The Defence Strategic Review is a claim to command civil society
Apr 26, 2023
The kind of strategic study Australia needs, to preside over this kind of defence staff college scribble, is one which gives a sense of our civil society’s capacities, needs, aspirations — and our neighbourhood.
The Flippingbook is an entirely inappropriate, narrow minded, chauvinistic, militaristic thing that belongs in a country practising for fascism, the submergence of the civil power and civil society.
The Defence Strategic Review in its public form, curiously “flippingbook” is something adopted by our elected government. It is nonetheless an alarming grab by the defence force for command of national resources, arrogantly saying that DFAT is to do the diplomacy, that other authorities will deal with emergencies and the defence force withdrawn largely from support for the civil power.
It imperiously asserts command over government generally, its social, economic, and environmental actions to serve some national strategy, posture of resilience, defence against threat with no warning time (including by submarines that may or may not exist in thirty years).
It uses a very small map to define a vast area of defence interest but it has nothing to say about, nothing to suggest comprehension of or interest in the three billion diverse peoples and governments who live in this area.
It laments the end of unipolar command by the United States and affects an apprehensive view of multipolarity. It assumes that China will conduct itself in the world as has the United States.
It surveys the past thirty years of American omnipotence from a small window at 100,000ft, with no acknowledgement of the overwhelming failures of American power and the way in which it we entangled ourselves with illegal and dishonest and ill-managed attacks on countries particularly in the middle east and Afghanistan. Where we have spent human and physical, moral and economic resources in stupid, illegal, ineffectual and damaging events, where in this document is there any awareness of this? Nowhere. I cannot see in the shiny language of the Flippingbook any understanding that the immediate past has been dark, immoral, foolish military failure. It gives no confidence of real change.
The Flippingbook disparages the random pattern of white and other papers and proposes (and the government accepts) that there should be another Flippingbook every two years.
The kind of strategic study Australia needs, to preside over this kind of defence staff college scribble, is one which gives a sense of the nation’s capacities, needs, aspirations — and our neighbourhood.
The Flippingbook is an entirely inappropriate, narrow minded, chauvinistic, militaristic thing that belongs in a country practising for fascism, the submergence of the civil power and civil society.
Flippingbook seeks to define our role in our region primarily as power projection. That is perhaps suitable for a defence force but only a defence for whose role in national strategy is limited. We are not a military state, our resources must not be focused on feeding the defence force and the defence mind.
Flippingbook threatens to steal minds and resources. We must get national resources sensibly focused on making this a country worth defending, with less inequality, fair employment, housing, opportunity, and new industries including in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, maximising our new energy resources and securing the environment. Re-embarking on lost connections with our region, respecting ASEAN as an emerging major economic power, knowing languages and cultures. Without effort to know our neighbourhood we will be like Albania was when it only connected to Cultural Revolution China. We do not need to be the barking mad white trash of Asia.
The Flippingbook offers no awareness of the degree of disintegration of the civil power in the United States and the lack of control, lack of interest in control of US defence forces advancing on China.
There is no sense of fragilities in the international system arising from US circumstances. No awareness of how the pursuit of the Ukraine war without relent, without objective of peaceful conclusion, is not only reducing Ukraine to a corrupt rubble, but has drawn down Western weapon and ammunition resources in a bigger than Iraq objective-free neocon disaster, encompassing all of Europe and with the revile of most of the human population on the planet, draining the power of the US dollar. With wide awareness that the United States projects either military force or economic sanctions, there is a steady sell off of foreign holdings of US Treasury paper… why put your money where it might be blocked or confiscated. The notion of permanently weakening Russia and then turning on China is a neocon dream, for others a nightmare.
Before writing another line about fighting China, it would be useful if aggressive media, officials and ministers could read and reflect upon this very recent philosophical discourse on the historical Chinese view of the world.
Dennis Argall's degrees were in anthropology and defence studies. his governmental work in foreign, defence and domestic departments and for the Australian parliament. His overseas postings included Beijing as ambassador, and Washington. He regrets the extent of his personal experience with disability but it has perhaps sharpened his desire that the future be a better country.
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