Listening to the three service chiefs speak at the Seapower Conference* yesterday, three things seem clear. Firstly, the ADF of five years from now will look very little like the one we have today. Secondly, the service chiefs are well aware of the challenge they face in transitioning the ADF towards being a joint, expeditionary, amphibious force. Finally, these three men will not be seeing much of their families in the next few years.

The Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Ray Griggs, described the shift to amphibious operations that will occur with the arrival of the RAN's LHDs as a 'quantum leap' for the ADF (photo, courtesy of the RAN, shows ADF officers inspecting the Spanish LHD, Juan Carlos I, on which the Canberra-class LHDs are based).

The scale of change occurring in the ADF was best detailed in Chief of Army LT GEN David Morrison's speech. It was a frank appraisal of the shortcomings Australia has in conducting amphibious operations – something that in his opinion we now need to 'relearn from first principles' after a 70-year hiatus. He outlined the need for a conceptual shift in Army away from viewing the Navy and Air Force purely as strategic lift, to understanding how to fight with all three services in a truly joint battle-space.

The Chief of Army also said that the recently launched Plan Beersheba will for the first time allow the Australian Army to achieve the objectives of the 2000 Defence White Paper, by overcoming the 'penny-packeting' of capability in the past that has made achieving joint interoperability so difficult in Army.

Henry Ergas has a sensible rebuttal in today's Australian of last week's piece by Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith arguing that a nuclear-propelled submarine option would erode Australia's defence self-reliance. Ergas points out, quite rightly, that the criteria of defence self-reliance for Australia imposed by Dibb and Brabin-Smith would only come at an unacceptable financial cost.

A point Ergas hasn't made (and which was pointed out to me by a correspondent) is that in several articles arguing against the nuclear submarine option, Professor Dibb has failed to declare that he is a member of the Defence SA advisory board. The board 'assists the (SA) State Government with its strategy and policy for delivering long-term defence industry growth', funded last week's Kokoda report on submarines, and includes the SA Treasurer, who last week lobbied Canberra for an Adelaide-built submarine.

Photo by Flickr user UK Defence Images.

Remember Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel 36? It seems the federal Opposition doesn't. That's the boat which was boarded in 2009 by Royal Australian Navy crew operating under Operation Resolute, the Navy's contribution to Australia's border protection. During the boarding a suspected illegal immigrant sabotaged the engine and lit a quantity of fuel which exploded the boat and led to the deaths of five people and injury to many more.

The coronial investigation (see p.19) identified that, upon boarding the boat, Navy personnel were required to read to passengers a warning and detention notice which began:

The government of Australia is determined to stop illegal migration to its territory...you should now consider returning to Indonesia with your passengers and not enter Australian territory.

And that it seems, is where the rubber meets the road in Australia's border protection policy debate – young naval officers and sailors reading farcical political statements in potentially life threatening encounters at sea.

Now the Opposition Leader wants the Navy to turn around more suspected illegal entry vessels and send them back to Indonesia. In the case of SIEV 36 the Northern Territory coroner concluded that this fear of being sent back was the catalyst for the unrest that followed. Such political statements sound tough, but they are toughest for the Royal Australian Navy, which must enforce them at sea.

Last week the Opposition was asked for its policy on the future submarine, Australia's most costly defence capital project. It demurred. Such is defence policy in Australia, where the Defence Force can be waved around like a political piñata while there seems little political interest in the details of long-term defence policy.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

ASPI's analysts have compared the cost of the future submarine project to the planned National Broadband Network (NBN).

The NBN debate has been public and vociferous. The Government and Opposition's dueling policies are detailed and their champions conduct near-constant briefings to all who will listen. Twitter lights up every time there is a new development in the debate, every piece of new data is critically analysed, and every tech head in the country has an opinion on the project's merits. In the past 12 months the NBN was mentioned 2382 times in Australia's major newspapers.

By contrast, the future submarine project received only 24 mentions — and most of them in the past two weeks. Only a handful of Australians have opinions on the future submarine. There is no detailed Opposition submarine policy, the Prime Minister has never expounded the topic, and there's been no debate at the National Press Club on future submarines. Most importantly, no one can gauge the views of Australia's 14,000 naval professionals because they are gagged by a ban on any public discussion that might be controversial.

The future submarine debate has been conducted largely among a small group of defence professionals, and mostly in closed forums (the Submarine Institute of Australia has done some excellent work on the topic). Several strategic options have been dismissed far too quickly.

There may be a comprehensive argument for why Australia's future submarine should be a home-designed, home-built evolution of the Collins Class, but today's Kokoda Foundation report (subscription needed to see the whole thing) hasn't provided it.

While the report summarises well Australia's strategic maritime disposition and the tasks the future submarine should be able to perform, it adds very little to the debate on how Australia's most expensive and complicated defence project should proceed.

