Australia: catch all

[Mark O'Neill]

Hi Rob,

I would not necessarily agree that we 'get' the requirements of 21st C warfare anymore than the US - we have the same excess of rhetoric regarding the nature of what we face, but by and large have maintained an almost one -eyed focus on developing capabilities that anyone looking at the pattern of development since we left Vietnam would find remarkably consistent.

The same applies to our intellectual capital. Our recently released Joint Future Operating Concept describes a 'new' world, then proceeds to describe how the same old structures, conventional equipment and training regimes will 'win' in them through networking the inherent power of trite buzzwords and meaningless phrases that successive Australian exchange officers and visitors to the US have plagarised from the US transformation lexicon....

The IDG is really a case of necessity being the mother of invention. We have been engaged in wide range of stabilisation missions in our immediate region over the last eight years or so that have been demanding on resources -and even a casual scan of the issues would reveal that our requirements to be engaged would appear to be enduring. Quite simply, we had been doing this in an ad hoc fashion with the AFP working the the military in these areas, it made practical sense to institutionalise the arrangements and achieve some efficiencies of planning , training and readiness.

One thing that the devlopments have highlighted to us over the last few years is the profound cultural differences between the Army and the Police. We all get on fine, but that often leads to an assumption that we are on the same page when we are doing things together. The experiences of the last few years have shown that whilst some understandings have developed, there is still a wide cultural chasm between our elements of the interagency that needs to be addressed.

Finally, your point about relative size is not insignificant. It allows us a flexibility and agility that a behemoth like the US interagency probably could not attain. I attended a 'Joint Interagency Symposium' at the NDU last year, the Americans in the seminar with me were struggling with just how 'small' our national security structures are. Your NSC alone would absorb several of our national bureaucracies. Of course, it is a case of what suits one does not suit the other.