top of page
Line Concept Level 3 page 2.PNG

Deterring Whom? Michael Pezzullo and Australia’s Missing National Defence Strategy

Oct 13
2 min read

“Deterrence, absent a grounding in actuality, is dangerous.” By Robbin Laird.


That was Michael Pezzullo’s opening proposition at the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar on air combat mass and depth. The former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs spoke for under twenty minutes. His argument was harder than most of the day’s technical contributions.


Australia has made deterrence a staple of its official vocabulary. It has not said what it is trying to deter, who it is trying to deter, or what success would take.


That is a comfortable position. It is also a dangerous one.


My latest analysis looks at how Pezzullo worked through the question by elimination, over a forty-year horizon. He ranked three candidates by probability:

  • A military dictatorship in Jakarta, which is the least likely. Australia would have real warning time, and the work is multi-generational.

  • A hegemonic China in a world where the United States no longer extends security guarantees. This is the hardest problem, but it would be decades in the making.

  • A disruptive China willing to use force to change the status quo in the Western Pacific. This is the one that matters now, and there is no warning time left.


On the third, his formula was blunt: Australia cannot deter by denial alone. At most, “we deter by annoying.” The credible contribution is a combined force, integrated with American airpower and allied capability, that offers more options, in more places, more often.


His sharpest criticism was aimed at the whole-of-government picture. Australia has a defence strategy. It does not have a national one. Civil defence and mobilisation remain, in his words, “two terms that dare not speak their names.”


For a seminar on air combat mass and depth, this changes the question. Mass and depth are national attributes before they are service attributes. A force can sustain combat power in a contested environment only if the surrounding nation can generate, protect and regenerate it. That depends on industrial capacity, infrastructure resilience, fuel, logistics, and a public that understands why any of it matters.


The question is not whether Australia needs the aircraft.


It is whether the nation behind them is ready to carry the weight no air force can carry alone.





 
 
bottom of page