practitioners from different areas of government in the complex task of harnessing the sinews of national power. Indeed, the new strategy is a perfect example of the pathology of “defence by document” whereby rhetoric replaces reality.

Australia’s true need is less a national defence concept than an integrated national security review to decide how best to organise our national power. In terms of reviews, an integrated national security review is the exception that proves the rule—the one document we truly do require to enhance defence and security preparations. Only an integrated security blueprint will enable government to align defence with funding, strategy with structures, and processes to people to encourage a streamlined culture of national security expertise. If done properly and swiftly, an integrated review could serve as a guide for issue-specific Defence documents and policy streams so improving our capacity for society-wide crisis-management.

Yet, in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the fissures it opened in federal governance structure, Australian politicians seem allergic to a national security approach. The folk wisdom in Canberra is that, in a federal system of states, a national security approach is “an inhibitor of freedom of action”. Yet, paradoxically, the very absence of a national security approach consigns the nation to a patchwork of uncoordinated strategies and resource plans that can never be mastered or directed by the Department of Defence. Relying on Defence, a dysfunctional department at the best of times, to manage national power in the 2020s is a mark of Australia’s lack of strategic vision.

Over time, a national security strategy is likely to be forced upon Australia because of the systemic global challenges posed by the arrival of what some policy specialists call the phenomenon of a polycrisis. A polycrisis is what occurs when fast moving trigger-events (such as Covid, the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza crisis) combine with slow-moving stresses (such as the rise of China, climate-driven energy anxieties, Western economic decline and a collapse in liberal democratic confidence) to push the global system out of established equilibrium into a volatile state of disequilibrium. In the 2020s, given numerous global challenges, we are arguably already in a polycrisis. If we are to have any hope of navigating the intersection of simultaneous and serious challenges, we must develop an enhanced national capacity for risk-management, resilience and national mobilisation. While such a national security approach intimately involves defence considerations, it cannot be led by a top-heavy Defence Department with a long record of failure.

The ideological climate and the ADF’s loss of moral standing

The fifth challenge facing Australia’s defence preparedness is the divisive ideological climate that is now affecting national cohesion and the sense of what it means to be Australian. We cannot separate the malaise in Australian defence from the broader malaise afflicting Australian society. The Lucky Country is sleepwalking into moral confusion due to a combination of a loss common values, social cohesion, poor economic productivity and lack of national vision. A faltering education system has much to answer for, not least in the roles that schools and universities need to play in the teaching of history and civics. Any effective national defence effort requires that free people educate themselves in a basic knowledge of war as a matter of civic duty. In Rhetoric, Aristotle puts it well when he writes:

[A citizen] must know the extent of the military strength of his country, both actual and potential and further, what wars his country has waged, and how it has waged them [and] about countries with which war is likely in order that peace may be maintained.

Since most of the Australian public education system no longer teaches the wisdom of the ancient Greeks let alone the history we derive from our Judeo-Christian heritage, this essential knowledge is now rare. Its absence affects recruitment and retention in the ADF. Many Millennials and Zoomers now view war as a social invention and not as a tragic part of the human condition. As Canadian historian Margaret Macmillan notes in her 2020 book War: How Conflict Shaped Us, “we like to think of war as an aberration, as the breakdown of the normal state of peace. This is comforting but wrong. War is deeply woven into the history of human society.”

Lack of historical education on how wars occur is one reason recruitment numbers in Western militaries are dire—especially amongst Zoomers, our first postmodern digital natives. Recent surveys in the United States reveal that 50 per cent of Zoomers believe that American foreign policy and defence should give priority to resolving global climate change. Only 12 per cent of Zoomers believe the United States should focus its main international activity on countering the rise of Chinese power, and this statistic is reflected in American military enlistment. Recruitment into the ADF is equally bleak. At present, the ADF is 7 per cent below its base requirement with a shortfall of 4400 personnel. In 2016, the Turnbull government sought to outline long-term plans to raise the ADF to 80,000 regular personnel by 2040. Despite heavy doses of advertising and the use of retention bonuses, this goal now seems like a mirage. Just how Australia is to find the naval personnel to crew five new nuclear submarines by 2040 has yet to be explained.

