BOOK REVIEW | No Higher Priority: A Blueprint for Immediate Action on Australia's Defence, 2025-2028

A Chinese friend told me a couple of years ago that he had heard a senior People's Liberation Army Navy officer describe Australia as, “a juicy plum ripe for the picking”. This alarming and depressing, but intensely thought-provoking book brought that frightening notion back to me.

And while the book is aimed at an Australian readership, it is nearly as relevant to citizens and leaders, particularly military leaders, of most western and Asian developed countries. Almost all of them are hopelessly unprepared to cope with active Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Iranian belligerence or, pity help them, actual attack. Donald Trump and J. D. Vance et al have a very valid point there.

Tragically, most citizens and too many political and military leaders of such countries have similarly lackadaisical and sanguine views. They certainly do not seem to have been good boy scouts in their youth!

Rather than being prepared, they prefer to live in hope that attacks won’t happen or, if they do, that America will come to their rescue. Well, President Trump has made it plain that ain’t necessarily so. Therefore, Australia and the others need to get off their backsides and take a much more realistic approach to their defence.

Australia, as the authors point out, is almost a classic example of what not to do about defence. For decades, it has been hopelessly deficient in planning, acquisition and recruitment.

It has a very expensive but practically useless defence force thanks to a combination of negligence, incompetence, corruption and political wishful thinking.

It is ridiculously over-generaled with too many important acquisitions made on the basis of, “that’s how we’ve always done it,” or, worse, on how many frequent flyer points a project will create.

The are the so-called “primes”, expensive, foreign-owned prime contractors, that have continually led the country up the garden path with ridiculously expensive and inevitably late platforms and equipment that is often not what is really needed. Australia’s senior defence personnel have largely been embarrassingly inadequate and their political oversight almost non-existent.

As a result, Australia and many of its contemporaries, are saddled with defence forces that are a long way from fit for purpose.

They have far too few qualified personnel and the “platforms”, weaponry and infrastructure that they have to operate are too few, too expensive, too complicated and generally unsustainable. It is largely a problem of too few very expensive eggs in too few baskets.

The current Ukrainian and Israeli wars should have been a loud wake-up call to Australia’s and other national defence leaders. Unfortunately, that has barely been the case.

The stark lessons learnt from the Israeli and Ukrainian experiences seem largely to have been ignored by defence professionals elsewhere, especially in Australia. That is probably the result of an almost complete failure to read and learn from military history.

The book’s authors are first-rate examples of that rare and diminishing breed of military intellectuals – and, no, that is not an oxymoron. They have wide and deep experience at the heart of Australia’s defence establishment.

They know very well how it works and what its many, too many, deficiencies are. Their broad experience enables them to place Australia’s defence disaster in a global context. The think tank they lead, Strategic Analysis Australia, is undoubtedly one of the world’s best and most influential.

Their thoughts and suggestions for reform are very timely. They are economical and practical and very unlikely to increase the incredible waste that usually accompanies changes in Australian defence practices and policies.

Rather, they are far more likely to facilitate significant cost reductions and provide much more “bang for the buck”. They advocate, and show how to achieve, massive reductions in waste, both in senior personnel and in expensive inadequate and inappropriate weaponry.

The latter can be replaced with smaller, cheaper, simpler, more effective and more disposable stuff and many of the larger and more expensive proposed purchases should be either cancelled completely or replaced with warships or weaponry imported COTS from manufacturers having competitive advantages.

It’s all in the book – and a very good book it is – vital and indispensible. It should be read by anyone involved with defence or even just interested in what is becoming a rapidly more important subject.

Authors: Peter Jennings, Michael Shoebridge & Marcus Hellyer

Available from the Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, Australia.

Web: www.ipa.org.au