Talisman Sabre 2023: Big lessons from a large exercise

Media material from Defence gives glimpses of activities like the first firing of a Japanese type 12 anti-ship missile outside Japan, demonstration of a South Korean military multiple rocket launch system, and engineering feats like building a temporary 540-metre floating pier.

The big lessons are not about success of tactical weapons use or even coordination between the large number of participating militaries, though.

Instead, they are about the limitations of Australian facilities and supply chains for supporting even moderately large military cooperation. Talisman Sabre should be providing a menu for urgent action to remediate and reinvest in Australia’s ability to host and support our own military and those of our allies and partners. This role is key to Australia’s contribution to deterrence of an aggressive China in our region.

A total of 34,500 military personnel exercising together for two weeks is a small-scale warm-up for the force levels and cooperation needed should conflict occur in our region. To give some sense of perspective, by 1943, some 250,000 American troops were stationed in Australia, with over 1 million US Servicemen having operated through Australia over the course of the war.

To give another point of perspective about the scale of support required for a modern military, in Ukraine, between February 2022 and May this year, Putin’s forces have fired some 5,000 missiles and “one-way attack drones” at Ukraine. Putin has lost somewhere between 1,700 and 3,300 tanks in the war so far. And both sides have been struggling to have supply of ammunition like 155mm artillery rounds to keep up with the rates of use in combat.

So, impressive as the coordination, participation, and planning were, hosting an exercise involving 34,500 personnel who test fired tiny numbers of missiles, rockets, and munitions and built a pier and some dry river crossings can only hint at the scale of effort required to actually have Australia able to play a role as a strategic enabler of deterrence in our region.

The challenge for the Albanese government and the Defence organisation is to first understand and then communicate to the defence industry, wider corporate Australia, the State and Territory governments, and that often forgotten “stakeholder”, the Australian people, what needs to be done so that Australia’s role in deterrence is made real over the next 2,3, and 5 years. After all, this is the period that the government’s Defence Strategic review says may be defining for our region’s security.

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The menu for action is different to the usual preoccupations of defence officials, ministers, and commentators. It’s mainly not about the latest tender selection of a new weapon, ship, tank or aircraft and its cost. Instead, it’s about the boring but important stuff that plays to Australia’s key strategic advantage for our own military and for our partners and allies – our location.

That means overturning the long-used basis for investing in defence facilities like airbases, ports, weapons handling facilities, and storage. For decades, Defence has planned its investments in “the Defence estate” by scoping what is needed to support introduction to the Defence Force of a new platform – the Air Warfare Destroyers, the F-35 fighters or the huge C-17 aircraft. And the projects for acquiring these have had parallel projects to do just enough at the bases and places they will operate from to make it work. In other words, we’ve scaled our defence facilities and supply chains to just meet our current needs, just in time and with just enough capacity for peacetime exercising and operation.

The result is when we host even a modest size of partner militaries, we max out everything needed to operate our own forces and support these partners very quickly.

Given this, the challenge is to sketch out and address what it would take to supply our own and partner forces operating out of Australia with the volume and type of consumables they would need in a time of conflict. What port facilities, weapons handling, and storage arrangements would be needed, for example? What classes of supplies ranging from fuels to clothing to munitions and missiles need to be either sourced and imported or produced domestically and moved to where they need to be? How will our own and partner and allied ships, aircraft, submarines, and vehicles be sustained and maintained, where and by whom? And, out of all this, what preparatory investment and planning do we need to get in place now, not sometime in the 2030s or 40s?

The shift needed is to invest early in scaling up Australian airbases, naval facilities, weapons handling, and storage areas and all the known bottlenecks for moving, accommodating, and supplying a military in a time of conflict.

Leaving such investment until a conflict begins and then “mobilising” will only do two things: undercut the credibility of any deterrent message from Australia and its powerful allies and partners – and ensure that should a conflict actually occur, Australia is much more vulnerable and much less useful to our own military and our allies’ and partners militaries than it needs to be. In their Strategic Review, Stephen Smith and Angus Houston pointed to the urgent need to improve northern basing and wider infrastructure – no doubt understanding the price tag to be equally urgent new funding.

The big problems with this acceleration and expansion of Australian facility and supply chain capacity are obvious: even a known need like the new east coast submarine base has been put on the backburner by the government. And investment in expanded defence facilities and supply chains beyond that already scoped and budgeted for back in the 2016 Defence White Paper isn’t affordable with the Albanese government’s defence budget projection – no new money for the next four years and then the only potential new money seems earmarked for the AUKUS submarine program.

There’s embarrassment looming here for the government and for Defence, because the Americans understand the value of Australia as a strategic location to operate from and they are accelerating their investment of US taxpayers’ money into what the AUSMIN fact sheet calls “the ambitious trajectory of Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation across land, maritime and air domains as well as Combined Logistics Sustainment and Maintenance Enterprise”.

It won’t take long for Pentagon and Congressional figures to work out that the Australian side of this ambitious trajectory consists of tweaking, rebadging, and re-announcing projects and activities that have been in the Defence budget plans since the 2016 Defence White Paper. Looking at our slow movements while they accelerate and spend down under, our American ally is going to start applying that old Australian tourist slogan ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ to us.

There’s a real role here for the Australian Parliament and its committee system to get the actual lessons and implications from Talisman Sabre on the table for debate, public discussion, and to prompt government decision making. That’s because of the unfortunate tendency of Defence media management to want to just put out glowing reports of exercise highlights and the overwhelming reluctance of either ministers of officials to bring the Parliament or the public into their confidence about real shortfalls and what’s required to address them. The new joint statutory committee on defence, along with Senate Estimates, are the right places for this forensic discovery work.

Deterrence is more than even the most successful multinational exercise and much more than meeting announcements and fact sheets. Sometimes it’s about demonstration of capacity through investment in the boring and the mundane but essential things needed to support militaries in conflict and always it’s about an informed public, defence industry, and corporate sector understanding what’s at stake and what needs to be done to ensure our own and our region’s security.

Michael Shoebridge is director of Strategic Analysis Australia. From 2018 until September 2022, he was the director of the Defence, Strategy and National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra.