 So in early August, ANU celebrated its 77th anniversary and soon after its establishment, Prime Minister Ben Chiffley said, scientific research is a necessity for the maintenance of our standard of living and even for our survival. As Australia's national university, a key element of our national mission is to contribute through research and education to the security of Australia and our wider region. And we're proud to work with army and defence more generally in this space. There are several examples of the long-running relationships we have with defence and army and one of them is our long-standing cooperation with the Army Research Centre. It's part of the fellows program, ANU academics work in the future land warfare branch on key challenges facing the army. This helps our researchers gain a better understanding of the challenges from army's point of view and also shows the army what academic research can contribute in solving some of these challenges. At the moment we've got two of our researchers working in the robotic and autonomous systems implementation and coordination office or RICO. Dr Sam Lake from Department of Quantum Physics and Dr Zena Asad from our School of Engineering and we're hoping they'll soon be joined by others. Of course we also have relationships through our national security college, has a long history of cooperation with defence and army including through the succumbent of army staff. At the moment Lieutenant Colonel James Groves is working here on campus to bring his experience and expertise to our research at the NSC Futures Hub. And there are many other initiatives afoot including in the area of cybernetics. So this is a great opportunity I guess tonight to build on this relationship and I encourage you all after the event to do some networking whether you're from army or otherwise in defence or from ANU, get together, talk about common issues and challenges and see where we can get to. But of course the main reason tonight we're here is to launch another ANU army cooperative project and that's an army research centre report on army forward presence and deterrence written by Dr Andrew Carr and Professor Stefan Frugling from our Strategic and Defence Study Centre. Andrew and Stefan approach this from a really interesting angle that draws on conceptual approaches as well as a range of historical case studies. Some of these examples show success some show failure but all demonstrate the complexity of using land forces but deterrence in practice. Since deterrence and army's role therein has been a central question of the recent defence strategic review we are delighted that Lieutenant General Stuart has agreed to launch this report and to share his views with us today. General the floor is yours. Professor Tracy Smart, thank you very much for your introduction. Can also add my acknowledgement that we meet more in another world country this evening. Good evening and thank you to Professor Stephen Stefan Frugling for the invitation and congratulations to both you and Dr Andrew Carr and indeed the Strategic and Defence Study Centre for the insights you've provided in this co-written occasional paper forward presence for deterrence implications for the Australian army. I think this paper and indeed this evening's gathering is a good example of what we can achieve when we work together and the powerful and I think perhaps untapped potential that there is in terms of relationship and working together between the academy and practitioners. The subject deterrence I think is is very timely and I think your contribution is a very valuable one because there's much room for thoughtful analysis and debate because the stakes are very high. And I begin by saying that I think deterrence is at least an equal part art as it is science. It's not easily measured and to do so or to get close to doing so I would offer that it requires some deep insight into the thinking, the strategic rationale and the motivations of those that we seek to to deter and ultimately deterrence is decided by its object. It's worth noting that deterrence can fail and we're presented with a very vivid example of this in Ukraine today and further that the nexus between deterrence and the capacity to respond if it does fail is also an area that I'd be particularly interested in in terms of the focus of future work. Understanding deterrence today is of course more important than it has been for a while because of the strategic circumstances that have been well described but I think importantly this work and an examination of deterrence intersects with two other things that are certainly foremost in my mind and the first is the balance between war's enduring nature and its changing character that is a I think a struggle for all security professionals and inherent in the idea of balance of course is the fact that you're going to vacillate between one side and the other and the second is and we often feel unique and somehow set upon as generations because the the times we're living in are so much if so much more unique and different and so much more difficult I would contend that if we just look at Australia's history since Federation that's not not the case but nonetheless there are some things that are different and I I contend use the Canadian president Justin Trudeau is quite that the pace of change has never been this fast and yet it will never be this slow again I think that's the unique challenge for our generation generations is the is that pace of of change and the compounding impact that that adds and the reduction in time for thinking and indeed for decisions to be made key to forward presence is the idea of persistent partnerships and that's what your army is doing every single day today there are about 1112 Australian soldiers working offshore alongside international partners and allies and in almost every single one of those 36 locations they are not working in a bilateral sense they're working in a multi-lateral sense and there is an absolute first for further multi-lateral participation in a whole range of activities that we have traditionally done in a bilateral sense so if if if persistent partnership is a constituent part a necessary requirement for forward presence it's certainly it's certain that forward presence and persistent partnership are key components when it comes to the achievement of collective security which of course is a combination of collective will and the collective capacity to deliver on that will and