Bradley Perrett | How the defence review's strategy works

Under the Defence Strategic Review partly published this week, we will adjust our military so that, if hostile Chinese forces approached us, they would meet increasingly intense resistance.

Called a denial strategy, it's not a new idea, and many Australians may wonder why we haven't been applying it all along. In fact, we have been applying it, but without much focus.

After the review's recommendations are implemented, we still won't be focusing on it enough, however.

China is far stronger than Australia, but its strength diminishes as it moves farther from its own territory.

Conversely, as the location of any fighting gets closer to Australia, our strength rises. It rises all the more if we have given our forces more weapons that are effective in the approaches to our continent, which is just what the review has decided we must do.

No doubt the unpublished part of the review also calls for improved sensors for watching what's going on to our north, but that's all hush-hush.

Measures to pay for the strengthened denial strategy include cutting back on intended capability for fighting intensive land battles - either in the Middle East, where we are never obliged to be involved, or in Australia itself, where (so far) an enemy army is extremely unlikely to land in great force.

By making those cuts, the review is imposing focus.

But we should be cutting back the army further and concentrating even more on our northern approaches.

Denial is in fact the strategy that China uses to deter the US from intervening in a war over Taiwan. In fashionable military jargon, the policy is also called "anti-access and area denial". Anti-access means intercepting hostile forces on their way towards the repeller's local zone, and area denial is the ability to hit those forces once they're in it.

It all boils down to the same thing: "Keep out."

To understand Australia's denial capability, start at the part that reaches farthest, which is our submarine fleet. We would hope that China would think twice before sending naval forces, such as aircraft carriers and supporting ships, to threaten or attack us, because they might run into an Australian submarine on the way.

Our diesel-electric subs of the Collins class, designed to operate at long range, can already perform the mission, but not strongly. Our nuclear submarines, with vastly greater mobility and range, will be far more effective, so the review strongly endorses buying them.

Our second defensive layer is likely to be the fighter force, and it too is now due for some improvement - but disappointingly little. The air force's F/A-18F Super Hornets, specially assigned to the strike mission, have already been due to get LRASM anti-ship missiles; now the review calls for the rest of our fighters, F-35A Lightnings, to have those weapons, too.

But we'd have expected that move eventually, anyway. And the review, at least in its published version, does not require acquisition of more fighters. It should have.

Our fighters can execute their most distant strikes, more than 1,000 kilometres away, when refuelled in flight by tanker aircraft, which would always be in short supply in a war. Again, the public version of the review fails to call for more tankers, one of the most obvious steps that we should be taking.

That means that our denial strategy really kicks into gear when an enemy is not so far from Australia.

"If it is an anti-access and area denial strategy, then it's a short-range one," says Malcolm Davis, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

To improve the chances of our fighters having bases to fly from, the review requires urgent action to make northern Australian airfields resistant to attack. That probably includes not just more concrete but also systems for shooting down incoming missiles.

We will also be using civilian runways as auxiliary bases, and unspecified action will be taken to improve fuel supply. That's badly overdue.

Perhaps after the fighters began conducting strikes, the navy's surface ships would be in action. The review requires us to buy small, "tier 2" warships, some of which we can expect to be loaded with anti-ship missiles. Although such simple ships can be bought as fairly quick reinforcements of the navy, they will be weak and vulnerable.

READ MORE:

As the range came down further, strike missiles launched by the army from Australia would come into play, so the intensity of resistance would rise again. The key weapon would be the forthcoming US PrSM missile carried around in HIMARS launcher trucks. PrSM, which we are helping to develop, at first will have a range of 500 kilometres, but a later version will fly more than twice as far and will be effective against ships as well as fixed targets on land.

The review implies that the army would move forward to islands to our north (whose islands?) so its missile strike radius would extend farther from Australia. Moving army units by sea in a combat zone looks dangerous, however.

Many of these denial capabilities would also be needed if China, instead of approaching Australia from afar, was already ensconced on territory to our north - for example, in Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea or, most worryingly, East Timor.

If China had by then also taken Taiwan and was dominating south-east Asia, it could assemble great strength in our near north. In that case, this country would need to be massively committed to a strategy of denial.