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Australia's strategic position in the Region

DEFENCETODAY The problems Australia is experiencing in Defence acquisition and planning mirror those in the US and UK, in large part due to the adoption of poor practices and organisational structures introduced in these countries. This historical problem is now openly acknowledged by current and former Defence Ministers and other observers, but not by the current Defence Organisation leadership. The Asian arms race has produced a realignment in the global military balance of sufficient magnitude to compel the US to abandon its Counter-Insurgency centric ideology and practice of the last decade, and declare publicly a 'strategic pivot' to place Asia and the Indian Ocean region at the top of its priority list. The precarious budgetary situation of the United States will, however, result increasingly over time in the Americans encouraging allies in the region to invest as much as is feasible to cover their own strategic needs. The initiator of the Asian arms race is without doubt China. After the fall of the Soviet Union China embarked on a large scale restructure of its military capabilities, taking advantage of a desperate post-Soviet Russia to buy up every single advanced system the Russians had to offer. Two decades later, China possesses the largest and most modern Integrated Air Defence System (IADS) in Asia; the largest fleet of upper tier combat aircraft in Asia, and if United States downsizing continues unabated, possibly globally; and a growing fleet of surface warships and submarines, also the largest in Asia. The 'party line' of PRC state propaganda is that these force developments are simply 'modernisation', which also involves some downsizing in fleets and qualitative improvement of force elements. While these statements have an element of truth they do not accord with the restructure and re-equipping of the PLA, resulting in a dramatic increase in reach or overall force structure 'throw weight', or the measure of how many munitions of a given size can be delivered to what distance. The 'throw weight' metric was widely used during the Cold War for assessing nuclear delivery systems capabilities, especially in ballistic missiles, but it is just as applicable in the era of Precision Guided Munitions (PGM), as it provides a realistic measure of how much damage can be done by a given inventory of terminally guided non-nuclear ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or air-delivered smart bombs. Calculation of 'throw weight' takes an agreed measure of weapon 'weight' (nuclear kilo-tonnage …