Defence in an age of climate change
This note marks the eightieth anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons in war in August 1945
My granny Eliza, who was born in Clinton, Central Otago in 1877,lived to the age of 96 on sheer malice. She was a tough old buzzard who could barely read and write but a lady of forthright opinions. One, often expressed, was that no good would come of interfering with the moon. For different, and mainly anti-military, reasons I’m inclined to agree, but I’ll grant there have some positive side effects of the space program. These include the invention of the internet and the application of Teflon to cooking utensils.
One that isn’t often remarked although it should be, is the Fisher space pen. Quite early on the United States boffins discovered that ordinary ink pens wouldn’t write in a vacuum and so they commissioned the Fisher Corporation to invent a pen that could. The company spent something like a million dollars inventing one and came up with what is recognized as one of the most beautifully designed objects of the twentieth century. It writes perfectly in a vaccum. You can buy facsimiles at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Russians, confronted with the same problem, issued their astronauts with pencils.
Why is this sorry tale relevant to our defence policy? Because both entail a process which lost sight of the primary objective. In one case to produce not a beautiful object but to identify something which could write in a vacuum, and in the other to come up with a viable defence strategy against an identified potential or actual enemy.
The interesting thing is that we have recently reviewed that strategy and committed ourselves to massive increases, in fact a doubling, in expenditure on defence at a time when all other public expenditure is subject to severe reductions. This has occurred without any public debate to speak of. We just take it for granted that we need to defend ourselves without saying against who or what, and how much it might cost.
We don’t even try to answer those questions which you might think are fundamental to having a defence expenditure item in the annual government Budget. But if you go to the Defence Act of 1990 you will find that although it specifies a power to raise armed forces it’s very vague on the subject of the purposes of doing so except to say that it is for the defence of New Zealand against threats to our sovereignty, which is rather circular in its logic and doesn’t get us very far.
In fact New Zealand has never tried to defend itself against external enemies, however defined, on our own, (or with one exception been attacked). We’ve always regarded our defence as something we do not only in company with others but in a subordinate role and have never thought too much beyond that. For most of our existence since 1840 to at least the end of the Second World War and beyond we saw that as entailing an operational role as a component in the overall defences of the British Empire which would decide for us who was to be the enemy, and we funded and committed our armed forces on that basis. Even after that it made some sense to continue to do so. Bear in mind that even in 1946 Britain continued to exercise direct rule over 640 million people and to deploy naval fleets and other armed forces throughout the world accordingly. That gave us something of which to be a component and we occupied a role as garrison troops in e.g. Singapore, and as fighting troops in Korea and Malaysia.
But in fact this appearance of international strength was illusory on the part of Britain. The United States had emerged from the Second World War as the most significant creditor nation by far and used the position to gave it within the newly created International Monetary Fund to impose loan conditions on Britain, a seriously debtor nation, which made the economic basis of the British Empire no longer viable. That, in combination with a growing and successful demand on the part of Britain’s colonies for independent self rule, over the two decads to 1970, meant we could no longer rely on Britain as the dominant basis of our defence strategy.
The result was that over the same period we developed a nexus of international defence relationships in which our military forces became an integrated and minor component in overall forces based on the United States and Australia, in which Britain asnd Canada also played a part, and overtly directed at something called “the threat of communism”. Bear in mind that a significant new dimension in this relationship also encompassed intelligence interchange.
Whether there actually was a threat of communism or not can be debated but that’s really irrelevant. The authorities said there was and behaved accordingly. This was not a unanimous view however. There has always been a secondary strand in our political culture which says we should not get entangled in military relationships or adventures with other nations for whatever reasons.
In the period leading up to the First World War this strand was quite significant, including opposition to our involvement in the South African War, and an even more widespread opposition based largely on the evangelical Christian churches to universal peacetime military training for adolescent males from 1911, which actually led to a number of conscientious objectors being gaoled. There was also significant opposition to conscription of manpower for the First World War from both pacifists and socialists which led to the formation of the Labour Party in 1916. Some of those who were to be subsequent government Ministers post 1935 found themselves in gaol as a result. The brutal treatment of others such as Archibald Baxter are quite well known and should not be forgotten.
Throughout the interwar period there continued to be quite a robust anti-war movement in this country and some attempts through Labour in parliament to pursue an ethics based foreign policy in our relations with Pacifica peoples and through support for the League of Nations but these had little practical effect on our relationship with the world. Even after 1935 and a Labour government, attempts to deviate from the British line on sanctions against fascist Italy over Abyssinia and Spain were very quickly sat on by the British Foreign Office to the point of undisguised censorship of a speech our representative at the League, Bill Jordan, attempted to give.
