Before 2020, Australian defence strategy was predicated on a planning assumption that we would have at least 10 years’ warning of an impending war. This would give us the crucial time that we would need to expand the Australian Defence Force and to make necessary preparations for war.
That assumption was upended in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which was released by the Morrison government in July 2020. Like its predecessor, the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also accepts that we no longer have a 10-year buffer. It is for this reason presumably that Defence Minister Richard Marles often speaks of Australia living in ‘the most dangerous times’ that we have faced since the end of World War II.
What has created this situation of peril? Australia is not threatened by any neighbour – including Indonesia, about which we had serious strategic concerns in the 1950s and 60s that have since dissipated.
Leaving aside China, no regional power could credibly threaten us without first building up its military power. This would take time. We would detect such a change and be able to hedge by expanding the Australian Defence Force and making necessary defensive preparations.
To rely on such warning time has been longstanding Australian policy, ever since the Dibb defence review of 1986.
However, there is no leaving aside China. The only credible threat to peace in our region would be an aggressive and unchecked China, which in the pursuit of its territorial and other objectives might be confronted militarily by the US, whose resolve China misjudges, as former prime minister Kevin Rudd recently suggested could occur over Taiwan.
Were a US-China war to break out, it is highly likely that Australia would be drawn in, because of our strategically crucial geography. History would have to judge whether the warning signs of such a war had been heeded by successive Australian governments and whether appropriate preparations had been made.
The Australian people would do more than demand the establishment of a royal commission in the aftermath of such a conflict. They would seek a far deeper level of accountability if it became evident that the government had had plenty of warning but had done nothing of consequence to prepare the nation. Should it come to pass, such a war would be one of the most forecast strategic events in modern history.
This does not mean that a US-China war is inevitable. However, it does mean that it is likely enough to drive changes in policy, strategy and capability.
Of course, even if we had strategic warning of a looming war, surprise attacks still could catch us off guard.
For all of its vigilance, Israel was caught by surprise in October 2023. A surprise attack by China would be difficult but not impossible to achieve. Its preparations would have to be masked by good deception and the use of plausible cover (such as large-scale military exercises). In a Taiwan scenario, such ploys would be designed to catch US and allied forces unprepared and out of position, with perhaps up to 28 days being required before those forces could arrive in strength.
As was the practice during the Cold War, the strategic warning capability and processes of the Australian intelligence community need to be strengthened. Full-time warning teams need to be established to look for signs of readiness changes in China: key military units moving into place; signs of national mobilisation; increased defence production and stockpiling; economic measures such as a rapid sell-off of US securities and the hoarding of gold; preparatory moves in cyberspace and space; changes in the content and intensity of Chinese discourse, which would be aimed at laying out the case for the use of force; and so on.
The 2024 Independent Intelligence Review (released by the government in March 2025) was alert to this gap in our intelligence activities. The review made relevant recommendations that were aimed at improving the strategic warning function within the Australian intelligence community, but it is not clear that these have been enacted.
To assist in the relearning of the discipline of strategic warning, analysts would do well to re-examine the issue of warning failures, which is explored in the substantial literature on surprise attacks such as those by Imperial Japan on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), North Korea’s invasion of South Korea (June 1950), the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962), the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979) and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (August 1990).
This literature focuses on the failure by analysts to connect and make sense of signals as against noise – for instance, in the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor – as well as the disposition of decision-makers to rely on their own experience and judgement to assess unfolding situations, often exhibiting a sceptical wariness of intelligence warnings.
Thanks to Keren Yarhi-Milo, in Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (2014), we better understand how in a crisis political leaders typically rely on heuristics – that is, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, reputational concerns and everything else that constitutes their personal cognitive models.
Whatever we may think about their decisions, they certainly think that their theories and choices are consistent and logical (for instance, think of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 clinging to the idea that he could dissuade Adolf Hitler).
If political leaders are unwilling to be persuaded by the best available intelligence or are disinclined to act meaningfully, then no amount of excellence in the national intelligence and policy processes will make a material difference to the outcome.
This may be a problem of professional dissonance. Political leaders typically do not have a deep background in strategic and defence affairs. Their frame of reference for considering the assessments that they receive is unlikely to be grounded in long experience in dealing with intelligence and other security information.
They also naturally will have an eye to their domestic agenda and political prospects, especially in relation to what may be involved in rallying public support for the hard task of preparing for war. If political leaders do not bring to the task deep strategic expertise, it is to be hoped that at least they bring conviction and a degree of historical perspective and that they are willing to engage in intelligence-informed conjecture where they may have to make decisions before knowing enough about the future to fully justify them.
Intelligence assessments regarding the prospect of war are necessarily an estimative activity. Unlike many other areas of public policy, there is no readily applicable probabilistic model for the likelihood of war, although we should not shut our minds to the possibility of improved predictive tools emerging in this field. In war, there will always be the irreducibility of uncertainty and unpredictability. As British philosopher and logician Carveth Read cautioned in Logic: Deductive and Inductive (1898), in some subjects it would be a mistake to aim at an unattainable precision and it is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. War is surely one of those subjects.
War challenges widely held assumptions about human rationality and assumed preferences for peace. The deployment by the Soviet Union of missiles in Cuba in October 1962 was a warning failure on the part of the CIA’s estimates staff. They judged that such a deployment would not be rational, as it was not in keeping with Soviet interests, and therefore they discounted the possibility of it occurring. They were wrong.
Some thought before World War I that economic interdependence would reduce or even eliminate the risk of war. They, too, were wrong.