Low Australian military recruitment figures come as no surprise given a zeitgeist that emphasises individual rights, racial identities, victim pathologies and entitlements, at the expense of social duties, national pride and the merits of service. We are far removed from G.K. Chesterton’s moral justification for those who don uniform to defend civilisation: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” When educational curricula suggest that Australian history is a shameful saga of colonial conquest, indigenous exploitation, and institutional racism, our youth are inclined not to love but to hate what is behind them. Joining the ADF is viewed by a growing number of Zoomers as an immoral career choice. In an age of narcissism and civilisational self-hatred, it is increasingly difficult to impart Immanuel Kant’s famous injunction that “the highest reason for living is to seek to act from a sense of righteous duty, to follow something greater than oneself and to discover how to serve”.

Matters are made worse when the profession of arms demonstrates a loss of faith in the nobility of its mission. The Australian military profession has always had a relatively low status in a national imagination dominated by a belief that, in times of war and crisis, bronzed Anzacs will spring out of the ground like the warriors in Greek mythology. In the anti-elitist heroic saga of Anzac, it is the ordinary volunteer Digger, not the officer, who is revered by the populace. As a result, when war crime allegations swirl around our Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and blame falls on Diggers and not their officers, there is predictable community cynicism. The fact that no senior Army officer has seen fit to assume command accountability and resign over the actions of Mad Max subordinates in Afghanistan has damaged the moral standing of the ADF in the eyes of many Australians. When military careerism combines with bureaucratic dysfunction one has a witches’ brew inside Defence that fewer and fewer Australian wish to taste. As security analyst Alan Dupont noted in the Australian:

The litany of bad news coming out of Defence across the past decade, from expensive acquisition fiascos to [ADF] command failures and the poor treatment of veterans, hasn’t helped [recruitment]. This has weakened [military] morale internally and made parents question whether they want their sons and daughters serving in an ADF that doesn’t appear to value its people.

Given a loss of command integrity and moral standing, if Australia is to retain an ADF at establishment and attract sufficient recruits, the profession of arms must reinvigorate itself as an honoured calling. Senior ADF officers who are the stewards of the military profession must be seen to possess the moral courage to be accountable for the actions of those under their command.

Conclusion

In the past five years, Australia and fellow countries of the democratic West have moved from a post-war to a pre-war world. Earlier this year, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, reflected this change in defence fortunes when he declared, “Europe today is mortal. It can die and that depends solely on our choices, but those choices have to be made now.” Australia too, is mortal, even if many of its people remain lotus eaters without the historical imagination to grasp the truth behind the nation’s defence weakness.

In 2024, we are a divided nation lacking leadership and vision, unready for the gathering storm of strategic revanchism fostered by our authoritarian adversaries. Despite AUKUS and the 2024 National Defence Strategy, the Australian political establishment prefers indulging in kabuki rhetoric rather than concrete action. We possess a dysfunctional Defence Department, a weak and undermanned ADF, an inadequate defence budget and too few citizens willing to serve in our armed forces. These are our mortal truths. The youthful generation that is likely to suffer in blood for Australia’s defence unpreparedness is now too poorly educated to understand the nation’s predicament. Unwittingly, in the future ahead, many Millennials and Zoomers are likely to encounter the greatest mortal truth: Bertolt Brecht’s grim warning in his 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children: “like love, war always finds a way”.

Michael Evans is Emeritus Professor of Military Studies at Deakin University and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington DC. This article is based on his address to Western Heritage Australia’s Round Table Forum, “Global Conflicts and Australia’s Defence Preparedness”, held at the State Parliament of New South Wales on May 7.