Transcript
Good morning, Admiral Johnston, distinguished guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, once said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
For the Royal Australian Air Force, there is one particular day in our history that, 83 years on, remains a source of reflection.
That day is the 19th of February 1942.
It’s the day 242 enemy aircraft darkened the skies of Darwin, effortlessly dropping bombs, across two separate attacks, on Darwin harbour, the city and the RAAF base.
It is the Royal Australian Air Force’s darkest hour. The attacking force was met with no opposition from Australian airborne defence, none whatsoever – and the surface defences did the best they could with what they had.
The attacking force had the opportunity to drop bombs, circle back, and drop some more.
In terms of damage, the cost was counted as 30 aircraft destroyed, nine ships in the harbour and two outside of the harbour were sunk, and some of the civil and military facilities in Darwin were destroyed.
But the heaviest price paid was in lives lost, and the bombing of Darwin cut short the lives of 235 civilians and allied service personnel.
It is, to this day, the most significant military attack on the Australian mainland.
Immediately following the attack, questions were rightly asked.
As a country, we knew the threat. We knew it was highly likely, at some stage, Darwin would be attacked – government had even evacuated most of the women and children – so then why were we so woefully unprepared when those first bombs dropped?
From a military point of view, there were three key failings.
Firstly, we hadn’t invested in the right capability.
Secondly, we hadn’t organised and postured ourselves, to prepare for attack, and that included implementing the right command and control.
And, thirdly, we hadn’t planned and practised how we would react and respond in the event of an attack.
It is widely accepted that our strategic imagination failed us, at least militarily, and our failure in foresight led to a failure in operational planning. We failed to sense change and it opened us to risk and closed us to opportunity. When those first bombs fell on Darwin, we were left with only a very modest, tactical response. It wasn’t enough.
Today, we find ourselves facing the most challenging strategic circumstances since the Second World War.
We are increasingly seeing long-established international rules and norms being contested, which is creating uncertainty, risk of miscalculation, and heighted security challenges that have real and direct impacts for all of us.
On the day I took command of the Royal Australian Air Force, I noted we are in a period of strategic autumn.
We have seen the return of great power competition globally. In our region, our role, along with our partners and allies, is to deter crisis and conflict…
…our role is to make and influence decisions that will avoid further deterioration of the strategic autumn – and prevent winter from coming.
Australia’s National Defence Strategy, released last year, outlines how we are evolving to meet these challenges.
The Strategy details how the current strategic environment has diminished Australia’s historical and geographical advantages and demands a new approach to defending Australia and its national interests.
This new approach is based on the concept of National Defence, which looks to harness all elements of national power to defend Australia and its interests.
To deliver on National Defence, the Government has directed Defence to adopt a Strategy of Denial.
The Strategy of Denial aims to deter conflict, to prevent a potential adversary from succeeding in coercing Australia, to support regional security and prosperity, and uphold a favourable regional strategic balance.
It is important to note, above all else, the Strategy of Denial is about deterrence.
Given deterrence is the centrepiece of our strategy, we must have a very clear, consistent idea of what deterrence looks like and where and how it is delivered.
Our National Defence Strategy defines deterrence as “the use of the military and other elements of national power to discourage or restrain a potential adversary from taking unwanted actions. It involves having in place measures and responses that change a potential adversary’s risk assessment and therefore decision-making calculus.”
Put simply, the battle for deterrence occurs in the minds of those malign actors who have the power to achieve their goals through force, and in doing so push us all from autumn into winter.
We deter by generating doubt – by presenting multiple dilemmas across all dimensions of national power as an orchestrated effect – to make Australia a costly proposition to attack.
In the military dimension, we talk about the four Cs of deterrence: capability, credibility, communication, and comprehension.
In regards to capability, our 2024 Integrated Investment Program sets out the Government’s program of planned defence capability investments over the next decade to deliver our Strategy of Denial.
It makes sure that Australia becomes more capable, more self-reliant and takes responsibility for its own security in an alliance and partner framework.
But we must acknowledge capability is not a sufficient deterrent in itself. It is a singular layer.
In regards to credibility, we are re-posturing to an integrated force and deepening our regional and international partnerships. But, again, we must acknowledge that operations and activities with allies and partners are important – very important – but insufficient.
Australia must present weight to credibly deter in its own right.
The National Defence Strategy clearly states that ‘to deter actions against Australia’s interests’ we must be able to demonstrate ‘our capability and resolve to respond to and withstand attacks on Australian territory.’
In my view, to achieve this, we must lift the concept of Force Generation as a direct contributor to deterrence.
Force Generation is how Air Force prepares its people, its organisations, and its capabilities to make sure we are ready to generate, deliver, and sustain highly effective air power when it is required, in the circumstances it is required.
It is about making sure we have the right people and the right capability, and that we have done the right training – that we have planned and practiced how we will react and respond – to undertake current tasks and potential future tasks.
When I say we must lift the concept of Force Generation strategically, what I mean is it’s not just Force Generation for itself, but it’s a powerful way to contribute to the national strategy of deterrence through posture with weight.