Before it was released, questions had been raised about the objectivity of this report. Its lead author, Brice Pacey, was formerly a strategic analyst for the Australian Submarine Corporation, the company most likely to benefit financially from a decision to build the future submarine in Australia. But this detail is missing from the report's author biography.

The report was sponsored by a coalition of ten defence industry entities, all of which have an interest in a future submarine being built in Australia. But nowhere is it mentioned that their sponsorship on this occasion was linked to this particular report, rather than to the Kokoda Foundation generally.

One of those ten entities is Defence SA, and it may be entirely coincidental that this report finds that the federal government should fund home-grown future submarines and a land-based propulsion test facility in South Australia. It may also be coincidental that the report was launched on the very same day the South Australian Treasurer is in Canberra to lobby Defence on those exact same issues.

Co-authored by Simon Palombi, an intern in the International Security Program.

The UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week released a report discussing the UK response to increasing piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. Notably, it tracked a significant increase in the past six months of the use of onboard private military security contractor (PMSC) teams by shipping companies.

This increase has largely been driven by policy shifts in the UK, US and Denmark, which all now condone the use of armed guards aboard ships. Two months ago UK Prime Minister David Cameron noted that armed ships had lower odds of being hijacked and that PMSCs provide a practical solution to risk of piracy. Of the PMSCs which have signed an International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers, over 100 are equipped to provide maritime security services. In October last year, an armed shipboard security team repelled a pirate attack on the Poseidon Ocean Rig in cooperation with the Tanzanian navy.

But in international waters, PMSC teams seem to be operating in a legal vacuum, particularly when it comes to the detention of pirates. If a commercial vessel with an armed security team comes under attack from pirates, the ship may respond with force, and the flagged state may arrest and prosecute the pirates. However, if the PMSC team suppresses a group of pirates onboard, the domestic laws of the ship's flag state apply, meaning that detention by a PMSC team may not be legal.

Ultimately, there is little clear guidance as to what a PMSC could and, perhaps, should not do when in international waters.

Thinking of traveling in 2012? You could do worse than embark on an Indo-Pacific electoral tour. Many of the major countries in the Indo-Pacific will have elections during the coming 12 months.

Leadership change will happen on both sides of the Pacific. In China, a transition is expected to take place in October when the national Communist Party Congress sits. In the US the following month elections will take place for the president, house of representatives and one-third of the senate.

In Taiwan, a presidential and parliamentary election will take place on 14 January. In South Korea an election for the national assembly will be on 11 April, with presidential elections following in December. India's parliament will elect a new president in July. Malaysia's prime minister is expected to call national elections next year before the current parliamentary mandate expires in March 2013. Legislative elections in Hong Kong will take place in September.

Closer to home, Timor-Leste will elect a new president in May, Papua New Guinea will elect a new national parliament in June, and Vanuatu will elect a new parliament in September.

If you trust that elections are quiet, orderly affairs, then this bonanza of psephological delight won't concern you too much. But the 2012 electoral calender might just be a reminder that many of the voices shaping the Asian century are liable to change in the coming year. If you believe that politicians are prone to the occasional rhetorical foreign policy flourish for domestic audiences, then the 2012 Indo-Pacific electoral calender might not be the harbinger of stability the region needs.

Photo by Flickr user Cle0patra.

It's been nearly a month since three Australian soldiers were shot and killed in Afghanistan by a member of the Afghan National Army, and the public is no closer to understanding what Defence has concluded was the reason behind the attacks.

At the time, Defence committed to a full investigation of all three deaths. But Defence investigations into deaths in Afghanistan are taking longer to complete, and longer still to be publicly released. I've argued that one of the reasons for declining public support for the military presence in Afghanistan is a lack of defence transparency. An analysis of the time taken to investigate deaths in Afghanistan (see table below) shows that transparency is increasingly hard to come by.

Between 2007 and 2009 the average time taken by Inquiry Officers to complete reports was 54 days. Since 2010, an inquiry takes 144 days on average. Between 2007 and 2009 it took an average of seven months after a fatality for inquiry reports to be released to the public. Now the average is 15 months. More redaction is taking place in reporting too: the name of the Inquiry Officer is now often blacked out on released reports where previously full personal details of the report's author were left visible.

There have been 16* ADF fatalities in Afghanistan since Stephen Smith became Defence Minister yet only two inquiry reports has been released in that time. One of those reports, into the death of Private Bewes from an IED, took eight months to complete and another eight months before it was released to the public in October this year. The inquiries into the deaths of Sappers Moreland and Smith on 7 June 2010 have now taken more than 541 days to be released.

There's been another incident overnight in Afghanistan involving Australian soldiers being attacked by an Afghan National Army colleague. This is the third time this year that Australian soldiers have been attacked in this manner, and comes only a week after seven soldiers were seriously wounded and three killed by a 'rogue' Afghan soldier.

There are three possible explanations for these attacks, but it is certainly too early to conclude what has motivated them. The first explanation is that all three are unrelated, coincidental acts of violence by mentally disturbed Afghan soldiers. This explanation is the hardest to accept — it's bewildering for the public and media that a string of deaths could be, essentially, random.