I think we ought not underestimate the magnitude of that challenge and as our authors rightly point out Australian strategic history can draw on just a handful of examples and they they lay out our naval contribution in the 1950s and 60s to the Bar East strategic reserve as well as the deployment of I think in 1960s our Air Force sabre fighters I would add one and there are very few army examples but I'd briefly mentioned the experiences of the ill-fated army bird forces that contributed to the forward observation line in the islands to Australia's north in 1941 but that really to me highlights the practical challenge of aligning strategic intent with force structure and posture decisions particularly in relation to forward deployments it's also I think a sobering reminder coming to the back to that question of balance about wars in here enduring human nature and the plate the part that fog friction chance play in its execution so from my perspective today's challenge for army and for land forces generally is how do we fulfill our obligations to the we're now calling the integrated force in Australia but also that multi-lateral expression of collective will through collective activity and then I like to use the term that in terms of signaling unambiguous political intent then the ultimate expression of national will and resolve is putting young women and men on the ground and among populations perhaps more eloquently put by our authors who said that the strategic currency or sorry the currency of strategic commitment remains slides on the line now obviously that that is not unique to the land domain or two armies but I think you understand the point I think it further demonstrates the proposition the value proposition and the utility of land forces which I would summarize by saying persistence presence asymmetry certainly value for money but also versatility and by that what I mean by that is you can take almost any army formation or unit and it can do almost anything that you require it to do on the spectrum of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief through to combat operations so I think we have not only the capacity but an obligation to contribute in those ways some things that resonated for me and and I think are of great value in this paper firstly the conceptual framework that Andrew Stefan lay out the three components there being thin tripwires thick tripwires and forward defense and also their use of historical examples and the one that really caught my attention was the UK's experience in the Falkland Islands in 1982 and if I might may just quote the example of the impressive coherence between structure posture and operational political logic demonstrated by the UK now that coherence only emerged owing to a spectacular failure of the UK to to the Argentine invasion in April of 1982 but that example I think illustrates the broader point that are all those of making and that is that the tension between the political and the operational logics that shape decisions concerning the structure and posture of forward deployed forces is a difficult and sometimes often dissonant set of requirements and certainly outcomes another example I'd use and and to probe to quote President Eisenhower following the 1958 Soviet ultimatum to vacate West Berlin here is another instance in which our political posture requires us to assume military positions that are wholly illogical and that's a long way of saying or getting to the point that that's why I think Australia's approach articulated in the document National Defence announced in the strategic review is a step in the right direction because it takes a whole of government and indeed a whole nation approach to the security challenges that are presented by a new era of great power competition it's also an approach that if well executed may go some way to easing that tension that Stefan and Andrew have identified between the political logic and the operational logic of our deterrence actions so thank you very much for your contribution and certainly from the partnership that we value and and indeed for your insights and I was just saying earlier that I think this paper serves as a platform or a springboard for some some other interesting and difficult topics to be further explored so we look forward to discussing what those options might be and and certainly a call to action to all of you to apply your considerable acumen and ability to these sorts of problems which are very much at the heart of our nation's prosperity in the future thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity to share some thoughts I think on the warm-up act for the main event and you'll be very interested to hear from Stefan and Andrew but thanks very much for having us as well thanks very much for your comments general Stefan Professor Stefan Frouling will now give us some of his thoughts about his baby it's Andrew's baby many ways more than mine and first of all why did we write it well it seemed to us that we are in a quite demanding time for australian defense policy with great power conflicts and deterrence long-range strike a new role for army in the littoral environment all coming together in in quite new and and I think yet unexplored ways and in this context we had the feeling that there has to be more to the way that army contributes to deterrence and especially in relation to sending troops outside the country what we're calling forward presence to do more to the role that army demonstrates our commitment and then the current focus on guided missile capabilities which kind of dominates so much of our thinking about deterrence and discussion about deterrence today and the second point was that on reflection how little historical experience australia actually has to draw in in this in this context I mean the general already mentioned our deployment of sabers to ubon which we think is the last time that we actually send forces forward explicitly to demonstrate the deterrence commitment to an ally obviously army is coming forward deployed on an ongoing basis but in many ways there's defense diplomacy there's capacity building there's the relationship building less so deterrence commitments that we have in our in our strategic history and and culture almost so our main aim and I hope the one that we have achieved is really to open the aperture of the debate about army and deterrence it's not a paper that will provide necessarily answers but we hope that we find a lot of good