Mixed defence news for India this week: the county’s first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine was activated days before an incident in which the kilo-class submarine INS Sindhurakshak exploded. Eighteen Indian sailors are feared dead. The Economist …
As outlined by Tobias Feakin and Jessica Woodall’s post last week, ASPI recently launched its new international cyber policy centre in Sydney. An expert panel discussed many facets of Australian cyber policy. What wasn’t really …
The Minister for Home Affairs released the Australian Crime Commission’s (ACC) latest update to its Organised Crime in Australia (PDF) series recently. This report is important and has implications for every Australian. The media needs to …
T.X. Hammes has a new article in The National Interest, ‘Sorry, AirSea Battle Is No Strategy’ in which he argues that war with China won’t be won by deep strikes. Distant, defensive deterrence and blockades …
The normalisation of tension on the Korean Peninsula is settling onto its foundations, with South Korea pledging US$7.3 million of humanitarian aid to North Korea over the weekend. The move came one day before South …
Andrew Davies’s recent post about long project timelines highlights issues that everyone accepts but rarely factors into the planning and management of the future force structure; modern projects take an unconscionably long time to actually …
The latest issue of the Kokoda Foundation’s Security Challenges journal is a special edition that collects contributions on ‘The Defence White Paper 2013’. ASPI is well represented, and the abstracts of our papers are reprinted …
I’ve had a number of conversations (both real and virtual) about intelligence oversight since I first wrote about it here a couple of weeks ago. In particular, Andrew Zammit’s response was a thoughtful piece on …
The limited interaction of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the outside world has been a major source of concern related to China’s military rise. Of particular worry is the fact that there still isn’t …
Andrew Davies valuable post calls attention to the range of watchdog mechanisms holding Australia’s intelligence agencies to account. It also asks why Australians don’t know much about these checks and balances. I would suggest that’s …
Hope is blooming with the summer flowers in Beijing after the Sunnylands meeting between Presidents Xi and Obama. The hope is that the two leaders—Xi just installed and Obama secure in his second term— will …
Toby Feakin’s post the other day brought up the topic of oversight of government security operations. He’s right that a liberal democracy requires checks and balances to prevent excesses from government agencies. But it got …