The second explanation is that this is a Taliban campaign to erode the will of Australian soldiers and the public back home, and force an early exit of Australian forces from Uruzgan. This possibility cannot be ruled out. The Taliban's propaganda machine somewhat amateurishly claimed a hand in motivating Shafiea Ullah, yet has claimed neither of the two recent attacks.

The third possibility is that there is something in the particular relationship between Australian mentors and Afghan trainees which is heightening tensions and leading to violent disagreements. Certainly the relationship in certain bases is tense — last week Afghan soldiers in the 6th Kandak were temporarily disarmed — but again there is no proof that the relationship between Afghan and Australian mentors is fundamentally worse than that with other ISAF mentoring teams.

There's lots of speculation about why these three attacks have happened, but it is simply to early to tell — and using the attacks to justify positions either way on the Afghan war is problematic.

Photo, from the memorial service at Al Minhad Air Base, courtesy of the Defence Department.

Today marks seven months since NATO started bombing targets in Libya as part of the campaign to enforce a no-fly zone authorised by UN Security Council Resolution 1973. Australia is now the second largest state donor to the Libyan reconstruction effort, having committed $41.1 million from our aid budget. That's 30% more than the funding committed to the Australian Civilian Corps, which has taken four years to be capable of deploying a handful of people.

Well might you ask why Australia is spending so much treasure so far from home, and to what end? Luckily our foreign minister answered that question at the UN last month:

Some may think that Australia is a long way away from Libya. If you look at the map, that is true. But we are very, very close in the family of democracies and we are very, very close in the family of political freedom across the world.'

It's worth considering whether Australia could have had more policy impact with a small, timely deployment of military planners and air traffic controllers in the early stages, when NATO was begging for help. It certainly would have been cheaper.

Photo, of an F-16 Fighting Falcon involved in the NATO operations in Libya, courtesy of the US Navy.

I've just finished reading Colonel Peter Connolly's account of his time in command of the ADF's Second Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force in Uruzgan between May and December 2009.

'Counterinsurgency in Uruzgan 2009' reads a lot like an edited post-operation report and its great to see an Australian Army officer writing about his combat experience for a public audience. The report is put out by the Land Warfare Studies Centre within Army, whose mandate is to 'raise the level of professional and intellectual debate within the Army'. A few points that stood out for me:

• This report was published nearly two years after Colonel Connolly returned from operations, no doubt due in part to the cumbersome information clearance processes within the ADF for public comment by serving officers. It would have been much more valuable had it been published sooner – the tactical situation has changed significantly in southern Afghanistan in the 20 months it took for this report to emerge.

The Australian National Audit Office recently concluded that the ADF has significant deficiencies in the way it learns lessons from operations. These kinds of delays are legion within the ADF and unduly restrict the flow of information that can help soldiers do their job better and stay alive.

• Connolly highlights the large number of Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles (pictured) lost to IED explosions – Connolly says he lost five in almost as many weeks. Earlier this year Defence announced that 31 of the $600,000 vehicles have been destroyed in recent years.

The Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan, the PRT compound is located at the bottom left of the photo. All photos in this post by the author.

The Taliban's attack on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) compound in Panjshir province over the weekend shows that, for the first time, there is some truth to the Taliban claim to be able to strike anywhere in Afghanistan.

Five Taliban fighters attacked the gate of the compound using an explosive-laden vehicle in an attempt to breach the outer perimeter. On Twitter, the Taliban claimed 43 ISAF casualties and eight destroyed vehicles. According to ISAF and provincial Governor Keramuddin Keram, two civilian fuel truck drivers were killed and two Afghan security guards were injured.

Panjshir is approximately 100km north of Kabul and was the only part of Afghanistan to resist both Soviet occupation during the 1980s and Taliban control during the 1990s. It was the birthplace of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military leader known as the 'Lion of Panjshir' who bears significant responsibility for driving Soviet forces from Afghanistan.

As the Soviets discovered, the Panjshir Valley is effectively a fortress, due to its topography. It is surround by soaring and nearly impenetrable mountains that lead to the Hindu Kush. Towering cliffs at the north and south entry points ensure all traffic is funneled along a riverside road into narrow ravines which can be defended by a small number of troops.

Approaching the Southern entry to the Panjshir Valley, the valley narrows and traffic is easily controlled by a small security force. 

Between 1980 and 1985 the Soviets launched bi-annual attacks against the Panjshir Valley and were repelled every time. The Soviet Army's 30,000 soldiers and thousands of armoured vehicles could only advance along the road two vehicles abreast, and were picked off by Massoud's small force. When you drive into the Panjshir Valley the wrecks of Soviet vehicles litter the landscape for kilometers – halted mid-advance and left to rust for decades.

