Australia’s Chief of Defence Force has told a major regional defence summit that deeper collaboration with like-minded partners and allies with mechanisms such as AUKUS could potentially offset the challenges of scale, costs and the pace of technological development.
General Angus Campbell was speaking at a special session on the challenges of Asia-Pacific military capability development at the annual Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore that took place on the first weekend of June.
The event is organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies – Asia (IISS-Asia) and brings together defence ministers and officials from across the Indo-Pacific and the world to discuss and enhance security in the region.
General Campbell outlined the challenges Australia faces in its drive to improve its defence capabilities, the primary ones being distance from its supply sources and ever-increasing costs of increasingly sophisticated and complex systems.
“An island nation bound by three oceans and one that largely depends on a range of just-in-time imports, Australia is extremely sensitive to changes in international supply chains,” he said.
He added that this impacts the defence sphere as sophisticated military technologies are often constructed with unique and complex components. “Most countries, including Australia, do not possess many of these components in large quantities, nor do we currently possess the industrial capacity to manufacture them,” he noted.
“The consequence is that “this creates significant dependencies – dependencies that must be reliable when the defensive sovereignty and national interest is at stake.
“The cost of new capabilities being sought are also expensive given their inherent complexity and sophistication, particularly in a “constrained fiscal environment” that “limits the amount available to be spent on research and development or on preparedness” and “impacts the ability of many nations to purchase advanced systems and components in sufficient quantities and within required time frames.”
However, he said that challenges such as the costs associated with developing capabilities encourages deeper collaboration with like-minded partners and allies and cited AUKUS as an example, calling it an opportunity to see the accelerated development of other advanced capabilities and technologies.
“Deepening collaboration with allies and partners to design inter-operability and indeed interchangeability into technologies from the outset not only reduces development and procurement costs but strengthens combined war-fighting capability,” GEN Campbell continued.
He also said that governments are seeking to minimise bureaucratic red tape and are indicating their willingness to accept higher levels of managed risk in an effort to keep up with the speed of technological advances.
These advances and new capabilities, particularly those that featured increased autonomy, provide smaller nations like Australia unique opportunities to generate mass while an increased appetite for risk “can give confidence to research agencies and private industry alike to develop, test and adjust novel capabilities and technologies and to pursue retaining or obtaining relative military advantage”.
Further, many of these new capabilities, particularly those with increased autonomy, afford nations with smaller populations such as Australia with unique opportunities to generate mass, GEN Campbell said.
Editor's Note: General Campbell will be addressing the ADM Congress on 21 June 2023. For tickets: https://admevents.com.au/