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Wrong Turn or Right Lane? Defending Forward against Cybercriminals Abroad

Image courtesy of TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense on 9 May 2020.

On April 7, the Australian Minister of Defense acknowledged – for the first time ever – that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) used its offensive cyber capabilities to disrupt foreign cybercriminal infrastructure responsible for malicious cyber activities exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic.1 While details on the operation are sparse, what we do know is that ASD “stopped the criminals from accessing their own systems and prevented them from accessing information they stole.”2 What we do not know is the how, the where, the when, and what exactly triggered ASD into action.

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AI and Autonomous Systems Are Urgent Priorities for Today’s Defence Force

Image courtesy of Daniel Wetzel/DVIDS

This article was originally published in the Strategist by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on 29 April 2019.

The 2016 defence white paper and the decades-long integrated investment program will deliver a future force that includes 72 joint strike fighters, several hundred infantry fighting vehicles, nine new frigates and 12 new submarines. F-35 deliveries have started but the ‘future’ frigate and submarine programs were well named: the Hunter-class frigates will turn up, all going well, between 2028 and the early 2040s, and the first Attack-class submarine is scheduled to enter service in 2035, with the 12th in the mid-2050s.

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The US Shouldn’t Go to War with China over Taiwan—and Nor Should Australia

Image courtesy of Kaila Peters/DVIDS.

This article was originally published in The Strategist by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on 13 February 2019.

Paul Dibb, in his recent Strategist post, writes that America’s strategic position in Asia would be fatally undermined if it didn’t go to war with China if China attacked Taiwan, and that Australia’s alliance with America would be fatally undermined if we didn’t then go to war with China too. The conclusion he draws is that, in the event of an unprovoked Chinese attack on Taiwan, America should go to war with China, and so should Australia.

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Are We Being Played in the Pacific?

Image courtesy of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Dan Pilhorn/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

This article was originally published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) The Strategist on 10 September 2018.

If you were trying to design a low-cost strategy to constrict the operational horizon of an important US ally in the region, China’s ploys in the Pacific wouldn’t be a bad model to examine.

China has been talking a big game in the Pacific. It’s been reported as looking to fund a major regional military base in Fiji and scoping Vanuatu for a military base of its own. And it apparently has plans to refurbish four ports in Papua New Guinea, including the strategically significant Manus Island. Over the decade 2006–2016, it has committed US$1.8 billion in aid, and Chinese telco Huawei has sought to build undersea internet cables in the region.

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Middle Powers in International Relations

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This article was originally published by E-International Relations (E-IR) on 8 May 2017.

Realism’s theoretical dominance in International Relations (IR) – especially its focus on the power of superpowers and its state-centric view of international society – has been challenged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global transformations characterising the post-Cold War era. One of those transformations is the way in which “states neither great nor small” are gaining increased recognition amid the disruptive multi-polarity of the current global disorder. Scholars such as Martin Wight and Carsten Holbraad, whose earlier writings about middle powers were overlooked in mainstream IR, are now acknowledged for their scholarly prescience. Bringing middle powers back into mainstream IR theorising is obviously overdue. There are two problems in the theorising of middle powers in contemporary IR scholarship that obscure their positioning and potential in post-Cold War international politics: (1) its intellectual history has been neglected; (2) “middle power” itself is a vague concept.

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