Aligning for Effect: Operationalizing U.S.-Australia Regional Defense Strategies

Alliance Future: Rewiring Australia and the United States

The Carnegie Asia Program’s “Alliance Future” project aims to ensure that Canberra and Washington are working to operationalize and integrate their alliance in new ways. The project explores how to undertake difficult reforms, forge new modes of cooperation, harmonize outdated regulations, better align national strategies, address sovereignty concerns and risk thresholds, and ultimately reform the alliance for a more competitive era.

Introduction

One of the primary challenges of managing future Indo-Pacific security dynamics will be the extent to which the United States and Australia—as alliance partners with convergent strategic interests in upholding regional order—are able to sustain alignment of their respective defense strategies over the coming decade. This is not as simple a task as some, particularly in the United States, believe.¹

It is commonly assumed that the integration of Canberra’s and Washington’s respective strategies should be easy and seamless—especially since its alliance with the United States is the so-called bedrock of Australian security and defense policy.² Yet, several factors bear upon this. Some are primarily functional, relating to operational capabilities. While increasing the overall lethality of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) via the acquisition of long-range strike capabilities is a positive recent development, the fact remains that Australia will not have significantly enhanced capacity to contribute to independent or combined high-end deterrence for some time.³

Other factors are more complex, involving Australian and U.S. relationships with regional actors whose posture during future conflict scenarios will be crucial to successful outcomes. Still others relate to different assumptions about the likely geographic locus of future conflict. Finally, it must be acknowledged that, although they are closely aligned in strategic outlook, the United States and Australia nonetheless have different interests impacting their respective threat perceptions. These shape the conditions under which they might be prepared to use force when responding to regional contingencies.

Each of these challenges must be managed to avoid miscommunication about intent and flawed expectations about the nature and purpose of Australia’s commitments to U.S. warfighting objectives.⁴ In this paper, we examine that task in more detail and propose ways to better harmonize U.S. and Australian approaches to regional defense. We reject the notion that aligning defense priorities relies on perfectly overlapping grand strategies. Indeed, we find that the recently released 2024 Australian National Defence Strategy (Australian NDS) offers a sound starting point for more clearly synchronizing defense priorities.⁵ This document prioritizes deterrence by denial in its broad approach, focusing explicitly on the effects that defense capabilities seek to engender.

In particular, the Australian strategy emphasizes maintaining situational awareness, alongside the ability to hold adversary forces at risk during sustained combat operations. In this context, we identify three priority areas of focus for the alliance: the importance of deploying resources effectively, in line with each partner’s interests; the need to build deeper relationships with regional actors to facilitate joint U.S.-Australia operations; and the opportunity to construct regional networks of resilience based on enhanced cooperation between like-minded states, either with or without direct U.S. participation. We conclude that, taken together, investing effort across each of these thematic areas will not only enhance Australian and U.S. alignment but also facilitate much more coherent effects—both in terms of deterrence and for potential future combat operations.

Navigating Uncertainty: U.S. and Australian Strategic Priorities in a Messy Region

Much of the contemporary discussion around Australian and U.S. defense cooperation focuses less on issues of intent and more on how Australia might integrate with American forces to best serve U.S. warfighting priorities.⁶ This is a fundamental mistake. First, it makes the flawed assumption that U.S. and Australian strategic preferences are synonymous. Second, it fails to consider that Australian decisionmakers do not outsource sovereign choices over where, how, and when its military assets might be utilized. 

It is, therefore, important to recognize that Australian support for U.S. strategic goals is by no means universally assured, even without taking into consideration Australia’s keen eye on the U.S. election and the potential for a renewed and more determined “America First” agenda. On the contrary, Australian commitments will not depend only on context and capabilities. Rather, they will rely chiefly on Australia’s perception of the circumstances under which its vital interests might be at risk, its ability to do anything meaningful to support Washington’s strategic goals, and pragmatic calculations concerning the costs and benefits of doing so.