The same factors that made the valley defensible against the Soviets also make it defensible against the Taliban. There have been no Taliban attacks in Panjshir in the last decade. When I traveled there my entry and security was personally guaranteed by the provincial governor, whose security men (left) controlled entry into the valley and screened all travelers for non-local faces.

For that reason the small Panjshir PRT, led by the US State Department and comprising diplomats, aid workers, and soldiers who seldom wear body armour and travel freely among the locals, is lightly defended compared with other compounds in Afghanistan. The nearest source of military help is the sprawling US Bagram airbase 50km to the south. The small PRT did well to fight off a planned, complex, Taliban suicide attack.

Panjshir is effectively Afghanistan's charter province: a place where improving security and living standards have shown that the ISAF campaign can work. US$60 million of reconstruction funding in recent years has generated economic growth in the valley. A wind farm was installed in 2008 (by a New Zealander) and micro hydro turbines alongside the river power farms and houses. Education and literacy levels have improved steadily. When I spoke with the provincial governor, he talked of demining Panjshir's mountains and creating a ski resort to bring tourists to the valley. In July the province was one of seven transferred to Afghan security control.

An experimental wind farm built in the Panjshir Valley in 2008 by New Zealander Tony Woods

Despite the relatively low loss of life and infrastructure, this attack provides enormous strategic value to the Taliban. It demonstrates that its claim that 'NATO is no longer safe anywhere in the country' is essentially true. For the Taliban to gain access to Panjshir with a truck bomb likely means that someone in the provincial security staff let them in. The question is why, and ISAF have dispatched a team from Kabul to investigate.

This attack takes away the one success story that ISAF and the Afghan government had, and the Taliban propaganda machine has been quick to text Western journalists to point that out.

The beautiful Panjshir Valley, immediately adjacent to where Saturday’s attack took place.

It will be a brave politician that makes the decision to stop attending the funerals of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, but that is exactly what Prime Minister Julia Gillard should do. The upcoming funeral of the soldier killed yesterday in Afghanistan should be the last she attends. It's time we de-politicised military funerals.

There is now a familiar ceremony that accompanies Australian military deaths in Afghanistan. Defence Public Affairs announces an 'operational incident', the Defence Minister and Chief of Defence Force front a media conference, meander through banal questions like 'Do we often patrol at night?' before finally answering the perennial question: 'Does this death mean it is time for us to leave Afghanistan?'.

Yesterday was General David Hurley's first announcement of a military death since becoming CDF. It was Stephen Smith's ninth since he has been Defence Minister and the personal strain was showing in his hoarse voice. The responsibility for putting soldiers into conflict must be no easy burden to shoulder.

In the coming days a shattered family will organise a funeral. Like eight other bereaved families this year they will incorporate the onerous protocol of having the Prime Minister, Opposition Leader, and other politicians in attendance. The AFP will coordinate security and transport arrangements so dignitaries can attend.

The full glare of the parliamentary press gallery will blaze as military colleagues say final goodbyes. Because, by convention, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott will take no other media appearances that day, the military funeral will become the only vision TV networks have of our political leaders. By virtue of the politicians' attendance, a private funeral will become a nationally televised political event.

The Taliban is fighting a full-spectrum war – in the media and on the ground. Yet the ADF, so quick to rush its leaders out for a media briefing when an Australian soldier gets killed, seems to have stepped back from the fight for perceptions.

In the last 24 hours, Australia's main military base in Afghanistan has become involved in a complex Taliban attack on the civilian population of Uruzgan. The Taliban detonated two bombs in the town of Tarin Kowt, walking distance from Multinational Base Tarin Kowt where Australia's Mentoring Task Force and Special Operations Task Group are based.

Three suicide bombers detonated themselves outside the Uruzgan governor's compound, the Radio and Television Afghanistan station (located on local powerbroker Matiullah Khan's private compound) and the Afghan National Police Headquarters. The Tarin Kowt hospital's maternity wing was demolished in the explosions and Taliban attackers reportedly fired indiscriminately into the town's marketplace with small arms and rocket propelled grenades. Of the 22 civilians known to be killed, one was a local BBC reporter and 16 were children, many killed in or around the hospital.

It is a horrific and spectacular attack carried out with media impact in mind. It reflects how the nature of the fight in southern Afghanistan is changing, and illustrates that the Taliban is under pressure to perform and limited in its ability to attack hard military targets.

It was not a successful attack. Few military or police personnel were killed. No military infrastructure was destroyed. Two of the Taliban's suicide bombers (reportedly from Pakistan) failed to detonate and were arrested by Afghan soldiers. The Governor was not killed, nor was Matiullah Khan.

Defence yesterday released the Rizzo Review into the causes of the failure in the Royal Australian Navy's amphibious fleet earlier this year. In Defence Minister Stephen Smith's words, 'it is a damning report'. Defence should be commended for releasing it so quickly to the public. 

The problems are legion:

...organizational complexity and blurred accountabilities, inadequate risk management, poor compliance and assurance, a "hollowed-out" Navy engineering function, resource shortages…and a culture that places the short-term operational mission above the need for technical integrity.

