Hardy, John
Description
Capability edge is one of the most expensive ideas that Australian politicians have ever
had. The notion of using technology to offset demographic and economic limitations on
Australia’s military emerged in the early 1970s alongside the concept of defence self reliance.
It began as a means to bolster Australia’s credibility as a regional security
partner as British security commitments to Southeast Asia waned. By the twenty-first
century it became a recurring policy concept and featured in...[Show more] public statements and
diplomatic signals at the highest levels of government. Although the need for an ‘edge’ in
military capability was articulated consistently in policy and political statements, the
meaning of the concept changed over time. This evolution provides insight into key
strategic policy decisions and offer lessons for scholars, policymakers and analysts alike,
but has not been directly examined.
This thesis traces transformations of the concept of an edge from its emergence in the
1970s through to the twenty-first century. It conducts a comparative analysis of publicly released
policy documents and archival records of speeches made by Prime Ministers and
Ministers for Defence in order to identify the ways in which the concept evolved and how
transformations were represented in political statements. It finds that three conceptual
links were crucial in the evolution of the edge. The first was the link between credibility
and technological advantage which emerged in the early 1970s and cemented the notion
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that technology mitigated Australia’s strategic deficiencies. The second was the gradual
entrenchment of the principle that Australia required a degree of relative advantage,
which created a narrative of confidence that was based on the condition of superiority.
The third was the explicit link between technology and quality which occurred in the late
1990s and conceptually mapped the concept of advantage, which had changed
significantly from its origins, back to credibility.
These processes have created a conceptual trap in which expectations of Australia’s
defence policy risk becoming untenable but have been a fundamental tenet of the
dominant defence narrative for so long that it will be a serious challenge to change the
discourse to accommodate new realities. The evolution of the edge is a cautionary tale to
the extent that there remains a significant risk of incurring enormous expenses in pursuit
of an objective which gained prominence in a different policy context. As regional
militaries modernise, they will in combination, if not individually in some cases, eclipse
Australia’s capacity to retain an edge. This will challenge a political idea which has
become a principal element of defence force structure planning, a core measure of the
standard of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and a key expectation of the Australian
public. Understanding the evolution of the edge from its inception to 2009 is crucial to
making an informed decision about the next evolution of capability edge.
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