Brilliant Greg Sheridan column on lessons for us from Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Saturday, 05 March 2022
I've only published a small extract of Greg's column, there's so much more at The Australian
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most powerful, shocking wake-up call to Western strategic complacency since the end of the Vietnam War. Yet Australia, despite the lofty rhetoric, shows no signs of taking this historic wake-up call seriously. Of all nations in the Western alliance we are long term among the most vulnerable and the least prepared.
Moscow’s brutal war crimes in Ukraine are a much bigger deal than the 9/11 terror attacks and bigger than any internal act of Chinese government repression. They demonstrate the weakness of the rules-based international order, the return to dominance of great-power politics, the willingness of a major nuclear power to wage a conventional and savage war of invasion and conquest in the European heartland.
The Russia-Ukraine war also contains specific military lessons.
The first is that a threat can materialise in weeks, days, perhaps even hours. Defence emergencies are all come-as-you-are. Nobody can rely on strategic warning times.
The next lesson is about being attacked by a much bigger nation. Ukraine, with 44 million people and land the size of France, is not a small nation. But Russia is much bigger.
Moscow can choose war because it can bear its own casualties and Ukraine doesn’t have offensive weapons. Regarding Russia, Ukraine lacks strategic strike. The calculus in Moscow would have been different if Kyiv had possessed 10,000 missiles that could hit any part of Russia, including the Kremlin.
This conflict demonstrates clearly that we live in the age of missiles. Western nations wickedly refused to supply Ukraine with relevant weaponry in advance. Ukraine’s heroic military and people are wildly overmatched, yet they have inflicted substantial losses on Russian forces through portable, cheap, shoulder-launched missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
Say it again: we are living in the missile age.
All these lessons apply to Australia but we are not taking notice of them. We’ve been brave in expressing solidarity for Ukrainians. If Churchillian rhetoric and grand pronouncements provided national security, we would be the safest nation in the world.
But the Australian Defence Force is almost insanely structured to meet none of our strategic needs, to take no notice of profound changes in our security environment and the modern ways of war.
Our rhetoric about Ukraine is infinitely less important than learning the real lessons of Ukraine, which we show no sign of doing. The most important lesson is that we need to be able to look after ourselves. Alternatively, we could persist with the current approach, in which case we should at least supplement it with molotov-cocktail-making classes in the suburbs.