The Australian Defence Minister launched a new National Defence Strategy last week. It is accompanied by a revised Defence Integrated Investment Program (at the same link) describing important people, equipment, and weapons priorities.
The new strategy contains three foundational ideas. The first is that the security environment in the Indo-Pacific, and globally, is changing rapidly and in ways that are not favourable to Australia’s interest. Second, that the nation must focus the bulk of its defence efforts on the region. Finally, the document adopts a strategy of denial as the key approach to defence planning.
A deterrence-by-denial concept is appropriate for Australia. As a nation allied to one superpower and facing potential conflict with another, Australia has to make a choice from three different approaches to deterring attacks against the nation and its interest.
First, Australia might adopt deterrence by punishment. This promises to inflict costs on an adversary until compliance is achieved. For the 13th-largest economy in the world to propose doing this against the second-largest is not good strategy. A second approach is deterrence by retaliation. This is where Australia would threaten that the costs of a future undesirable activity by China or others will exceed the gains secured by that activity. In both cases, this would require Australia to have the capacity to strike directly and often at the homeland of our most likely adversary.
As such, Australia for decades has embraced (implicitly and lately, explicitly) a defence strategy which focusses on deterrence by denial, which promises that our response to some unwanted act will directly prevent our opponent from achieving their objectives. It implies a focus on targeting the forces directly threatening us, rather than the adversary’s homeland.
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