When war broke out in 1939 our Prime Minister Joe Savage was able to say in announcing our involvement and without any sense of irony “where Britan goes we go”. That remained the basis of our foreign and defence policies, as remarked, until the 1970s, after which is became pretty much impossible to pursue because there was no British Empire from which to take out lead.
Notwithstanding, the view that we should maintain an independent foreign and defence policy with whomsoever, remained no more than a minor strand of political thinking into the post war world, and again had little purchase despite our playing a leading role in the establishment of the United Nations and in first steps to develop a rules based international world order under Prime Minister zpeter Fraser.
There was, however, one exception to that general failure in the face of the rabid anti-communism of the period and that was widespread opposition to armament with nuclear weaponry and the testing of such weaponry initially by the United States in the Marshal Islands, and subsequently by the French at Mururoa, both in the South Pacific region. By the beginning of the seventies this opposition had broadened out into a more general critique of our failure to pursue an independent foreign and defence policy, mainly through opposition to the siting of various military communications centres in this country, our involvement in the war in Vietnam and to continuing cultural relationships with apartheid South Africa, to the extent that we sent an official protest frigate to Mururoa under the Kirk government (1972 – 1975).
By the nineteen eighties this had built up sufficient head of steam for the incoming Lange government (1984 – 1990) to adopt a general anti-nuclear policy when it came to ship visits. The political explosion from our allies, the United States and Australia, that resulted echoed around the world. That, in theory remains our policy and led to our apparent expulsion from the ANZUS alliance. As it happened and rather ironically this declared expulsion was something which was widely supported domestically, and also louudly applauded in some international quarters.
In fact the reality is that the expulsion was a myth that never happened. Let me put that in context.
In 1999 the government changed to a Labour/ Alliance coalition in which the latter held five Cabinet posts. I happened to have joined the staff of the new Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton by invitation from the public service three years previously. With only five Cabinet members we were at a disadvantage when it came to Cabinet’s weekly policy discussions and so we developed a collegial system for dealing with that.
When the Cabinet papers were issued on Friday afternoon these were divied up between Ministers and senor staff who each took one or more portfolio areas depending upon expertise and preference. Then first thing on Monday morning before the weekly Cabinet we met and worked through the agenda with the allocated person commenting on any points of interest or concern as a basis of general discussion. This meant that Ministers went to Cabinet fully briefed on any matters we wanted to raise.
Because of my background in writing on military history, I drew the Defence portfolio, along with another senior colleague who had a longstanding interest in and wide knowledge of military weapons and communications technology. It didn’t take more than a few weeks of reading for us to become aware that the relationship which incorporated our arms forces with those of Australia, the United States, and others, far from being cut off by our so-called expulsion from ANZUS, was alive and well and living in the Ministries of Defence and the Foreign Affairs. It was not only business as usual but the relationship was being regularly extended and expanded, largely without public discussion or even consultation.
At about the same time we recived an informal (and theoretically improper) approach from within the Ministry of Defence by various senior officials expressing concerns about this continuing relationship which was, in fact, entirely contrary to government policy. As a result I was asked to review our defence structures as a briefing basis for our representative on the Defence and Foreign Affairs Cabinet Committee which was engaged in one of its regular reviews of Defence policy.
A number of interesting things emerged from that exercise but the most relevant for this narrative was the existence of a network of senior military personnel based at those of our overseas posts in countries with which we had previously maintained defence policy relationships under ANZUS and other treaties notwithstanding that we were supposed to be international pariahs without such relationships. What we had instead was essentially a phantom alternative foreigh service to ensure there was foreign and defence policy representation and continuity where there was not supposed to be one. If you were aware of this then over the nine years during which we were a part of the government this continuity could be traced through piecemeal Cabinet decisions. In other words, although we had theoretically been chucked holus bolus out of ANZUS and other defence and intelligence relationships, nothing of the sort had occurred. It was business as usual. The full public restoration of that relationship became bit by bit more and more overt over the years and is now completely out in the open; the strengthening of ANZUS is a declared fundamental objective of our defence forces
So – has the current situation changed in relation not only to the policy towards our defence but more generally in relation to its overall context? And is that reflected in the current Defence Review which supposedly underpins the recent major decisions on Defence expenditure?
