Australia Lays Out China-Focused Defense Overhaul
Australia is overhauling its military to create a larger, more powerful force focused on the Indo-Pacific as it seeks to counterbalance China’s growing influence and military power in the region.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday that Australia will spend roughly $186 billion over the next 10 years on high-tech defense programs including new long-range missiles, offensive cyber capabilities and radar surveillance.
“We need to prepare for a post-Covid world that is poorer, that is more dangerous and that is more disorderly,” Mr. Morrison said in a speech at a defense academy in the capital, Canberra. “We have not seen the conflation of global economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced in our region since the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s.”
A defense-strategy paper released Wednesday outlines plans to acquire long-range antiship missiles from the U.S. Navy and to develop and test hypersonic missiles that would travel at five times the speed of sound. Australia also will expand its advanced radar network in tropical Queensland state to survey deep into the southern and central Pacific. Dotted with thousands of islands and home to important shipping lanes and fisheries, the area is again in strategic calculations as China projects its power far from its shores.
Asked about Australia’s plan for long-range missiles, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, “All countries concerned should avoid military competitions and purchasing unnecessary military equipment.”
The U.S. Marine Corps is already pivoting its focus from fighting insurgents in the Middle East to being able to hop from island to island in the western Pacific to bottle up the Chinese fleet—its most sweeping transformation in decades.
“The strategic competition between China and the United States means that there’s a lot of tension in the cord and a lot of risk of miscalculation,” Mr. Morrison said Wednesday. “And so we have to be prepared and ready to frame the world in which we live as best as we can and be prepared to respond and play our role to protect Australia.”
A staunch ally of Washington for decades, Australia sent combat troops, warships and aircraft to support U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that military tie-up is complicated by Australia’s economic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner.
Australia was already building new warships, advanced submarines, stealth warplanes and amphibious forces as part of a long-term security blueprint drawn up in 2016. But the rapidly deteriorating security environment is forcing a look at ways to strengthen the current force, according to defense analysts.
“Covid has brought about quite a stark change of demeanor on the part of the Chinese Communist Party. Wolf Warrior stuff,” said Peter Jennings, a former defense and intelligence official who heads the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a security think tank. “It has made it very clear it is in the mode of coercion at the moment. Every country has had a taste of what that is like.”
“Australia is saying, ‘If the choice is more coercion [by China] or more defense by us, we will go for defense,’” he said.
Tensions with Beijing have been increasing in the past couple of years, as Australia has tightened counterespionage laws—making foreign interference in politics a criminal offense—and banned Chinese telecom companies Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. from its next-generation 5G mobile network over cyberspying concerns. The companies have long denied their equipment poses any security risk.
The relationship deteriorated further in May when Beijing, responding to Australian calls for an investigation of its coronavirus response, imposed tariffs on Australian barley and threatened to boycott Australian meat and wine and cut off visits by Chinese tourists and students.
Beijing has previously denied any efforts to influence Australian politics.
The new defense blueprint also outlined nearly $1 billion in spending over the next decade on recruiting spies and developing offensive cyber capabilities—driven, cyberanalysts say, by concerns countries such as China are becoming bolder in using cyber tools to disrupt the strategic environment.
Security agencies in recent weeks have ramped up warnings about potential cyberattacks, including on such critical infrastructure as power and water-distribution networks and transport and communications grids. Last month the prime minister said Australian businesses and government agencies were being targeted by a sophisticated state actor in a large-scale cyberattack. Some cyberanalysts said China is one of the few countries with both the resources and the motivation for such an attack.
Photo: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defense Minister Linda Reynolds arriving at the 2020 Defense Strategic Update on Wednesday. - PHOTO: LUKAS COCH/SHUTTERSTOCK
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/australia-lays-out-china-focused-defense-overhaul-11593595679