Let me explain that in greater detail.
We talk a lot about how to induce a sense of risk in a potential adversary’s calculations, and to change that risk balance to one in which an adversary concludes the risks outweigh the benefits. The logic of deterrence is that it only works if you signal your own preparedness to accept risk in pursuit of your objective.
To be credible in our capability to deny the adversary their objectives, it requires us to design, train, and force generate the quality and quantity of forces to actually deny the adversary their objectives in conflict conditions.
Seeing is believing.
Therefore, to “fight a deterrence fight” requires us to posture and train the way we would fight today and how we think we would fight tomorrow.
This is needed for two key reasons.
Firstly, as I said earlier, one of the key military failures of the bombing of Darwin was that we hadn’t planned and practiced how we would react and respond in the event of an attack.
To make sure we do not repeat history, we need to prioritise training. This is needed not just for the current force but for the future force out to 2040 and beyond.
Secondly, while we can generate and deliver highly effective air power, as part of the integrated force on current operations in competition phase, what Force Generation allows us to do is rehearse and demonstrate we can also deliver, degrade, disrupt, destroy, and defeat in crisis and conflict.
Those are some of the ‘d’ words of deterrence and we must demonstrate our ability to achieve those four words.
If we successfully demonstrate those words, then we are communicating in a way the malign minds can comprehend.
And if we think of and invest in Force Generation as a direct strategic contributor to deterrence through denial, then we will also invest in the fundamental inputs to capability – bases, infrastructure, systems, logistics and personnel – required to sustain our deterrence through the long autumn ahead.
The benefit is twofold: by force generating we are deterring, and by force generating we are ensuring our preparedness to respond to winter, should it come, despite our best collective efforts.
So what does this look like for our Air Force? It looks like harnessing what makes Australian air power unique – like vast distances, and transforming them into opportunities through the spectrum of competition to conflict.
It’s about generating and exploiting depth in time, space and posture … which is the theme of today’s symposium.
Air power is at the heart of National Defence and the Strategy of Denial. In the Indo-Pacific, we are in a maritime theatre defined by vast distances - Australia is an island, albeit an immense one, surrounded by archipelagic and maritime spaces. But all of it is covered by air.
The speed, reach and flexibility of the air domain are critical to assuring the generation and manoeuvre of the integrated force in the region.
Given Australia is such a large land mass, aviation is engrained in our country’s modus operandi. We are an aviation nation.
We want to maximise – indeed exploit – Australia’s diverse and geographically dispersed aviation infrastructure, in both our northern and southern areas.
We do this by taking an agile approach to air operations, which allows us to posture and manoeuvre our forces to generate a highly effective, highly lethal and survivable force.
I’ll give you just two examples of what that looks like in practice.
In north Australia, we’re working with privately owned and civilian airfields to increase the number of locations from which we can generate air power. The integration with our civilian and industry partners has been fantastic, and these steps to generate air combat power together are just the beginning.
The other example is Fighter FARP, which stands for Forward Arming and Refuelling Point. It will give us the ability to draw on our current air mobility and air combat capabilities to allow us to use airfields with limited or no infrastructure to quickly regenerate combat power. Literally re-arming, refuelling, re-crewing, re-planning air combat formations from the back of air mobility platforms.
With more options available to our operational commanders to manoeuvre our forces and concentrate combat power at a point of our choosing, we have the ability to project, to move rapidly around our continent and deliver air power through competition, crisis and conflict – delivering deterrence through denial; and if needed, to quote the great Mohammad Ali, to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
These examples demonstrate we are seeking agility and asymmetry in all that we do.
Another aspect of generating and exploiting depth in time, space and posture is looking to the future and making sure our Air Force is an autonomy-enabled force - integrated, lethal, sustainable, scalable, and survivable. This is a significant capability enhancer not only for Air Force, and the ADF – but for industry and national power. The future is opportunity.
Going back to the bombing of Darwin, in the years and months leading up to it, as a Defence Force, as a country, we didn’t do enough, fast enough to ready ourselves for attack. We hadn’t imagined what the attack would like look, or if we had, we hadn’t taken that imagining seriously enough. Perhaps it was always a problem for tomorrow, a problem for the future.
Let’s learn from history. Let’s not condemn ourselves to repeat it.
The battle for deterrence is not a problem for the future, it has already begun – and deterrence has two sides.
On one side, deterrence is about generating doubt in the malign minds who have the power to push us from autumn into winter.
On the other side, deterrence depends on overcoming the doubt holding us back in our own minds—we must leave behind the pursuit of perfect, and embrace timely, novel, and tailored air power solutions at appropriate levels of risk, and at the pace of strategic relevance.
This can no longer be an organisational aspiration; it must become how we think and act as individuals right now.
Today, you will hear from a number of eminent peers and professionals who will no doubt challenge and shape your thinking.
As we listen and engage I would like you to ask yourself a question as Air Power leaders, followers and decision makers;
‘What am I doing to actively challenge traditional modes of capability, systems and cultural thinking to generate the depth we need today? – because we can’t wait for tomorrow.
Per Ardua ad Astra.
Thank you.