One arena where this plays out is in Australian domestic debates about strategic policy. Recent disagreements about the utility of the trilateral Australia-UK-U.S. security agreement (AUKUS), and related concerns about force posture cooperation, are a good example of the plurality of thinking in Australian security discussions. But they are also reflective of broader and longer-standing internal contests over how Australia should conceive of its place in the region and the world, where it should prioritize its defense spending, and how much value it should place on its security relationships.⁷

According to one view, espoused by a number of prominent strategic policy commentators, including a former Australian prime minister and a past foreign minister, the only logical endpoint of Indo-Pacific strategic competition is a Sino-centric rules-based order.⁸ Under that scenario, it is argued, the United States will be compelled to withdraw to an offshore balancing role at best, if not a total retreat into nuclear-armed isolationism. Hence, Australia’s acquisition of U.S. Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs)—which may end up partly crewed by U.S. Navy personnel—is problematic, and merely entails limited Australian capabilities becoming a more vulnerable target for coercion by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The solution, according to proponents of this viewpoint, is for Australia to prioritize a larger fleet of conventional submarines, adopt a much more localized “Defence of Australia” posture, and establish a deeper relationship with China based on mutual trust.⁹

A second (and related) thread in this narrative concerns the so-called entrapment thesis: the alleged concession of Australian sovereignty over its strategic and defense decisions. This revolves around the proposition that closer integration between U.S. and Australian forces equates to a de facto commitment by Canberra to support any major strategic choice made in Washington. Thus giving Canberra little room to bargain over the commitment of Australian military assets in the event of war.¹⁰ Some champions of this view take the line that Australia should opt for a position amounting to principled armed neutrality—upholding common interests with the United States where necessary, while practicing a normatively ambivalent deterrence-by-denial posture grounded in hard-headed realism, reminiscent of an Australian echidna.¹¹ In other words, they foresee an ADF capable of inflicting too much pain on an adversary to make attempts at occupation or military coercion viable, but otherwise limited in ability to generate effects. Yet this misses the point of the broader strategy, which sees deterring invasion as necessary—but not sufficient—to Australian needs. Others, more prosaically, reach similar conclusions, but are driven by a conviction that U.S. regional leadership has been destabilizing, and that Australia has been an enabler of American imperialism.¹²

Of course, these views do not represent official policy. They also ignore several strategic realities: First, Australia alone lacks the capability to confront even a moderately determined adversary, let alone a great power such as China. Second, it is impossible to hold an adversary’s forces at risk if their range advantage is beyond Australia’s capability to reach them. Third, many of Australia’s crucial trade routes are outside the immediate vicinity that a “Defence of Australia” strategy would seek to secure¹³—and, in any case, a direct invasion of the Australian mainland is unlikely. And finally, downsizing the U.S.-Australia alliance would inevitably entail more difficulty sourcing weapons systems of sufficient lethality and scale for a credible denial posture.

The point here is not to champion a particular strategic vision for Australia, nor to make a case for which one may gain the ascendancy. It is merely to note that there is by no means a consensus on Australia’s strategic course, and that external as well as internal developments may intrude on the current trajectory of Australian thinking. Returning to AUKUS as an example, the route to an Australian SSN capability—even assuming the best-case scenario delivery of Virginia-class boats in the 2030s, prior to the bespoke AUKUS-class design becoming available in the 2040s—will be long.¹⁴ It may even be the case that the question of strategic competition in the region is settled before Australia receives its first SSN.

The reality of this is not lost on decisionmakers in Canberra. It also contributes to threat perceptions that are distinctively centered on Australian, rather than American, interests. One of the central differences here concerns where those vital interests are located. In the United States, it has become customary to identify Taiwan as the main potential flashpoint for any future conflict with China.¹⁵ There is a solid logic here. First, Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to restore Taiwan to the Chinese mainland by force if necessary, and there is strong evidence to suggest he sees it as part of his legacy in realizing the “China dream.”¹⁶ Second, although the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act has played an important role in reinforcing strategic ambiguity, a Chinese invasion would commit Washington to respond militarily.¹⁷ Third, a successful Chinese assault on Taiwan would entail a breakout from the first island chain. That would directly threaten U.S. treaty allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as other areas claimed by Beijing within the so-called nine-dash line. This, in turn, may also undermine U.S. security commitments and regional resolve for balancing.¹⁸

However, while Australia has been cautiously supportive of U.S. policy toward Taiwan, it has deliberately avoided committing to taking an active part in hostilities alongside U.S. forces should a conflict arise. This is because Australia does not necessarily see Taiwan’s security as part of its most vital interests. Moreover, Australia tends to have a wider planning aperture that links conventional challenges with subthreshold gray-zone activities. In traditional Australian strategic thinking, major threats to its interests are located closer to home, and they encompass the types of vulnerabilities commonly faced by maritime trading states—from blockades to invasion scenarios.¹⁹ This is defined in the 2024 Australian NDS as Australia’s “immediate region.” It includes the Strait of Malacca and the Sunda Strait to Australia’s north, at the intersection of the Andaman and South China Seas, as well as the Torres Strait, Timor Strait, and Arafura Sea. Further afield, it also includes maritime links to U.S. bases in Hawaii and the continental United States via the western Pacific Ocean and the Coral Sea.

