Yesterday, the Australian government released its 2024 National Defence Strategy and 2024 Integrated Investment Program.
In an op-ed in The Australian today, Security & Defence PLuS Executive Director Dr Ian Langford writes that the strategy “ultimately fulfils its commitments first articulated in [Australia’s] 2024 Defence Strategic Review. Whether capabilities can be delivered fast enough, relative to a changing security environment, remains to be seen.”
In order to meet the challenge, Ian notes, it will be necessary “to institutionalise defence and national security as a truly strategic endeavor” for which “separating AUKUS pillar I (submarines) from the Defence budget would be a start.”
On AUKUS pillar II (emerging technology), “[o]vercoming bureaucracy inside and outside the government will be key” to achieving “the kind of asymmetric advantage fundamental to [Deputy Prime Minister Richard] Marles’s strategy of denial.”