questions here tomorrow over and ponder so there's an element of theorizing from first principles as and you would expect in any kind of like academic work in this paper and you'll find that most clearly in the way that we define this framework that the general mentioned about thin trip wires thick trip wires forward defense postures as different ways different roles that army can play or forward presence of army can play in substantiating a deterrence commitment but as an all good research we also had a few findings that we didn't really have on our radar as much as they turned out in our view to be as important as we as and wanted to draw out the first relates to signalling and the way that this doesn't just influence decisions on the structure and posture of the forces that we send but also what they actually do on a day-to-day basis so you have I mean countries from I mean Britain Indonesia and others conducting cabinet meetings and remote locations in order to imbue those forward presences with the political significance that they otherwise wouldn't have and you have public parades you have ministers are attending very elaborate change of commands kind of like ceremonies which should be routine but ultimately are given political significance and national significance to demonstrate that commitment by the way that they're conducted. More concerning perhaps is I mean how that we we realized how hard it is to achieve a clear coherence in these deployments between political considerations about reassuring allies and nuancing commitment in many ways to different different audiences of short-term political decisions that ultimately prove politically impossible to unwind and even practical challenges of forced generation for for enduring commitments all of which make kind of maintain entering and maintaining forward presence commitments for deterrence signalling a really messy experience and exactly because they have that political significance of demonstrating a national commitment these are often very very hard to unwind and so I mean one example is that I mean the fact the U.S. Army U.S. Army Brigade in Berlin in many ways only took shape because Kennedy in the context of the crisis in 1962 decided to send another battalion as a kind of like signal in their context of that particular crisis well that battalion never left until the end of the cold war because it was politically impossible to pull them out. So in many ways kind of like in that sense I hope you read that history not necessarily as interesting anecdotes and as good political scientists we shamelessly raid history for good anecdotes in this paper but in many ways also as a kind of caution that I mean almost every country that we looked at has found reconciling making these decisions coherent really hard and it would be I think presumptuous to assume that we once we actually enter into this would find it any easier to kind of like navigate these challenges and contradictions than many other countries. So then in the final part of the paper we ask how all of this might come together in two hypothetical scenarios I mean one we look at at Christmas and Cocos Islands if you decided if government decided to forward base army as a deterrence commitment and what might that actually look like in practice and then we do the same with a in a hypothetical scenario where we might want to see army forward deploy and support as a deterrence commitment to a regional partner and we just chose Palawan in the Philippines but I mean you can come up with your own examples and try to kind of like start to think through what are all the unexpected issues that history would suggest we would have to contend with if you actually if government kind of like thought about using land forces an army in that way. In all of doing this we deliberately stopped short of making clear recommendations it's not that kind of paper as I said I mean look for questions not for solutions in this paper but I hope that that's actually even going to be even more useful than if we had to take another approach. If there are takeaways though I'd probably leave you with two broad ones the first is for policy and in general I mean once we've kind of like done this work we are left with a certain sense of caution in so far as if policy at the moment emphasizes deterrence it emphasizes forward presence and it emphasizes self-reliance that it's probably easier to achieve to any combination of two out of those three than necessarily achieving all three at the same time. The second point is I think more for army and the Australian divide on army and this is really I guess that the main message here that strike isn't everything about deterrence there's a lot more to deterrence than strike putting Australian troops directly in harm's way as the general said is a powerful political signal of Australia's commitment to regional security and it binds the nation's honor to respond should they come to harm. So for all the talk about rapid technology for the the lack of mobility of land forces and the humble soldier can actually be a feature not a bug if you want to link national commitment to certain territories or commitments and call it grace or adage that soldiers are in a country in a way that sailors and air personnel are not that does remain relevant even here in Australia. So I'd encourage you all to kind of have a read feel free to get in touch with us if you want to discuss and contest what we've written in the paper but I'd like to conclude with a few thank yous for all those without whom we wouldn't be here tonight. First Conor Luz and the and the army research center for their support to this work both financially and a lot and through a lot of support advice comment and feedback which really has been invaluable in particular the participants to an army research center round table on the paper and and later reviewers who allowed us to expose our ideas and provide it really in the imagery immensely helpful feedback to Emily at Robertson who can't be here with us tonight I think for her work at in helping with the research and gathering material much of which she had to organize her in between COVID lockdowns of the a new and at the libraries to Michelle and her team who have organized this this event as flawlessly as usual thank you for your hard work on this and finally for all of you for showing your interest and support and for this paper for the ARC and and the a new and for coming here tonight so thank you.