*Rudd will make hard-headed decisions on defence*

Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | March 20, 2008

THE most important decision the Rudd Government has so far made in national security is this week's announcement that it will proceed with the $6 billion purchase of F-18 Super Hornets.

These will replace the F-111s until the new Joint Strike Fighters come into service next decade.

Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon rightly points out that the Super Hornets are an excellent plane and will defeat any possible adversary they could face in our region.

The decision is also important because it offers a template for the modus operandi of the Rudd Government. I suspect the Rudd Government will be like the Hawke government.

It will offer a certain amount of flim-flam and mushy talk to satisfy its supporters on the Left. But, ultimately, on national security it will make the right, hard-headed decisions.

There is no need to reprise the Super Hornets debate except to say a ridiculous campaign had been waged against them, and against the JSF, by an odd coalition. Always ready to demonise the Howard government, ABC television in particular had run hard on all this.

Labor in Opposition seemed to encourage this campaign, understandably enough, while carefully limiting its comments to criticisms of the process the Howard government used to arrive at decisions, rather than the decisions themselves.

That at the first test it ditched the postures of Opposition for the responsibilities of government is an encouraging sign.

As his department moves towards writing a defence white paper, Fitzgibbon must impose a similar discipline. Both in the defence white paper, and in the national security white paper to precede it, there will be a temptation, Sweden-style, to include all kinds of non-defence issues, such as climate change, as part of national security. At one level, everything is a part of national security: economic policy, education outcomes, whatever you like. I have the greatest respect for Australian soldiers, but I also know this: the Australian Defence Force cannot solve global warming.

If talking about global warming as an issue of national security is just a nod to political correctness, then it won't do any harm. If it contributes to shaping the structure of our defence force, that would be nuts.

There are two other conceptual false trails Fitzgibbon must avoid in the white paper. The first is that he must not allow any contradiction between Australia's local and regional role and its global role.

Australian leaders since Alfred Deakin have always understood how profoundly Australian security is tied up with the global security order.

We are the 15th biggest economy in the world, we have one of the biggest land masses and we have a mature, stable democracy: if we don't contribute to global security, almost no one else will. The plastic gangster, faux hard-man school that dominates academic debate about Australian national security demeaningly portrays every Australian contribution to any international coalition as mere alliance management, keeping the Americans happy so that they will look after us. This is analytically stupid and demeans the men and women of the ADF who put their lives on the line for real strategic objectives in places such as Afghanistan. Global security tasks, undertaken by US-led coalitions, are not just alliance management. They profoundly affect Australian security in themselves. Our ability to contribute to these tasks is a core function for the ADF. Second, Fitzgibbon should not fall for the other great plastic gangster line that terrorism can never be a real strategic threat.

Though no plastic gangster himself, academic Hugh White gives expression to this view in the remarkably lame, left-wing Dear Mr Rudd book edited by Robert Manne.

White writes: "The claim that terrorism poses a real and present danger to our way of life and the international order as we know it ... simply has no foundation in serious analysis." Happily, Rudd holds exactly the opposite view to White. In an interview with The Australian published on October 20 last year, Rudd said: "If you're describing threats for the future of Australia and therefore the force structure to meet those threats, it covers the whole spectrum of soft power and hard power threats, and right across the middle of this spectrum is terrorism.

"When does terrorism become a strategic threat? Obviously when it acquires force projection capabilities that it can inflict large-scale death and destruction with, for example, weapons of mass destruction ... If terrorists possess such a capability (nuclear weapons), of course it would constitute a strategic threat."

Rudd is dead right here, and White is dead wrong, and the white paper should reflect that. White's analysis is absurdly simplistic and unrealistic.

Nuclear terrorism is itself a strategic threat, to any but the most paradigm paralysed. Bill Clinton's arms control guru, Bob Gallucci, told The Australian it was more likely than not that terrorists in the next decade would strike a Western city with a nuclear weapon.

But terrorism also interacts with traditional geo-strategic equations in complex ways. Terrorism gave us the conventional wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism's fluidity also allows it to be simultaneously a non-state actor, and therefore not restrained by deterrence, yet an instrument of state power. The classic example is Hezbollah's relationship to Iran.

In a recent speech Fitzgibbon said the white paper would answer the question of whether the era of major state-on-state conflict had come to an end. It is the only really foolish thing I've seen Fitzgibbon say as defence minister because no one anywhere in the world is arguing that state-on-state conflict is over.

Rather, this view is a straw man to be knocked over by the opponents of a big army in the Australian strategic debate. They argue that armies are useful only in constabulary roles and real strategic conflict involves exclusively submarines and aeroplanes.

Fitzgibbon is too smart for a nonsense formulation like that. So, thank god, is Rudd.

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