The cultural, structural, and organisational problems the report describes are so entrenched that it would be surprising if they didn't exist elsewhere in Defence. If Navy was a civilian airline and received this kind of report into its engineering and maintenance services, it would be grounded and out of business.

The report's most significant recommendation is to 'rebuild Navy Engineering'. Not just reorganise or fix it, but rebuild the capability entirely from the ground up. Navy is a highly technical force, and engineering capability is the backbone of Navy's technical expertise. The Rizzo team's recommendation is like telling the Army to rebuild its infantry capability or the air force to rebuild its pilot training.

No costs are given but you can bet this rebuild won't be cheap. The review notes 'resource requirements and impacts have not been scoped' and suggests that the 'increase in resources needed to address this plan' will conflict with the ongoing cost-cutting of the Strategic Reform Program.

• This week Australia tragically lost its 28th soldier in the Afghanistan conflict. The evolution in the way Canada has dealt with combat deaths makes an interesting comparison to the Australian experience. (H/t Natalie.)
• Former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware suggests Australian troops are 'fighting, bleeding, sweating and dying' in a vacuum of silence on what Australia is doing in Afghanistan.
• The head of the beleaguered Defence Materiel Organisation, Australia's best paid public servant, quits after months of criticism of his organisation.
• The Public Interest Advocacy Centre, an Australian legal NGO, calls for a Royal Commission into Australia's treatment of military detainees during the early days of the Iraq War.
• Mark Thomson has released a truly excellent report detailing the challenges in administering Defence and recommending some much needed reform.
• A Task Force of the US Navy's 7th Fleet in Japan is steaming south to join the ADF for Exercise Talisman Sabre, Australia's largest bilateral defence exercise, later this month.

I was a little confused by the news that a combined Coalition and Afghan National Army Special Forces raid had located and killed ANA deserter Shafiea Ullah, who killed Australian soldier Lance Corporal Andrew Jones almost three weeks ago.

The murder of LCPL Jones was a tragic and despicable act, and the impact of his death on his family and military colleagues is horrific.

But it will have little strategic significance in the wider Afghan counterinsurgency. Both Defence and ISAF have suggested for some time that the attack on LCPL Jones was an isolated incident and not part of a calculated Taliban plan. When it happened, Defence Minister Stephen Smith stressed the need to put the incident into perspective. And in a statement released yesterday, ISAF confirmed again that Ullah 'had no affiliation with any insurgent networks'. 

So why would the US military take its most highly trained soldiers away from their core task of tracking down high value Taliban commanders and instead mount an operation to find and fix a lowly ANA soldier on the run?

The Defence budget is increasingly becoming a national ponzi scheme: drawing down on our strategic future to meet the political promises of our past. Australia is no longer on track to build the Defence Force outlined in Force 2030, the 2009 Defence White Paper.

There's nothing wrong with a little tightening of the Defence belt every now and then. A lean military is an efficient military. As the New Zealand Defence Force knows far better than us, reduced defence spending means you focus on what delivers capability and discard what doesn't. Across the globe, everywhere but in Pakistan and China, defence austerity is the new black.

Going or gone: Two years after Force 2030 was launched, many of its major backers have moved on.

In the US, a bipartisan commission has recommended the Pentagon cut $1 trillion (twice the current annual budget) over the next decade. The UK's defence budget will fall by 8%; 17,000 uniformed and 25,000 civilian positions will be cut, and the army will lose one in six of its deployable brigades. France has frozen defence spending at current levels.

These three countries between them account for 50% of global defence spending – which explains why annual global military expenditure is at its lowest rate of growth since 2001.

Here in Australia, the word 'Defence' hardly appeared in Treasurer Wayne Swan's budget speech, but then he didn't use the word 'cuts' very much either. Though the Defence budget is short on dollars, there's no shortage of weasel words to obfuscate exactly how the funding will be cut. Take this phrase from the Defence Portfolio Budget Statements 2011-12:

Defence will mitigate the effects of this overachievement through a range of measures designed to return the military work force to guidance. 

Translated, that means: 'We might need to fire some people next year because we didn't properly match recruitment numbers with retirement numbers'. Or this baffling word-artistry:

• Australia is now the second-largest provider of military training to Pakistan.
• Was that why Defence Minister Stephen Smith was so coy about the role of the Pakistanis?
• Marc Ambinder has the best piece on the team that carried out the mission.
• The Age alleges Australian soldiers have served in the unit.
• From 2007, Mark Bowden describes the way trained interrogators extracted 'lethal information' to track down and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
• A study into High Value Target Teams: How US Special Forces experimented with integrating counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations in the one team.
• Stanley McChrystal explains how he changed the model for joint special operations teams, fusing intelligence analysts and tactical operators at the lowest level.

Cross-posted on The Drum.