Analysis today could similarly be distorted by the idea that the economic cost of war is so great that no power would rationally start a war in the face of its probable consequences. The idea that economic interdependence acts as a brake on war does much to explain why peace may endure but nothing to explain why wars still occur.
There is a statutory office-holder whose task it is to address these analytical challenges and to make the best call on strategic developments that may affect Australia, including the possibility of war. She is Kathy Klugman, the director-general of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI). Hers is not a household name, as is that of the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Michele Bullock. ONI is hardly recognised outside Canberra, while most Australians have heard of the RBA.
Arguably, Klugman and ONI have the greater responsibility in terms of assessing developments that ultimately could affect our national existence as a sovereign and uncoerced nation; that is, not a vassal to a hegemonic overlord.
Under the ONI Act 2018, Klugman has statutory independence in performing this function. By law, the director-general is not subject to direction in respect of the content of, or any conclusions to be reached in, any report or assessment prepared by ONI.
The principal means by which the director-general provides advice on the most consequential matters is by way of a national assessment that is prepared for the government.
Very few in government ever see such assessments and they are never seen outside government, which is as it should be.
In preparing a national assessment, the director-general is obligated to consult a national assessments board, which she chairs.
Core membership consists of the departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, Home Affairs and the Treasury; the ADF; and other departments and agencies that may be invited to attend when the board is considering particular national assessments.
If there is a significant difference of opinion between the director-general and the board, members must by law endeavour to reach agreement. If they are unable to reach agreement, the director-general must give a statement to each person to whom the national assessment is provided that sets out the matter on which there is a difference of opinion.
What this means is that there is a legal framework for the structured assessment of the most significant features of our strategic environment, where officials are able to engage in a process that is free from political interference.
This legal framework ensures that there is contestability in the process and that differences of view are not censured but rather are surfaced and recorded in advice to government. Given this legal framework, there is no excuse that will be able to be proffered later that officials were not able to lay before ministers warnings about the risk of Australia being attacked. Officials have the full protection of law to do just that. There will be no excuse for any failure to do so, without fear or favour.
If we are living in a time of peril, we have to assume that an assessment of the likelihood of war has been, or is being, prepared under Klugman’s direction.
It would be highly classified, as it would contain the most sensitive intelligence information that would be available to the Australian government, perhaps including exquisite and unique insights into Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s thinking and plans, should such intelligence be available.
If he has such an assessment to hand, Albanese should do his duty and make a sober and measured statement to the House of Representatives so the parliament and the people know what it is that may lie ahead.
At the very least, the parliament and the people have a right to know that such an assessment exists or is being prepared, even if it never sees the light of day.
If such an assessment does not exist, and there is no intention to produce one, the prime minister should direct that it be prepared, noting that he cannot give directions as to its contents or conclusions. If he has not done so, then the secretaries committee on national security, which is chaired by the secretary of PM&C, should recommend that such an assessment needs to be prepared as a matter of urgency. Such a national assessment would have to grapple with the question of how best to judge Xi’s calculations, especially regarding Taiwan.
Xi’s calculation, and especially his reading of US and allied resolve, will be the critical factors in determining whether there is peace or war. He may well perceive that the dangers of the peace outweigh the costs of war and that risking war would be preferable to living with an unacceptable status quo.
He might perhaps judge that he could achieve a grand bargain, perhaps a deal with US President Donald Trump over Taiwan, while preparing for a war that he would prefer to avoid.
Under Xi, China might make very deliberate and aggressive choices regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea and elsewhere in the full knowledge that conflict was a possibility.
These choices could take a number of different forms and could be sequenced in a number of different ways. A full-scale invasion of Taiwan should not be thought of as the inevitable outcome of a linear calculation. Taiwan’s offshore islands might be seized first, with a view to testing responses. A blockade or quarantine might be pursued first. Other operational strategies might be employed.
Taiwan’s own actions will have a bearing on China’s calculations. As Taiwan stiffens its defences by deploying asymmetric anti-invasion capabilities, China’s calculations will change. US actions would have a decisive bearing. US willingness to shore up Taiwan’s capabilities, to enhance its own forward presence and to continue to build a system of integrated regional deterrence with allies and partners would affect Xi’s calculations.
Xi also would have to calculate the actions of others, such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines.
Limited wars against others might be launched first – for instance, against the Philippines. Each scenario and sub-scenario would have to be worked through by analysts, who should be using structured war-gaming techniques to play out how events might unfold and what levels and types of force might be employed at different points.
War will not occur as an inevitability. The strategic environment is far too contingent for that. History is not a runaway, driverless train that defeats all attempts at human intervention. Neither is it an unchangeable train schedule that was fixed long before choices were made by those with the power to shape its path. History is always contingent. It is a product of vast structural forces as well as the decisions of those whom German philosopher GWF Hegel termed ‘world historical individuals’.
Through their decisions and actions these individuals can nudge, deflect, accelerate and even disrupt the playing out of history. Structural factors are always crucial – for instance, it is China’s economic expansion that has generated the military means by which it could force events – but in the end decisions and actions still count in shaping the direction of history.
It falls to ONI to assess how this play of structural forces, decisions and actions will unfold. Without the benefit of access to exquisite intelligence, from the outside it would appear that we are likely to experience nerve-racking crises as early as 2028, with a major war being the least likely scenario.
Diplomatic initiatives to manage crises and prevent war should be pursued in the face of the contingent unfolding of history. The peacemaker should always continue to labour, even as the first bombs are falling.
Let us hope that our finest intelligence analysts are working on the task; that they are professionally fearless and analytically brilliant; and that they are at least vaguely right and not exactly wrong. Let us hope, too, that our political leaders are heeding and acting on their warnings.
This article was first published in The Australian.
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