Three fundamental reviews of national defence and security policy have been ordered by the Rudd government as the Australian Defence Force conducts ongoing high-tempo military operations abroad and continues a multi-billion dollar rearmament and expansion program at home. Labor’s reviews are dictated partly by the new government’s desire to differentiate itself from the Howard government on national security policy, partly by the increasingly complex and changing regional and global threat environments now facing Australia, and partly by the high and rising costs of defence.

The new Defence White Paper commissioned by Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon will provide new and overdue foundations for 21st century national strategic policy. The review of air combat capability is Labor’s response to ongoing controversy surrounding the decisions by the Howard government to spend $16 billion dollars on up to100 F-35 joint strike fighters and $6 billion on 24 Super Hornet fighters. And the review of Australia’s homeland and border security arrangements has been ordered to establish whether or not Australia needs a separate department of homeland security in an age of Islamist terrorism, globalised crime and global warming.

While Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon are understandably anxious to develop and own distinctively Labor defence and security policies, it remains to be seen how substantially different their policies will be when the reviews are completed. Before coming to power Rudd committed Labor to maintaining defence spending (currently running at $22 billion annually) with minimal annual real growth of three per cent. While he pledged to spend money more efficiently, he accepted that Australian military forces had to be able to operate both regionally and globally in coalitions. So he acquiesced in Howard government defence policy parameters to the extent of insulating defence from funding cuts.

Moreover, Labor faces the same regional and global problems that faced the Coalition: the deterioration of Australia’s strategic circumstances in the south-west Pacific, a changing global balance of power with the rise of China and India, and the wider threat from Islamist militancy. The scale and diversity of these problems limit the space for immediately apparent policy shifts.

Finally, Australia’s military and civilian defence establishment has always been extremely good at protecting its role and its perquisites. Labor, like the former government, will not dare (and will not want) to ride roughshod over Defence as it pursues policy adjustments.

Some things will of course change this year. Australian combat troops will come out of Iraq. Military high command personnel will change with the expiration of the employment contracts of the Defence Force Chief, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, and the army, navy and airforce chiefs. There will inevitably be differences in ministerial style and substance and emphasis as Fitzgibbon, still somewhat unknown, settles into his new job.

But many familiar defence issues will not change: Australian troops will remain at risk on potentially hazardous operations in Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The US alliance will remain central to Australian security policy. There will be an ongoing need to understand Australia’s current and future threat environment and to structure Australian military forces appropriately. The ten-year $50 billion program to acquire new planes, warships and advanced land warfare equipment will continue, with many key decisions on fighter aircraft and new warships already made and being implemented.

Also remaining will be the problems of recruiting and retaining the skilled personnel needed by a modern defence force, and of ensuring that Australia’s defence industry base is capable of developing, repairing and sustaining military equipment. (Labor, like the coalition, is committed to selling the government-owned ASC - formerly the Australian Submarine Corporation - shipyard to private industry this year).

Despite Labor’s claims that it inherited a Defence mess, the Howard government in some ways left the ADF better funded and better equipped and better managed than it was under the previous Labor government. Under the pressure of global and regional events, and alliance obligations, the ADF was also much busier with its deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. But after early efficiency and acquisition reforms, the Coalition found itself struggling to overcome continuing waste and mismanagement, delay and cost overruns in sometimes contentious procurement decisions, and critical shortages of skilled people in some areas.

Overall, the Coalition’s greatest failing was its reluctance to take a fully considered long view of Australia’s changing strategic environment, including how to develop, equip and structure forces for the future within the nation’s financial capabilities. It preferred to throw money at Defence and to respond reactively to events in tandem with the US and other allies. At various times it embraced radical and contentious doctrines - including preemptive attacks - and it could not quite resolve the sometimes dubious tensions between advocates of so-called regionalist and globalist defence postures. Howard had no less than five defence ministers.

By far the most important of Labor’s policy reviews designed to remedy this situation will be its new defence White Paper, due to be completed in December. It will be first defence White Paper for eight years, although the Howard government published three slim “updates” in 2003, 2005 and last year.

The White Paper will attempt to assess Australia’s strategic environment out to 2030 and the likely forces and equipment that will be needed to respond cost-effectively to that environment. It will involve judgements about regional and more remote threats from state powers as well from as non-state actors including Jihadist terrorists and criminal organisations, and from phenomena including global warming. The principal author will be Defence deputy secretary Michael Pezzullo, a tough, bright and ambitious bureaucrat who wrote last year’s “update” for the Howard government.

As a strategic analyst Pezzullo clearly straddles the regionalist-globalist policy divide. In last year’s update he defined Australia’s “area of paramount defence interest” in specifically regional terms, but also said “we... recognise that our interests often must be secured in places distant from Australia.” This is in line with both Coalition and Labor policy. The White Paper will expand on the air, sea and land forces, equipment and the financial resources required to defend national interests in the environment that is likely to evolve over the next two decades. Whether Australia ought to move towards acquiring ballistic missiles, and how far it ought to become involved in US anti-missile defence technologies, will be tough questions for Pezzullo and his advisers.

The brute facts of geography dictate Australia’s need for superior regional air combat and air-strike power. As the 2000 White Paper noted: “Air combat is the most important single capability for the defence of Australia because control of the air over our territory and maritime approaches is critical to all other types of operation in the defence of Australia.”

Labor’s air combat capability review will look at the adequacy of current air combat planning to the year 2045 in the light of critical, highly expensive and quite opaque decisions taken by the Howard government. Stage one of the review will examine the Howard government’s decision to retire Australia’s diminishing fleet of ageing F-111 aircraft in 2010 and to acquire 24 F/18 Super Hornet fighters for some $6 billion. Stage two of the review will look at emerging trends in Asia-Pacific combat air power and the Howard government’s decision to purchase up to 100 American F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for $16 billion. It will also consider the case for and against acquiring F-22 Raptor aircraft.

The Howard government’s decisions to acquire the Joint Strike Fighters and the Super Hornet appeared to be taken with little prior warning or public discussion despite their formidable cost. There have been long-simmering controversies, often promoted by commentators with an apparent id©e fixe, over the decisions to retire the F-111s and not to seek US government permission to purchase Raptors.

The review will conducted by Defence first assistant secretary for police development, Neil Orme and is due to be complete by the end of April. The ubiquitous Mr Pezzullo will chair a steering committee.

Current speculation is that the review will eventually back the decisions to retire the F-111s and to acquire the Super Hornets. It is unlikely to support acquisition of Raptors, despite Fitzgibbon’s declaration at recent US-Australia ministerial talks in Canberra that he wants to have the option of purchasing the advanced high-performance planes. Critical decisions for the review may revolve around the timing, cost and number of joint strike fighters Australia will need in a future air force armed with Super Hornets equipped with advanced radars and stand-off missiles.

The homeland security review, to be conducted by former Defence secretary Ric Smith, will examine whether Australia needs a separate super-department for homeland security to deal primarily with terrorist threats. It will review the roles and responsibilities and coordination of counter-terrorism, federal police and customs agencies. Indications so far are that the Rudd government is not attracted to setting up a separate homeland security administration but that it is looking to Smith for advice on how better to coordinate the national domestic security effort.

The White Paper and the air combat and homeland security reviews have to be seen as coordinated Labor initiatives to assert political, intellectual, policy and financial over the defence and security legacy of the Howard government. They are sensible and necessary initiatives that show Labor is very serious indeed about getting defence and national security right. But it would be very surprising if the eventual outcome was a radical redefinition of the nature of the threat environment and the optimal force structure needed to address it over time.