The issue of whether—and, if so, how far—Australia might become involved in a conflict over Taiwan is not new. Indeed, former foreign minister Alexander Downer faced exactly the same question in 2004. Admittedly, Downer quickly reversed his initial response (that Australia would remain neutral) after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state for president George W. Bush, responded that he would expect Australians to fight and die in such an eventuality.²⁰ However, it underscored the fact that a central part of U.S strategic policy canon is viewed in Canberra as more of a second-order challenge, with hypothetical decisions over Australian involvement revolving more around alliance loyalty than a genuinely held assessment of immediate threats. 

A potential U.S.-Australia disconnect over Taiwan is also visible at the doctrinal level. The 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy is clear about what it sees as the most likely future major-power war requiring the commitment of U.S. forces: it will be a high-end contest, with much of it occurring on the high seas.²¹ In contrast, the 2023 Australian Defence Strategic Review foresaw that the most likely requirement for the deployment of the ADF would be in green waters-or littoral combat—- than blue-water warfare.²² This emphasized the need for an Australian deterrent posture that could generate innovative asymmetrical advantages to dissuade attempts to blockade Australia’s access to shipping routes. Even so, its notion of an “integrated force” was a radical departure from past planning, obliging the army to reimagine itself for island defense,²³ and requiring long-range capabilities that the ADF had previously not possessed. 

Finally, there is also a certain degree of disjuncture between the capabilities required for littoral operations and the capabilities Australia seeks to acquire to conduct them. Put simply, although SSNs give Australia force projection capabilities, they are largely unsuited for green-water naval operations. They are much more useful when deployed in a deep-water environment, where their superior speed and endurance can pose unacceptable risks to maritime expeditionary forces, and they have the range to reach an adversary’s homeland. In contrast, conventional submarines remain virtually undetectable in shallower waters but can often be outpaced by the largest maritime targets, and they have limited capabilities in addressing the broad range of deterrence scenarios relevant to maintaining Australian security.

Fortunately, none of the differences in U.S. and Australian interests or doctrine identified so far are insurmountable or precludes the more effective alignment of their respective defense agendas. That said, these differences also cannot be ignored—either by making false assumptions about the inevitability of Australian contributions to U.S.-led combat operations or by discovering too late that Australia lacks the capabilities to be of much assistance in future regional crises. The consequences of doing so would be less effective deterrence efforts and heightened sovereignty risks. Moreover, there are significant opportunities for both Canberra and Washington to maximize their positions in the region through diplomacy and relationship building that are all too often downplayed—or even outright absent—in discussions about strategic alignment. Accordingly, we now turn to consider how these challenges and opportunities might be understood in the context of broader strategy development, with a view to identifying priority areas for attention.

The Effects of Strategy? Or a Strategy of Effects?

Like most grand strategies, the 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy,²⁴ in concert with the accompanying National Security Strategy (NSS) and Nuclear Posture Review (NPR),²⁵ are primarily aspirational documents. With China identified as the main U.S. “pacing challenge” in a subsequent 2023 Department of Defense report,²⁶ as well as the need to constrain Russia being central to the 2022 NSS, U.S. strategic policy tries to be both holistic and particular at the same time. This is true not only of numerous regional threat arenas (including the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, Africa, and the Arctic), but also the plethora of threats they identify (state actors, cyberspace, space, pandemics, biodefense, technology, climate change, food insecurity, terrorism, arms control, trade, and economics).²⁷

The 2022 Defense Strategy identifies four priorities for structuring its response to the contemporary multifaceted threat environment: defending the homeland from multidomain Chinese threats; deterring strategic threats against the United States and its partners; prevailing in conflict while paying special attention to Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific; and building a resilient joint force and defense ecosystem.²⁸ These aims are to be achieved in three ways: so-called integrated deterrence, campaigning, and building enduring advantages, particularly by working with industry on innovative capability development across domains.²⁹

