Australia races to reform defence amid shift of power in region from US to China

Australia will overhaul its defence force as changes in power competition in the Indo-Pacific region and the speed of military threats mean its current capabilities are no longer "fit for purpose", the government has said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's administration on Monday released a public version of a major strategic review of Australia's defence capabilities - the first in about 37 years. It commissioned the report soon after Albanese took office in May 2022.

Criticised by the opposition party for being light on defence spending previously, the Labor government has agreed to many of the review's recommendations and will implement major changes, such as improving the defence force's ability to carry out long-range strikes and investing in nuclear-powered submarines, as part of the Aukus security tie-up announced earlier this year.

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"The review is clear that we cannot waste any more time when it comes to acquiring critical defence capabilities," Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles said on Monday, the eve of Australia's Anzac Day war commemorations. "The Albanese government is determined to reform defence and its capability acquisition processes to ensure our defence forces have the capabilities they need and sooner."

Despite years of being insulated from direct threats from other conflicts in the region, Australia now faces a need to renew its defence capabilities.

The Australian army, for example, will be improved so it can conduct "littoral manoeuvre operations by sea, land and air from Australia, with enhanced long-range fires".

The air force must be able to maintain "a network of northern airbases with appropriate hardening and dispersal" and the navy's capability will be transformed by nuclear-powered submarines which have been ordered via Aukus.

Driving these changes are changes in the region including China's growing military strength, the report said.

The region's leading power, the United States, is no longer the unipolar leader of the Indo-Pacific. Military forces in other countries have modernised and China's military build-up is now "the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War".

However, there remains "only a remote possibility of any power contemplating an invasion of our continent", the report added.

"This build-up is occurring without transparency or reassurance to the Indo-Pacific region of China's strategic intent," the report said. "As a consequence, for the first time in 80 years, we must go back to fundamentals, to take a first-principles approach as to how we manage and seek to avoid the highest level of strategic risk we now face as a nation."

While an invasion is not predicted, threats to Australia also include non-invasion threats such as disruptions to Australia's security interests including cyber warfare and interrupted trade routes, the review said. Australia has lost "warning time" given the modernisation of military capabilities.

"More countries are able to project combat power across greater ranges ... cyber warfare is not bound by geography," the report said.

"The rise of the 'missile age' in modern warfare, crystallised by the proliferation of long-range precision strike weapons, has radically reduced Australia's geographic benefits, the comfort of distance and our qualitative regional capability edge."

This underpins Canberra's next steps which is to undertake a whole-of-government overhaul and "harness all elements of national power" including a bigger role for foreign affairs.

The report calls for stronger regional defence partnerships with Southeast Asia, New Zealand, Japan, India and others such as the UK and Nato while reinforcing the US as Australia's key military ally.

"Contrary to some public analysis, our alliance with the United States is becoming even more important to Australia," it said.

Albanese did not directly address questions about the US' reliability as an ally at a press conference on Monday, but said Canberra's relationship with Washington was "a relationship between peoples and it's based upon our common values".

But both Albanese and Marles made clear that despite these defence changes, the Labor government "supports the status quo", especially in relation to Taiwan. There have been concerns that there will be conflict in the Taiwan Strait if the mainland were to take the self-ruled island by force.

"We call for peaceful resolution through dialogue. That's not changed by this," Albanese said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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