Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam and the Defence of Australia

[Mark O'Neill]

The SDSC is associated with a discredited defence philospophy of "continental defence". This is essentially a 'flat earth' view of our defence needs that sees our national security interests largely in terms of protecting the integrity of the our sovereign soil, and essentially denying that the Nation has 'global' security interests beyond the continental shelf. They see airpower and strong maritime forces being the defence panacea for our island continent.

They are taken with the idea that the airforce can 'save' Australia in the same way that the RAF did Britain duing the Battle of Britain in World War II. They are severely 'down' on the Army. Of course, this idea overlooks the fact that if the BEF had been able to fight well enough in 1940 and avoided Dunkirk, then the Battle of Britain might never need have happened..


This theory was at its strongest in the 1980s. The author's biases undoubtedly come from his service in the RAAF. For a while there airpower advocates were the golden children, to some extent the '91 Gulf War only made them worse.

The problems for these folks are many:

1. They have missed the 'big idea' of globalisation and the associated security implications.
2. They spend a lot of effort describing how the 'sea-air' gap to our north can be used in our defence, they fail to realsie that it is in reality a 'sea-air' bridge with land at both ends.
3. Their defence theory defends against a non-existent and increasingly unlikely to develop threat.
4. Their ideal force structure posture provides little or no capabilities to deal with the threats we currently face , and are increasingly likely to face. How useful are attack submarines against the Abu Sayaf Group? What chance that a JSF can win hearts and minds in Tarin Kowt?
5. They cannot reconcile themselves to acknowldge the truth of Sir Lawrence Freedman's truism about airpower from his last Adephi Paper (The Transformation of Strategic Affairs. p. 63) -

'The basic problem remained that very few political objectives could be directly met by air attack alone. Its use can influence the victim's calculations, but it cannot achieve the physical control of enemy decision making that is always at least a theoretical possibility following a land offensive'.

I found most the analysis in Stephen's paper to be banal. He clearly overreaches in trying to associate Emerging Australian Doctrine with the French Defeat in Indochina.

He is to my mind, either being duplicitous, or is a few tinnies short of a six pack in his understanding of Australia's Future Joint Operating Concept and the Australian Army's Adaptive Campaigning doctrine.