Yet this tells us very little about how Washington intends to operationalize its overall approach to strategic and defense policy, and even less about how Australian defense policy can be optimized to align with it. Of particular note here is the concept of integrated deterrence, which is virtually synonymous with a whole-of-government approach to statecraft.³⁰ For one thing, it seeks to fully integrate the levers of U.S. national power. For another, it emphasizes the need to work more closely with allies. But beyond that, it does not articulate how the concept approaches threats and challenges across and between domains, what allies can do differently to contribute more effectively, and how this generates enhanced deterrence against strategic rivals.

A useful alternative way to shed some light on the core areas in which U.S. and Australian defense policies might be better aligned is to view the challenges they face through the prism of the strategic effects that are being sought. Doing so arguably allows both partners to focus more keenly on desired outcomes, instead of taking abstract grand strategy formulation (which frequently becomes redundant due to the pace of regional change) as the starting point. This is the main approach adopted by the 2024 Australian NDS, which notes that deterrence by denial is the main frame by which Canberra seeks to achieve its strategic objectives, but focuses much more centrally on the questions of how, where, and with what capabilities it intends to utilize.³¹

To this end, the Australian NDS identifies six effects that the ADF should seek to engender.³² These are to:

• project force;
• hold an adversary’s forces at risk;
• protect ADF forces and support Australian critical infrastructure;
• sustain protracted combat operations;
• maintain persistent situational awareness in Australia’s main area of military interest; and
• achieve the decision advantage by possessing resilient command and control capabilities, while simultaneously undermining an adversary’s own command capabilities to affect its cost and risk calculus.

Applying the lens of effects-based strategic planning illuminates more clearly the tasks confronting the United States and Australia in aligning their defense priorities. Ultimately, none of the effects listed above can realistically be achieved without investing time and energy into specific capabilities; clearly defining objectives; seeking and obtaining leverage among key regional actors; and finding ways to add value to strategic solutions by creating incentives for enhanced regional cooperation, especially with treaty allies like South Korea and Japan—both with and without the United States as the framework partner.

Without wanting to over-specify the contexts in which Australia and the United States might seek to apply operational effects, some examples are necessary. First, without agreement by key regional players in Southeast Asia to at least tacitly permit transit through the contested and congested waterways and airspace of the South China Sea, the U.S. and Australian militaries’ ability to project force and hold the PLA at risk would be severely curtailed. Second, absent commitments from Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines to play a greater role in regional deployments, the ability to maintain situational awareness and generate credible deterrence—against a range of contingencies, from an invasion of Taiwan to gray-zone activities by the PLA Navy-becomes problematic. Third, building minilateral coalitions on a variety of specific issues—from championing norms of responsible behavior in cyberspace and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) technology, to intelligence sharing and cooperation on artificial intelligence (AI) and critical infrastructure protection—is crucial to provide uplift to credible deterrence in a multidomain context.

Resources, Relationships and Resilience: Three Areas for Priority Focus

How might an effects-focused approach to U.S.-Australia defense alignment be put into practice, and what might constitute the key areas needing attention? Below, we identify three areas of priority focus that are both specific and interlinked. We begin with resources, which refers to the capabilities needed to effectively deter threats and conduct combat operations if necessary; it also specifically identifies arenas requiring investment by the partners. We then consider the importance of relationships, pertaining to the effects benefits generated from leveraging existing, as well as encouraging new, security partnerships. Finally, we consider the need to better evolve networks of resilience. These are less tangible in terms of direct effects, but they are nonetheless important planks of order-building that help with norm creation around good behavior and foster surety and assurance among regional actors. In pursuing that agenda, they better serve the strategic effects the United States and Australia are seeking to engender in their respective regional defense policies.

Resources

The ability to provide useful capability contributions is central to any kind of effective integrated military planning between allies. The ADF has long preferred an approach to capability acquisition and force structure that has allowed it to operate as a highly trained and technologically advanced, but necessarily niche defense organization. This was done with two factors in mind. First, any major combat involving the ADF would be in partnership with allies and partners. Second, Australian commitments to maintaining regional and global order help buttress any future calls on alliance assistance it might need to make. Yet with strategic competition now more firmly centered on its region—as noted in the 2024 Australian NDS—the question becomes to what extent Australia can rapidly enhance its independent force projection capabilities while also enabling more appropriate contribution to allied deterrence and warfighting efforts.

