Devising a cohesive warfighting strategy

In August, the Albanese government  launched the Defence Strategic Review, touted as the largest assessment of the Australian Defence Force’s structure, force posture and ­preparedness in 35 years.

According to the terms of reference, the review would include considerations of the “priority of investment” in Defence capabilities.

The review aims to “identify and prioritise” the estate, infrastructure, disposition, logistics and security investments required to “provide Australia with the Defence force posture required by 2032-33”.

This involves considering “all elements of the Integrated Investment Program” and issuing recommendations for “the program’s reprioritisation” in response to recently announced “large-scale projects”.

Recommendations are due to be handed down in March 2023 in time for the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

But according to Bob Moyse — a former Royal Australian Navy and Royal Marines officer and former desk officer in the strategic policy division of the Department of Defence — the review must look beyond capability procurement.

Moyse claims the review must also examine the “type of fight” the Australian Defence Force must prepare for, avoiding “genericism”.

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The veteran notes a lack of cohesion between the services, making particular reference to the operational challenges of a forward posture requiring deployed forces from both Army and Navy.

“Unless Australia is invaded, the army needs to get out into the region to be relevant, but no single service is master of its own destiny,” he writes in ASPI's The Strategist.

“What it can aspire to is constrained by the Navy. As a rule, it takes three ships to keep one operational.

“It may be possible to surge to two or three with long enough notice, at the cost of subsequent downtime.”

Moyse notes while the Canberra Class landing helicopter docks’ heavy vehicle deck is designed to support 12 main battle tanks, its light vehicle dock may not be capable of accommodating army’s next-generation armoured vehicles.

“HMAS Choules can theoretically carry more. Divide the number of vehicles in a brigade by the capacity of HMA Ships Canberra, Adelaide and Choules, then multiply the number of trips by the time each will take, and you’ll soon see that this won’t be blitzkrieg,” he observes.

“There’s no commercial shipping available in the region suitable for landing heavy armour either. Even if there were, it would need a suitable port, of which there are few and likely not where we want to go.”

“Once hostilities start, hitting static installations like ports doesn’t require a kill chain; it’s just a matter of hitting a grid reference. Lose the port and the landed force becomes the stranded force.”

Moyse goes on to note interoperability challenges between the Navy and Air Force, noting risks for surface ships operating without air cover.

“Covering operations in the Bismarck Sea, the Louisiade Archipelago, New Caledonia or Timor from distant mainland bases is questionable at best,” he writes.

“I’ll leave it to Air Force logisticians to explain the infeasibility of placing expeditionary air bases closer to the fight with the Air Force’s current and planned structures.”

Moyse argues these challenges reflect the evolution of a disjointed strategy, with each service preparing to fight a different war.

“The current force structure represents ad hoc mutual adjustment,” Moyse adds.

“Policy and design don’t impose coherence on the system. The elements are not even a system.”

This, he claims, is evidenced by Australia’s amphibious warfare capability.

“Uniquely to Australia, it comes under the ‘land’ domain and the Navy and Army are running their own separate amphibious capability projects to their own separate concepts of operations,” he writes.

“When you live next to the world’s largest archipelago and can’t get this right, you have a systemic problem.”

Moyse concludes by claiming the success of the Defence Strategic Review would be dependent on its ability to unite the services under a shared warfighting strategy.

“A generic fight is a good way to facilitate goals everyone can agree on and avoid focusing on some objectives rather than others,” he writes.

“It allows each service to quietly consent to stay out of the other two’s business as long as it gets its third of the pie.

“A test of the review will be whether it forces Defence to join the parts together to a common purpose.”

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