More holistic approach needed to National Security
by Ernie Davitt, National Affairs Editor, ASM
One of the biggest challenges facing the new Gillard Federal Labor Government is to continue the evolution towards a more cohesive whole-of-government approach to national security policy development, budgeting and procurement.
Australia’s national security community has made impressive improvements in recent years but it is still subject to criticism about tribalism, lack of cohesion and the need for a more holistic approach to funding and decision-making which best serves the national interest and not just the needs of individual key players.
Undoubtedly there have been a lot of positive changes in recent years – with increased funding, development of Australia’s first national security statement and upgraded levels of professional training to name a few areas.
Governments and agencies alike say they now have a wider view of national security than the long-established military-driven one and they now work with a more collegiate approach.
But just how much does the rhetoric match reality? Many of Australia’s top strategic thinkers still think there is a long way to go.
Some leading researchers believe it will take many years of hard work to deliver a system which best serves wider national interests.
The setting up of a new National Security College at the Australian National University (ANU), creation of a National Security Adviser in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and moves towards having a separate National Security Budget have gone some steps down the road of delivering the goods.
The newly established National Security College at Canberra’s ANU, one of the legacies of the Rudd Labor Government, was set up with the aim of strengthening networks and enhancing the functioning of the national security community.
The Government saw training at the new college as a prerequisite to senior national security appointments. Because it has strong support from the majority of the national security community itself and a strong degree of bipartisan political support, that thinking is expected to continue.
This is particularly so now that Kevin Rudd, who championed the college and development of a more holistic approach to national security, is, as expected, in the key foreign affairs ministry, and Stephen Smith, the former Foreign Minister, is now Minister for Defence.
The National Security College, a joint venture between the ANU and the Federal Government, was still developing its research and educational programs when ASM contacted it.
Asked how the college would contribute to development of a more holistic and cohesive national security community, the college director, Professor Michael L’Estrange, whose CV includes postings as a head of Foreign Affairs, Australian High Commissioner to the UK and Secretary of Cabinet, told ASM:
“The College has a role to play in helping to develop a more cohesive national security community, but I’d stress we are only one among many who have a ‘role’. We think the College will help to build trusted networks of interaction across the community by providing a place where all those with a role to play in national security – government, business, community sector and academia – can come together and discuss the challenges they face in promoting Australia’s security.
“Of course, the College has a role to play in helping to educate a new generation of strategic leaders too, and we will do so in a variety of formats including postgraduate education and executive education and training.
“On promoting a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, the College intends to provide education and some practical experience to participants on a wide range of topics such as strategy planning and implementation, collaborative leadership and risk.
“We think these will make a positive contribution by providing national security professionals with a shared language, an enhanced understanding of the strategic environment, practical skills and a broader appreciation of how to work together towards shared goals.
“We’d note the strong role played by others in areas such as operational planning and procurement, and we don’t intend to duplicate those activities.”
Asked about progress with establishing courses and recruiting staff, he said:
“The College has made good progress since we started planning last December. We conducted our first executive development course in June and a short course in August.
“We conducted two more courses in September and October, which will bring the number of course participants in our first six months of operation to over 100.
“We will be conducting another course in December, then beginning a full program of Executive Development courses from February next year as well as starting our postgraduate program around the same time.
“We have also conducted a range of other activities including a conference, monthly seminar series and a small research project; and begun to establish relationships with academic and professional bodies with interests similar to ours.
“The College’s staff stands at 11 at present, and we are currently recruiting some more academics, secondees from government and general staff to the faculty. We’ll be looking to recruit a small number of additional staff over the next year as demand for our services builds,” he concluded.
Strategic Policy Framework: a key part of future national security architecture
The Government emphasised in last year’s National Security Statement that a key element of its future national security architecture would be the implementation of a new ‘strategic policy framework’
This framework, which includes the promise of periodic statements to Parliament, was designed as a mechanism to ‘guide and coordinate effort across the national security community by setting priorities, allocating resources and evaluating performance’.
Carl Ungerer, who is Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI’s) Australian National Security Project, says the national security community must demonstrate a stronger correlation between priority settings and resource allocations.
“This is where the test of complementarity becomes important. Policy makers should be able to demonstrate a more direct relationship between current assessments of national security threats and the allocation of human and financial resources to meet those particular challenges,” he said in a recent ASPI strategic analysis paper entitled Measuring up: evaluating cohesion in the national security community.
“Although the government has embarked on the process of announcing a single national security budget as part of the annual budgetary cycle, there needs to be a more coherent articulation of the rationale for spending priorities.
“Currently, Australia’s prioritisation of national security risks remains mostly informal and intuitive.”
The paper argues that Australia’s national security planners should first focus on a number of interim or intermediate steps to build cohesion in the national security community including comprehensiveness, connectivity, consistency and complementarity.
Dr Ungerer said agencies across the public sector were trying to find efficiencies and more effective ways to spend the national security dollar.
“Performance measures and evaluation are an important part of this task. They ensure that spending is kept in line with strategic and operational objectives,” he said.
“They can provide governments with a useful management tool – performance measures can be used to ensure accountability and to drive future resource allocations. But it’s hard to identify appropriate measures, particularly when seeking to apply those measures across the entire spectrum of national security institutions, activities and agencies, which in Australia’s case now covers more than 20 per cent of the federal bureaucracy.”
