SDSC 2021 - Challenges to the Australian PAPERS Strategic Imagination

In a strategic environment of reducing strategic space, the challenge for Australian strategy is to determine which force disposition and design is going to provide the most flexibility and embody the best recognition of the reality of our strategic environment.9 In this context, how we conceptualise our strategic geography in the context of a changing strategic order is a challenge to strategic i. [...] Much of this thinking is embodied in the concept of the “Extended State”, a set of ideas that argue for a very expansive conception of security and a commensurate expansion of the state’s security role into almost every aspect of national and social life.12 We have expanded the scope and reach of security in policy discourses. [...] This conception of the ADF, arguably an element of the Australian strategic imagination, perhaps blinds us to the reality of what the ADF is and the nature of the work that it does. [...] As the Second World War receded and with the legacy of the Korean and Vietnam wars becoming visible, we saw a much more aggressive assertion of Australian national identity in defence policy that came to fruition in the 1990s.18 Perhaps the deep purpose of strategic policy is to help create Australia by charting a future and giving meaning to the past. [...] The art of the policy maker and the strategist is to bring imagination into the world of experience and through this to create strategy Australia was like that can change the world.