In May every year, a PhD-wielding theoretical physicist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute sifts through the Federal Budget to account for how our Defence Force and Defence Department have spent the $26.8 billion we give them to provide for our national security. Mark Thompson has been doing his brilliantly expert work for a decade and it still takes him weeks to decode what Defence reports.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, though, to know that our Navy is in crisis. For the past six months, the Department and Minister have been telling the public that our amphibious ships were still meeting operational needs and prepared to put to sea if required. Yesterday, Stephen Smith gave an extraordinary speech in which he criticised his own department for not only failing to do its job, but failing to keep him properly advised.

The hull of what will be the amphibious ship HMAS Canberra, photographed at Spain's Navantia shipyard.

Smith says faulty Navy advice suggested the amphibious support ship HMAS Tobruk was prepared to respond to cyclone disaster relief in Queensland, when in fact it was unable to leave its home base in Sydney. Smith also confirmed the worst kept secret in the Australian Defence Force – that our other amphibious ships, HMAS Manoora and HMAS Kanimbla, are broken and likely to never sail again.

Amphibious ships are a critical capability for a maritime country like Australia. They let us send troops, boats, and helicopters to regional disasters and emergencies. They provide floating hospitals, airports, and command posts to control an evacuation of Australian citizens from a regional country in crisis. All three broken Navy ships have been critical to ADF operations in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji over the past decade.

Listening to Defence Minister Stephen Smith and his colleague Jason Clare at their press conference today, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Government was taking decisive action by killing off several sick defence projects. They announced the end of a problematic watercraft project that cost $40 million and delivered little capability, they flagged some honest concerns about the Army's MRH-90 helicopter, and they focused on the transition to the Navy's shiny new Canberra Class amphibious ships (pictured; image courtesy of Defence).

But they skipped over a more serious concern – Australia now has almost no amphibious capability to respond to emergencies in our region.

The ADF's amphibious capability is critical to our ability to respond to humanitarian and security emergencies in our backyard. Two Navy ships underpin that capability: HMAS Kanimbla and HMAS Manoora. They are staging platforms for helicopters, can carry over 400 embarked Army troops, and have medical and communications facilities to support an amphibious landing. They have underpinned recent ADF deployments to conflicts in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and disaster responses like Op Sumatra Assist.

The ships are also critical to Australian Government contingency plans in our region. In 2006, Special Forces soldiers and Blackhawk helicopters were deployed on HMAS Kanimbla to waters near Fiji in preparation for a potential coup and the subsequent evacuation of Australians. HMAS Manoora also played a critical role in the MV Tampa incident in 2001.

In September last year both ships were tied up and declared unseaworthy after a fire broke out onboard HMAS Manoora inside Sydney Harbour. At the time, the Navy said both ships would be seaworthy again and ready for operations early in 2011. That is no longer the case – Manoora will never sail again and Kanimbla will undergo repairs until at least mid-2012. That leaves no amphibious capability for at least the next 18 months. Then we'll have only a single ship until at least mid-2014, when HMAS Canberra is due to be accepted into service.

Afghanistan

After a lackluster parliamentary debate in October last year, Australian troops will remain committed in Afghanistan through 2011. The Afghan fighting season starts in May and it is an unfortunate near-certainty that Australia will sustain more casualties this year — two soldiers have been wounded already in the first fortnight. We lost ten soldiers last year and 21 in total since the ADF went back into southern Afghanistan in 2005. 

The Prime Minister has committed to an annual parliamentary statement on Afghanistan and will be under pressure this year (like all political leaders in ISAF) to demonstrate tangible improvement in both the training of Afghan National Security Forces as well as the war overall. She nominated 'persevering in our mission in Afghanistan' as one of her policy priorities for the year ahead.

The budgetary battle

Even without accounting for the probable 1% decrease in GDP after the Queensland floods, this year's federal budget in May will be tight for all departments. For the Defence Department it will be a particularly difficult budget, with some commentators already foreshadowing that Defence will get raided to balance the books.

It seems I accidentally hit a raw nerve yesterday by suggesting WikiLeaks and Julian Assange represented why the hacker mentality was bad for democracy. Stephen Collins was kind enough to explain why I was profoundly misinformed and making a fool of the Lowy Institute and myself. Normally it takes much less than 200 words for people to realise that about me, but I digress.

The gist of Collins' argument is that all hackers are not equal — there are evil hackers (script kiddies and crackers), sure, but most hackers are ethical, trying to understand the world through a commitment to open government and a collaborative effort to 'chip away at the edges of a closed system'.

For the sake of the argument, let's accept that premise, noting that the hacker community itself hasn't quite resolved this definitional dilemma. What is it that lies at the core of all of these groups, then? It's right there in Stephen's post where he derides the Lowy Institute for only hiring insiders and suggests his colleagues are 'chipping away at the edges of a closed system'. And it's all throughout the hacker manifesto that Stephen referred me to, with the hacker's sense of alienation from the mainstream and persecution by a world that 'murders, cheats and lies'.