Dr Ungerer outlined the recent history of national security policy development and pointed out that while much progress had been made, lingering doubts and problems remained.
“In Australia, the connectivity problem is highlighted by the continuing lack of a single information technology architecture that allows all members of the national security community to work together,” he said.
“Although the government has appointed a chief information officer for national security to fix this problem,
it will take another 10 years before these systems are in place.
“The government’s desire to both deepen and broaden the national security community has been reflected also in the establishment of new institutions such as the Office of National Security in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the National Security College at the Australian National University.
“As the centerpiece of these reforms, the creation of the National Security Adviser’s position was meant to be the connective glue that would bind the various elements of the national security community together.
“It reflected a key recommendation of the earlier review of homeland and border security arrangements – that what the federal government needed was more leadership and not more bureaucracy.”
He said the ‘strategic policy framework’ was the mechanism chosen by the government to guide this new approach to performance evaluation. It was based on three streams of activity – priority setting, resource allocation and performance review.
Dr Ungerer noted that cohesion may not be warranted in all circumstances. There were still hard barriers between the compartmentalised world of intelligence agencies and the more operational aspects of policing and community engagement.
“And there is a danger that too much cohesion will undermine the specialisation and subject-matter expertise that is necessary in national security planning and assessments,” he said.
Another senior ASPI researcher, former defence scientist, analyst and manager Andrew Davies, makes out a strong case for the national interest to be given greater consideration when making decisions about spending priorities within the national security sector.
By way of example, he says the Federal Government should reconsider a decision by Defence to defer the purchase of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles (UAVs) for a decade because of their wider value for high national interest civil uses like countering illegal foreign fishing, people smuggling and drug running.
Dr Davies makes the point that, although there are many stakeholders involved in the national surveillance effort, none of them has an acquisition budget anything like the Defence capital investment program budget.
Australia could be ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ on the UAV case, by basing decisions on purely defence rationale, and not the wider national interest which includes civilian uses like countering people-smuggling, drug running and illegal foreign fishing.
While a wide range of Federal agencies, including Customs, Coastwatch, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, had requirements for surveillance data, the money and the decision-making for the capability was ‘stovepiped’ solely in Defence.
Dr Davies, who is the Program Director for ASPI’s Operations and Capability Program, says Defence has the lion’s share of the procurement budget and, rightly, continues to invest in platforms and systems which best suit its particular requirements.
But he says it is time for the Government to take a broader look at its wider surveillance policy aims – and to allocate resources accordingly.
He criticised the Government’s decision to defer the purchase of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial reconnaisance vehicle from now until 2019 because it would put too much pressure on the Defence Force.
“One of the potential advantages of a holistic approach to national security is that cost-benefit decisions can be made based on the overall national benefit of a program, as opposed to the relatively narrow view of an individual portfolio,” he said.
How would this approach work?
He said the area of maritime security was a good case study. With the output of Australia’s marine industries now approaching $50 billion a year, now outstripping agriculture for the first time, and the UN recently giving us responsibility for additional undersea resources potentially worth trillions, Australia’s maritime surveillance and enforcement needs are increasing rapidly.
Policing an overall maritime jurisdiction across an area approaching 14 million square kilometres with a population of 22 million people and a $1.1 trillion economy is going to require all of the resources and smart technology the country can muster.
A strong case can be made for balancing the need to meet civilian priorities in protection of Australia’s national interests in its maritime jurisdiction as well as its defence priorities.
“As a trading island nation, we are reliant on shipping for 99 per cent of our trade by volume while Australia makes up 10 per cent of the world’s entire seaborne trade,” Dr Davies says.
The size of the Customs and Border Protection task alone can be seen in the fact that in 2008, more than 834 million tonnes of international cargo moved across Australian wharves on 4000 ships in more than 11,000 voyages.
The Royal Australian Navy is to get a fleet of 20 bigger, faster offshore patrol vessels to replace its fleet of 12 Armidale Class patrol boats, minehunters and hydrographic vessels.
The Customs and Border Protection Service is buying eight new higher-capacity vessels to replace its current Bay Class fleet.
But is this enough? For starters, growing global energy and food shortages linked to climate change and population growth, will see enormous additional pressures applied to effectively patrolling a full land and marine jurisdiction of 27.45 million square kilometres or about 5.4 per cent of the earth’s surface.
The size of Australia’s marine jurisdiction is in the top three in the world along with the Big Five members, the USA and France. But we only have a fraction of their resources and population.
Dr Davies said the UAV decision needed to be revisited but through the eyes of Australia’s total national interest, not merely Defence interests.
The reason why the purchase didn’t proceed was on the basis that introducing such an advanced new aircraft at this time would have caused ‘incredible workforce pressures’ on the Australian Defence Force, particularly given the requirement to transition the Air Force’s AP-3C Orion fleet to a new manned surveillance aircraft in the same time period.
“From the point of view of Air Force and Defence, this may have been a reasonable prioritisation of effort,” he said.
“But in any case, it is worth considering whether this applies in terms of the overall national ability to collect intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information in our expansive maritime domain.”
Referring to the size of the surveillance task, Dr Davies said “the haystack is large and the needles are small – and mobile”.
This article first appeared in Australian Security Magazine (ASM) November-December 2010