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that this is the baseline requirement for force development. And I see no difference, even
in the wake of the very difficult decisions that the Government has had to make about its
current budget.
There is a national imperative to weigh carefully the real cost of diluting that capability, and
that is my argument. The strategic case is irrefutable and, as I ventured earlier, I believe
that the fiscal case for sustaining the current Army is also sound. A recent study that I
commissioned looked at the inefficiency of the yo-yo process of shrinking and surging the
Army to meet short-term economic gains. That work confirms that cyclic changes in capability,
characterised by the removal and subsequent re-growth of capability, is exponentially more
expensive than retention of capability over time, unless, of course, a lengthy benign future is
actually foreseeable.
The bottom line is that we have not even yet completed the remediation of our land forces
found to be necessary to achieve the strategic tasks assigned to the ADF by the 2000 White
Paper. However, this process has already incurred massive sunk costs—and that’s not just in
Army. The vital enabling component for the simultaneous deployment of a brigade and battlegroup,
within the archipelagic approaches to Australia, is only now just being realised with
the arrival of the first Landing Helicopter Docks. The point at which we could reduce the size
of the Army, and reconfigure the rest of the ADF to implement a pure sea denial strategy and
actually achieve budget savings, I believe has already passed.
In brief, the plan for Australia’s future force structure, BEERSHEBA, also makes financial sense,
characterised as it is by the standardisation of our combat brigades and their vehicle fleets.
This will achieve significant efficiencies and savings. And we remain committed to nesting a
dedicated amphibious capability, based on the Second Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment,
within the 3rd Brigade in Townsville in Queensland. This is a vital initiative, as demonstrated
by the rapid deployment of our forces to East Timor in 1999 and again in 2006, as well as the
Solomon Islands in 2003 and our tsunami relief operation in 2005.
Let me close with three quotes. The first is from Trotsky, whose history, cum-blatant
propaganda of the Russian Civil War, following the Bolshevik Revolution, I enjoyed immensely
as a university student. It is the oft-quoted line, ‘you may not be interested in war, but war is
interested in you’. 12 The second is taken from the great protagonist of Trotsky, Joseph Stalin,
whose observation that ‘quantity has a quality all its own’ 13 was stating, in my view, a simple
fact in regard to the physics of war and military operations.
I will conclude by quoting from Al Capone who, while applying his observation solely to the
protection rackets of the 1920s, lends weight as to why armed forces are likely to remain an
intrinsic part of how all nations interact with each other. He purportedly observed that ‘You
can go a long way in this neighbourhood with a smile. You can go even further with a smile
and a gun’. 14
Lieutenant General David Morrison joined the Army in 1979 and graduated from the Officer
Cadet School, Portsea to the Royal Australian Infantry Corps. Between 1980 and 1991, he
held a variety of regimental positions in Brisbane, Singleton and Newcastle. He was also the
Australian Instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, UK in 1987-88. After attending
Army Command and Staff College in 1992, he was appointed the Brigade Major of the 3rd
Brigade, deploying in that role to Bougainville as part of Operation LAGOON in 1994.
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