Let me make a couple of observations at the outset. Firstly as to the standard of analysis contained in the Review to which I’m referring. As it happens I spent my working career in the public sector in one capacity or another in the fields of strategy and policy development, mostly and latterly in particular at a senior level. I am fully familiar with government reviews and reports, not least from having written more than a few myself, and presented these in a number of high level contexts, incuding the international.
This Defence Review is a very shoddy and inadequate piece of work. One of the markers of that is something I have come to recognize over the years, and that is recourse in the narrative of a report to bombastic assertion, mainly through the excessive use of such expressions as “we will”. This Review is riddled with such assertions. But that doesn’t mean that it’s worthless because it does contain quite a lot of useful information about the thinking behind our defence policy, although not always, I suspect, to the effect its authors had intended.
What it recommends is still business as usual i.e. that the current setup in which our armed forces are a minor component in an overall force in the South Pacific dominated by the United States and compatible with Australia should continue and be enhanced. This means that over the last several decades we have essentially and increasingly been re-integrated into Australian forces, which in their turn are integrated into those of the United States, including in matters relating to operational communications. We are not alone in this, by the way; quite a number of other regional military forces of smaller nations are in the same situation. In practical terms it means that in the event of an actual deployment our armed forces will be able to communicate directly with and receive orders from the Pentagon or Washington without necessarily going through our government in Wellington. Regular joint exercises are predicated on this assumption.
However, the “analysis behind the Review which leads to this ‘business as usual’ approach is predicated on a single contextual strategic assumption which is highly questionable. This is that tensions are rising rapidly to dangerous levels internationally, and more particulary in our region, to the extent that justifies an enhanced combat capability, and a further operational coalescence of our forces with Australia in what is described as “an integrated ANZAC force”. This means in its turn significantly higher levels of expenditure entailing new and more tightly knit communications and other military technologies, a space capability, developing our ability to deploy uncrewed vehicles [that means drones and related equipment], and an enhanced surveillance role. Thus is justified the massive increase in defence expenditure that it will entail.
But how true is the claim that this is justified by tensions rising in our region? It’s certainly the case that according to a recent World Bank report (published in the Guardian last month) that there are one billion people in the world living in extreme poverty, and thirty nine separate economies in the developing world defined as fragile or conflict affected. This certainly has a destabilising effect on international affairs. We also have before us the spectacle of open warfare between Russia and the Ukraine, and what amounts to genocide on a vast scale in Palestine – but the question is:does this differ in its outcomes from previous decades?
The answer is not as much as it appears to. Tensions having been running high internationally for some time. For example, for the last forty years at least most of north and central Africa has been engaged in widespread warfare and conflict with accompanying atrocities. The same can be said of central and major areas of South America. It just isn’t very widely reported. There’s nothing much new about the tensions abroad in the world.
I’m always conscious of something the radical commentator Richard Neville said in the nineteen sixties; that we live in an international bar-room brawl. That remains the situation and although that’s not a happy thing to contemplate I don’t think that things have yet got to the point where we need to double our defence expenditure to deal with our role in relation to it. So what is the recent “re-think” of defence policy really about?
One thing you quickly learn in analyzing matters in this context is that what people say has to be decoded. When commentators claim that tensions are rising what they really mean is that the Chinese are getting too big for their boots and too much of a presence in the region, and they need to be warned off, especially as economically they’re beginning to outstrip the United States in that regard. Nobody says that outright, of course. Instead it is claimed that China is now a military, and particuly maritime threat to the peace loving democracies of the Pacific region of which we are one. But the existence of that threat happens to be highly questionable when you look into it.
Last year I had occasion to give a talk to a Wellington group exploring just how much of a military threat China actually is in the South Pacific (see below for the text of this). What emerged almost immediately from my updating my background on the topic was that most independent commentators on that subject regard the suggestion that China is a martime threat to the United States and its friends in the South Pacific as cause for hilarity raher than alarm, because of the enormous disparity between the relative military capabilities of the two countries. To coin a phrase: if Beijing started anything by, say, invading Taiwan, it really would ‘all be over by lunchtime’. And the Chinese are well aware of that and are not so silly as to do anything precipitately in that direction – or at all.
When they sail in international waters near Australia with a small flotilla of three ships and let off a few pop gun rounds, they’re doing something the United States does every day and much more often in much greater strength just a few sea miles off the Chinese coast without anyone batting an eyelid. There’s really no need to go off like a bunch of maiden aunts (or uncles) with the vapours if the Chinese do it as well but to a much lesser degree. Nor is there any reason for the Chinese to get militarily aggressive. They’re already winning the trade and diplomatic war in the South Pacific, so why start shooting at people?.