Many of the key requirements for such a dual posture are already in progress and are often associated with Australia’s advantageous geostrategic location. These include accelerating and enhancing U.S. access to bases on the Australian mainland, with the aim of utilizing Australia as a logistics and resupply hub for U.S. forces. They also include purchases of long-range strike options such as the HIMARS system to upgrade the Australian Army’s aging, shorter-range artillery assets for potential deployments beyond the Australian mainland;³³ the acquisition of the Tomahawk cruise missile for Australia’s Hobart-class destroyers;³⁴ plans to purchase the U.S. Joint Strike Missile and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile;³⁵ the aforementioned acquisition of SSNs, in line with Pillar 1 of the AUKUS agreement; and the development of uncrewed systems for reconnaissance missions.³⁶ These aim to serve the requirement in the 2024 Australian NDS for the ADF to better project force, hold adversaries at risk, enhance situational awareness, and build capacity for protracted combat operations if necessary.

But more can be done by both the United States and Australia to generate enhanced effects—not only in a multidomain context, but more importantly by harnessing the allies’ levers of power across the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic spectrum.

First, the partners should recognize that Australia’s capability mix—although evolving—will remain best suited to contingencies that involve green-water and littoral combat and deterrence functions. Here, enhancing the ability of both the Australian and U.S. navies, as well as the Australian Army and the U.S. Marine Corps, to perform joint operations at the land-sea nexus would be an important step toward greater alignment between the two partners. Investing further effort into asymmetric maritime force development—from mines to unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as land-based Tomahawk and HIMARS strike options—would also be a swift and resource-efficient way to maximize Australian capabilities.³⁷

Second, the United States can better support Australia’s proximity advantage in bolstering adherence to a rules-based order in the South Pacific, where it has long sought to generate good governance outcomes. This is not simply a deterrence function: on the contrary, it will require skillful diplomacy as well as a much more serious effort by the United States to develop concrete subregional investment incentives and opportunities beyond its traditional focus on hard security. And it will be necessary to counter ongoing attempts by China to establish political leverage and a potential security presence in island nations whose preferences are dictated more by concerns about development, climate change, and evolving a blue economy than by major-power strategic competition.³⁸ Moreover, being responsive to the needs of these states assists Australian and U.S. strategic alignment by providing greater potential capacity for political and in-kind support from regional partners during crises.

Third, both the United States and Australia should devote more effort to developing plans that jointly address hybrid and gray-zone operations in a maritime context. China is likely to increase its utilization of subthreshold activities, including civil-military fusion fleets, the testing of regional actors’ exclusive economic zones, and establishing self-declared air defense identification zones in contested territories.³⁹ Countering this behavior will require coordinated efforts to encourage legal and normative compliance, as well as hard power deterrence and escalation management options. This also reinforces the need to craft and promote a more compelling regional narrative that appeals to interests beyond hard national security. For instance, combining more vocal condemnation of Chinese incursions, developing codes of conduct with like-minded actors, and laying the foundations for networked air defense architecture would go some way toward providing the normative and punitive tools needed to impose costs on such activities 

Fourth, it would be advantageous to enhance U.S. and Australian cooperation on countering hostile cyber operations against critical infrastructure, and to harmonize messaging to blunt disinformation campaigns. In a public-facing context, Australian participation in the U.S.-led Global Engagement Center would be a sensible step, facilitating more coordinated messaging against Russian and Chinese disinformation about issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to the security impacts of regional alliances.⁴⁰ Australia should also urgently develop a regional counter-disinformation capability to address anti-AUKUS messaging in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, which is currently going unchallenged. And deeper bilateral cooperation on AI-enabled political warfare would allow both partners to respond with greater agility to threats emanating from China and Russia.