In today's SMH, Tanveer Ahmed has an interesting psychiatric analysis of 'anomia' — a sense of alienation or dissatisfaction with the system which seems to underpin both hacking and conspiracy.

Hackers like Julian Assange and many of his supporters have no patience.

In the hacker mindset, a single clever individual is pitted against a complex system designed to keep them out. The hacker wins if he can spot a flaw in the complex system and exploit it. End of game. Outcomes, like the systems used in the hacker's world, are binary. You either win or the big bad complex system defeats you. Hackers want to believe that government and its minions are involved in obfuscation and that they have been somehow excluded from the decision-making process.

How many of these hackers have ever applied to join DFAT, the ADF, or our intelligence agencies? How many have ever run for political office? How many have involved themselves in the painstaking and lengthy process of fact-checking and background research that sets proper investigative journalism above the stolen-information fencing that WikiLeaks represents?

What sets democracies apart is that anyone can apply to work for government or be a politician and have an equal chance of being successful. But it takes patience, hard work, and an ability to work with others. Hackers want quick results for little investment, and they work alone.

As Sam mentioned earlier, the voices absent from this debate are the thousands of Australians working in government agencies. They are prevented from commenting on WikiLeaks – but more importantly, they're getting on with the business of government. Democratic governments like those in Australia and the US won't always get everything right but at least they're trying to build society in ways that are complex and take time. Thoughtless destruction of complex systems helps no one but the hackers themselves.

Photo by Flickr user José Goulão.

As a former Army officer, I'm predisposed to view the release of secret documents during wartime as a traitorous crime. Like Stephen Colbert in this excellent dissection, I thought the WikiLeaks publicity campaign around the film 'Collateral Murder' was despicable for its rash editorialising and lack of contextual appreciation.

The cablegate leaks have softened my position because, as a diplomacy outsider, I am fascinated by the voyeurism of it all. I can see the value in knowing the duplicity of Kevin Rudd's views on Afghanistan. It's reassuring to know that the US Embassy shares the concerns I have about the fanciful budgeting behind the 2009 Defence White Paper.

Last week we asked the Lowy Institute's Twitter followers to make sense of WikiLeaks: Is Julian Assange a #wikihero or #wikivillain? Eighty percent of responses were in Julian Assange's favour.

Some of the Twitter posts were revealing. @thewinchesterau commented that Assange was 'Exposing corruption & hidden agendas, shining lights in areas of the world where it's desperately needed'. @aireys also commented on this theme: 'The world has now changed. US is confused, pollies exposed and the people unite against all the corruption and lies. Well done JA.' @alecthegeek phrased it as a simple dichotomy: 'What sort of society will we bequeath to future? Truly open & participatory; or closed &controlled by gov and corp?'.

What struck me is how few people are likely to be swayed from their initial instinctive response on WikiLeaks. The crux of the issue seems to be how you feel about government – if you feel positively about the work governments do, then you hate WikiLeaks. If you have concerns about the way governments operate, then WikiLeaks is the salve to a wounded trust.

Photo by Flickr user Natasha Friis Saxberg.

Several Lowy colleagues and I attended today’s Remembrance service in Sydney's Martin Place. It is a particularly moving ceremony — full of pomp and humility in equal measure, yet also underpinned by uniquely Australian egalitarianism. During the ceremony, one of the officials seeing a particularly elderly medal–resplendent couple standing on the sidelines, lifted a rope and ushered them to hastily arranged seats in the front row of the VIP section.

Remembrance Day is an occasion that draws out community groups from all over the city — choirs, marching bands, scouts and school groups — a tangible reminder of the kind of delightful community spirit that fallen veterans missed out on.

I was struck by how dominantly Christian the ceremony was. Three prayers were offered by a military padre, and my favourite military hymn was sung ('Of God Our Help in Ages Past'). This would have been entirely appropriate in the early days of Remembrance Day services when our veterans and citizens alike thought of themselves as British as well as Christian. Yet Christianity no longer has a monopoly on wartime sacrifice in Australia.

Lowy Institute Navy Fellow Justin Jones remarked to me that under his command he had Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim sailors all wearing the Australian Naval Ensign. Today's Remembrance ceremony, in Sydney at least, was as much a tribute to soldiers currently deployed on operations as it was a tribute to those of the Great War. Statistically today's Australian soldier is just as likely to be of no identified religion as he or she is to be a member of one of the major Christian denominations.

