Is the US–Australian Alliance ready to fight the next war? ⬇️

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has released a research project that examines whether our Alliance is future ready that we’ll post in the comments. ‘Alliance Future: Rewiring Australia and the United States’ calls for Australia and the USA to better align resources, coordinate regional relationships and invest in resilience.

“Washington and Canberra have a storied history of sending their forces into combat and then fighting shoulder to shoulder…. But they have very little history divvying up roles and missions in the manner that will be required for deterrence, defense, and ultimately warfighting in the context of high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific.”

Much of our recent experience in fighting alongside the US is that of boutique contributions to wars of choice against insurgents. There is no living memory within either military of fighting in a large scale combat operation against a peer adversary together. There are plenty of lessons to learn from history – World War II in the Pacific in particular. There are also opportunities to learn from conflicts of the present  – Ukraine and the Middle East.

The project has papers on Regional Defence Strategy, Force Posture and Structure, Alliance Roles and Missions and Defence Industrial Cooperation.

Jennifer Jacket’s paper on Defence Industrial Cooperation (we’ll post a link in the comments) is well worth a read. There are two recommendations that particularly caught our attention:

1️⃣ Establish a Future Warfare Strategy Team involving strategists, war fighters, technologists, researchers, innovators, and investors

2️⃣ Mobilize a group of venture capitalists from the United States and Australia to independently scope a new dual-use technology fund in Australia

📷 via Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Alliance Future: Rewiring Australia and the United States

Too many people in Washington and Canberra presume that the strategic challenge from China alone will make defense coordination within the alliance easy. The reality is that it could sharpen contradictions around the kind of operational planning that will be needed to enhance deterrence. Australian and American defense strategies, while closely aligned, are not identical.

Innovative Alliance: U.S.-Australian Defense Science and Technology Cooperation for a Dangerous Decade

Maintaining an edge in defense science and technology is one part of the U.S. and Australian strategy to deter war or increase the likelihood of victory in war.