Relationships

Australia benefits from having constructed strong relationships in its immediate region, and both Washington and Canberra have invested heavily in upgrading ties with like-minded actors on a suite of alliance functions, from intelligence sharing to mutual defense cooperation. These include, for instance, ongoing efforts to draw India into a firmer balancing posture (although such attempts must also accept the reality that New Delhi’s appetite for competition in an East Asian context is far more limited than its desire to balance Beijing in South Asia’s continental and maritime spheres). There are also other obstacles making regionwide deterrence an unworkable proposition. Many Southeast Asian states (one might argue Australia as well) regard China as the key to their future prosperity. Arguments appealing to democratic values are futile at best—and counterproductive at worst—in a region comprised of a mishmash of partial democracies, illiberal regimes, and semi-authoritarian and authoritarian states. The preference of established multilateral organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), is still to avoid becoming involved in great-power competition.

But while an Asian equivalent to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is clearly out of the question, Australia and the United States could take additional steps to maximize the effectiveness of their shared security agendas. One of the most obvious opportunities here is to leverage existing military cooperation with Japan and South Korea for more coordinated allied signaling and deterrence activities. It is certainly true that past attempts to encourage Tokyo and Seoul to take on a heftier share of the regional security burden have encountered several hurdles. Japan, for instance, has been constitutionally constrained in contributing to missions like freedom of navigation operations. South Korea, meanwhile, faces the ongoing threat of an increasingly fractious and capable North Korea, which has captured most of its attention. And, while the relationship between Japan and South Korea is improving, there are still significant historical hurdles to overcome.

That said, the strategic environment has deteriorated to the point where both Tokyo and Seoul have been signaling that they are more amenable to investing in the maintenance of broader regional order, and in the case of Japan it is likely that a government following Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s departure will sustain that course. Both have growing military capabilities, which affect Beijing’s risk calculus. Continued violations of Japanese maritime and airspace by Chinese air and naval assets have prompted a more robust commitment by Tokyo to security and defense. Likewise, South Korea’s position within China’s anti-access/area-denial perimeter has prompted its willingness to potentially countenance greater risk, especially given concerns over the future credibility of U.S. forward-deployed forces due to potential changes in American domestic politics.

Here, there is an opportunity to build on positive developments emerging from the Australia–South Korea 2+2 meetings and the Thirteenth U.S.-Australia-Japan Trilateral Defense Ministers’ Meeting, held in Honolulu in May 2024. Two areas are especially promising. The first is the intention to intensify South Korean participation in Australian exercises such as Pitch Black. Canberra could first propose a joint Australia–South Korea live-fire maritime exercise on the sidelines of Talisman Sabre, which would deepen direct bilateral military cooperation. The second is the emphasis on tighter Australian-Japanese strategic alignment.⁴¹ Canberra might seek to test Tokyo’s appetite for greater force posture coordination by jointly wargaming potential conflict scenarios. The benefits of doing so are obvious. Put simply, better interoperability directly between U.S. allies not only assists the United States and Australia in aligning defense priorities in the event of future joint operational requirements, but also helps add credibility to collective deterrence efforts.

A related area where the United States and Australia can generate enhanced deterrence effects is via deepening cooperation among the so-called AP4 (Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand), within the context of its participation as a group with close ties to NATO. While it is unrealistic to assume that European NATO members will make significant military contributions to underpin stability in Asia, the AP4 is an important bridge in underscoring that the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific occupy a shared strategic space.⁴² The Baltic states, Poland, Germany, and the UK in particular are increasingly attuned to the systemic challenge of an authoritarian China, alongside the more immediate threat of a revanchist, aggressive, and expansionist Russia. Indeed, NATO went as far as naming China an enabler of Russia’s war in Ukraine at its July 2024 summit in Washington.⁴³ Moreover, in addition to increasing awareness of security challenges affecting both regions, the AP4 is a useful vehicle for cooperation. The recent announcement by New Zealand’s prime minister, Chris Luxon, that Wellington will be much more vocal in identifying attempts by China to intervene in New Zealand’s affairs was a welcome signal of evolving convergence in threat perceptions amongst AP4 members. This is especially the case since Luxon’s comments came soon after a visit by Chinese Premier Li Qiang.⁴⁴

A final way both allies can deepen their relationships to encourage positive effects in U.S.-Australia defense cooperation is by encouraging key partners in Southeast Asia to make contributions that facilitate shared defense objectives. Although it is probably accurate to describe ASEAN as mainly composed of states that wish to hedge on future strategic competition, one bilateral partnership stands out as a potential opportunity: Indonesia.