• The US might have been more successful in exporting democracy to Afghanistan than it thinks. In a Tammany Hall-style incident, hundreds of Hazara Afghans seized a polling booth in Uruzgan and cast 4200 votes for their preferred candidate.
• ForeignPolicy.com has this insight into local politics in Southern Afghanistan, including a profile of Matiullah Khan – a figure well known to Australian soldiers in Uruzgan.
• The Commanding Officer of Australia's Afghan Mentoring Task Force calls home once a week. Right after his family, Channel 10 News Brisbane is next on his call sheet.
• Now that General McChrystal has been replaced, the ban on Burger King has been overturned.
• Over 800 Australian soldiers will soon deploy to Uruzgan to replace their comrades and fill positions left vacant by the departing Dutch. The venerable Northern Territory News neglects its normal crocodile reporting duties to profile Lt Col Huxley, who will lead 'the Darwin Battalion'.
• Huxley's future boss in Uruzgan, US Army Colonel Jim Creighton, spent time at the Council on Foreign Relations as a Military Fellow. His CFR bio is here.
• Australia's most recent mission in Afghanistan is training the Afghan National Army to take over security. This clip (some strong language) shows just how tough that can sometimes be – when the ANA soldiers you're trying to train are stoned.

Three Australian soldiers have died in Afghanistan in the past week and a lot of people have been asking me 'what is going wrong'. It's a natural reaction when people need to feel like tragedy has a logical root cause. My answer is that nothing has changed.

Australian soldiers from the Mentoring Task Force are supporting the Afghan National Army as they were several months ago. Soldiers are conducting security patrolling in much the same manner as they have been for years. Our Special Operations Task Group is tackling the same excruciatingly difficult tasks it has been tackling since we first entered Afghanistan.

The fact is that we have been extraordinarily lucky in the past seven years and luck is now catching up with us.

Maybe it was the peacekeeping experiences of the 1990s that convinced Australians that we could deploy troops overseas and see them all return home standing and smiling.

Even the Australian Defence Force thought for a long time that it could deploy troops overseas without preparing for many of them not to return. Investigations into the repatriation of Private Jacob Kovco from Iraq in 2005 showed that the ADF had an inadequate mortuary affairs process. It seems the ADF had a written policy on whether its troops could wear berets in Iraq before it had a written policy on how to get its dead soldiers back to Australian soil.

It seems like the death of Australian soldiers provokes two reactions from those of us back here. One is genuine sympathy for the families of fallen soldiers and admiration for the sacrifices made on our behalf. The second is to question what we are doing in Afghanistan and declare that the latest death conclusively proves that we need to get the hell out/stay committed to Afghanistan (depending on where you sit on the Afghanistan debate).

Add to these two now a third reaction – using the death of Australian soldiers to lay blame at the foot of your political enemies. On Wednesday, the next MP for Denison, Andrew Wilkie, made the following observation on Afghanistan:

Sam's post on open source intelligence software, and the amount of time I've spent recently critiquing Wikileaks, unlocked an idea about creative open source intelligence collaboration.

The proliferation of social networking software and communications technology has provided incredible opportunity for open source collaboration on knowledge projects. Wikipedia is the best example of a public, refereed system for collaborative knowledge. What if we were to match this collaborative knowledge-building approach with the public's growing appetite for transparency?

Imagine if we could provide a site where whistle-blowers could collaborate with experts, journalists, and authorities to build a picture of what's happening. Software like Matthew Burton's might help (and feel free to let me know what else is already out there).

Take the example of a government with heavily entrenched corruption (if you live in Sydney you won't have to stretch your imagination too far). Using some sort of technology that allows anonymous posting, a whistle-blower could post details of corruption to a website, using an open source version of software like Analyst's Notebook, which provides a visual representation of intelligence data (essentially a detailed mind map which can be extensively manipulated). An interested journalist could add to the data by asking specific questions or drawing connections of their own. A member of the public might have a particular expertise in mining publicly reported financial or property data and could add their insight to the analysis.

In such a way, a picture of a corrupt network might emerge. Sure, it wouldn't be legally enforceable and could be downright defamatory. But by adding to everyone's overall awareness, such collaboration might make investigative journalism or legal enforcement more focused in its efforts. In any event, it might be more practical than simply dumping thousands of documents onto a website.

The applications for anonymous open source intelligence collaboration could be immense. Italians might want to build a picture of organised-crime networks, or maybe just chart Berlusconi's love interests. International relations scholars and pundits might finally be able to nut out who did what to who and when in the South Ossetia war. There would undoubtedly be difficulties to overcome in execution, but Wikipedia and similar sites have blazed that trail already (Wikipedia continues to prevent me from posting my dogs as notable residents of my suburb).

Photo by Flickr user jessicafm, used under a Creative Commons license.

Make no mistake — people in Afghanistan will die because WikiLeaks has chosen to publish classified military documents this week. Let me explain why.

WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange was asked in a press conference yesterday whether he thought his actions would compromise soldiers on the ground. His reply? 'There’s no tactically significant information in this material. We have looked at it'.

Wrong.

There is plenty of tactical information in these documents that will have the Taliban rubbing their hands together with glee. Some of the documents provide an insight into the way that tactical units communicate and think. Some provide an insight into support responses available to tactical units. One document I saw details a tactical weapon capability that the Taliban did not previously know about. Our own soldiers in Afghanistan will need to tread more carefully because of what WikiLeaks has done.