So is there any reason to massively increase our defence expenditure in the absence of any genuine specified military threat? The answer is: a loud: NO. In that case why go on doing it? Well – think back to the story about the Fisher pen with which I bgan this presentation. We go on doing it because we have lost sight of the primary objective which is to defend ourselves against a real life threat. Instead, we go on doing it unthinkingly because that is what we do, not because we have thought through whether there is a threat, how it is constituted, and what steps we might need to take to combat it.
And once you undertake a proper and serious investigation it becomes apparent that we almost certainly need to maintain a military force but for very different reasons to those currently advanced. One of the duties specified in the Defence Act is to render assistance as necessary to the civil power. In fact you may recall that we did precisely that during the COVID crisis although the military got a bit grumpy about it because they didn’t see that as their role, despite it being specified as such in our law. But before I suggest what that role might be in future I need to comment on another justification regularly advanced for the current massive increase in military spending.
The argument runs that we spend something like 1% of our GDP on defence whereas the Australians spend 2%, and that makes us free loaders. We need to catch up to their level.
Who says? Well, the peope who like to sell armaments and the people who like to buy them for a start, so they would say that wouldn’t they? But there is also a vested interest in maintaining the present arrangement, partly from inertias but also partly because it can be used by those who currently benefit from it to give the rest of us the jitters if we don’t think too hard about it, or question the assumptions on which it’s based.
Actually as an assertion it probably isn’t even true. Comparisons of this sort are notoriously difficult to make because the ways expenditure is allocated by Vote in national Budgets is done in quite different ways internationally from country to country. To take one simple example, that of pensions. In Australia the allocation of funds for military pensions is included in their Vote: Defence. But because our pensions are universal and paid from general taxation they mostly get allocated to a different Vote entirely. If you do the re-allocation exercise you discover that we’re already quite close to the Australian 2% when it comes to defence expenditure.
Secondly comparisons are invidious. Why compare with Australia? Countries differ widely in the percentage of GDP devoted to defence depending on how they perceive themselves in the world. I’m aware of at least one country which has no armed forces at all (although it has a Customs Service) notwithstanding that it is located in Central America, one of the most politically turbulent areas of the world. That’s Costa Rica which abolished its armed forces in 1948 in response to a failed military coup. The last time I did research in this area New Zealand was grouped in percentage terms with a number of smaller countries which directed about the same percentage of its GDP to defence – Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland among others – as we do and for similar reasons. Defence expenditure should be directed not by a questionable formula based on percentages but by a rational analysis of need, which in this case depends on what may be threatening us.
What is interesting about the Defence Review is that there is such a looming threat to which our defence policy should be responding but which desn’t get a mention in the Review. This is the threat of major climate change. It should also be apparent to even the meanest intelligene that the threat is real and imminent. Similarly it is clearly apparent that while the nations of the world are prepared to hold endless conferences deploring it no one is prepared or inclined to actually carry out the known available remedies to the degree needed beyond paying lip service to them.
The reasons for this are to be found in the fact the the ten largest emitting economies, account for 69% of global emissions, led far and away by China with 31.8% and then the United States at 13.1%. Beyond a few futile gestures these major polluters are also well aware that taking effective steps to combat climate change is politically impossible because their entire economies as currently structured would face collapse if they did. Far too many rich and powerful people would be negatively affected by that for it to be allowed to happen and so it is not going to.
Although we aren’t up there with the big players we do not escape from blame for taking a hypocritical role in this farcical play acting prtence of doing sdomething. In fact over the last two years our government has been dismantling even those ineffective steps we have previously taken to play our part. We are already feeling the impacts of climate change in terms of excessive rain, flooding, high winds, drought and fire hazards. Similar effects are occurring throughout the world almost on a daily basis.
As this crisis progresses and grows worse over the next several decades, and we along with other polluters fail to take effective action, we will need to learn the trick of developing a standard strategy for dealing with the outcomes. In that context having military forces integrated with Australia and the United States will avail us absolutely nothing. We should not be thinking of our military as a minor component in a regonal and aggressive military force armed to the teeth. We should instead abandon our current futile defence polcy of integrating ourselves into another country’s military. We should think of our military infrastructure instead as the basis of a ready reaction force available as standard first responders as crises in our climate multiply and become more extreme, and develop it accordingly, as well as making it available in helping smaller Pacifica countries in the South Pacific – which are likely to be seriously affected – coping with the consequences.
Will we do so? Probably not – but I’ll never know because I’ll be dead. But should you survive it please tell my grandcihildren that you heard it here first.
Tony Simpson – August 2025