The imminent inauguration of President-elect Prabowo Subianto has fueled discussion about whether Canberra and Jakarta can evolve their relationship to bolster Indo-Pacific collective security. Indeed, the journal Australian Foreign Affairs recently devoted an entire issue to the question “Could Indonesia Ever be an Ally?”⁴⁵ Here, one view is that Canberra and Jakarta immediately need a military-security alliance. But it is more realistic—given Indonesia’s ingrained tendency to eschew taking sides—to pursue what scholar Evan A. Laksmana calls a “friends with benefits” type of arrangement.⁴⁶

This is borne out by recent announcements about an upgraded Australia-Indonesia security pact, which will facilitate broader military exercises but also respect Indonesian preferences to formally retain a nonaligned posture.⁴⁷ Developing agreements (even tacit agreements) involving future scenarios whereby Indonesia, and possibly Brunei as well, would permit transit and overflight by U.S. and Australian forces—and potentially even undertake supportive actions like providing for resupply—would be no small accomplishment. Indeed, it would be crucial to Australia’s and the United States’ ability to project power more comprehensively into areas of likely future tension, especially in the South China Sea.

Resilience

The third priority area we identify to facilitate U.S. and Australian effect-based strategy concerns resilience. Most of the opportunities in this arena involve initiatives or potential areas of advantage that can add value in a variety of different contexts: regional order-building, domain-specific innovations, and strengthening cooperation between like-minded states on specific military-security issues. As a result, while the suggestions made below should not be seen as independently decisive, they nonetheless contribute to particularly important effects. This is especially the case in relation to the information domain, pertaining to persistent situational awareness and critical infrastructure support. In addition, they also have the beneficial effect of giving more shape to integrated deterrence, operationalizing it in practice as a whole-of-government effort.

It is a simple reality that the Indo-Pacific is not as conducive to the type of deep institutional order that has helped underpin European security and strategic stability. It is composed of multiple subregions, each with their own histories (often turbulent ones), identities, levels of development, and types of political organization. It encompasses continental states, maritime states, and states with both land and sea borders. It is little wonder, then, that the political community in the Indo-Pacific has centered primarily on trade rather than security, and on principles of sovereign noninterference rather than integration.

Multilateralism moves at the pace of the slowest member and, absent the anchoring functions of institutions, states’ interests tend to coincide rather than coalesce. Achieving effective security cooperation in the region is, therefore, much more likely to succeed if it is minilateral in composition and issue-specific in scope. That said, there are several potential avenues that Australia and the United States might pursue. These could include, but are by no means limited to:

• Enhancing “spoke-to-spoke” cooperation between existing U.S. security allies. This not only deepens capacity amongst those nations most comfortable in partnering with Washington, but also enables them to explore cooperation without the United States as the common “hub.”
• Deepening military-security cooperation in existing minilateral structures by expanding bilateral 2+2 ministerial dialogues with South Korea and Japan into an additional trilateral format.
• Moving toward a semiformal next tier of intelligence sharing with like-minded nations on specific issues where interests coincide, in “Five Eyes–plus” and “intelligence-plus” formats.⁴⁸
• Exploring opportunities for cooperation on dual-use high-end technology sharing, especially in the AI space with advanced nations such as Singapore.
• Encouraging norms and rules around proper conduct in the maritime domain, space, and cyberspace.
• Encouraging norms and rules around the responsible use of CBRN technologies and access to critical minerals.
• Encouraging robust condemnation of rule-breaking (for instance, Russia’s decision to supply North Korea with military technology) in international fora, as well as sanctions coalitions.

Conclusions

Three clear findings emerge from this analysis of U.S.-Australia defense alignment.

First, in seeking to better enmesh U.S. and Australian defense strategies, it must be acknowledged that their interests, threat perceptions, and capabilities, while closely aligned, are not identical. Hence, as a sovereign actor with agency over its choices, Australian support for future U.S.-led combat operations should not be automatically assumed.

Second, and with that caveat, a focus on desired effects represents a better way to conceive of U.S.-Australia defense alignment, rather than the temptation to embrace grand strategy.

Third, a focus on the three priority arenas identified above—resources, relationships, and resilience—adds significant clarity in identifying the enablers of shared U.S. and Australian defense objectives. They also help sharpen the types of opportunities that might facilitate broader regional military-security cooperation, thus enhancing both deterrence and supporting strategic stability. 

This research was supported by the Australian Government through a grant by the Australian Department of Defence. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Department of Defence.

Notes