Australia urged to adopt guerrilla, Singapore’s ‘poisonous shrimp’ tactics

Australia must learn from past guerrilla insurgencies and adopt an “unconventional deterrence” policy in facing down threats from China, Russia and elsewhere, one of the country’s leading think tanks said on Wednesday.

Australia, under the tripartite Aukus pact with the United States and the United Kingdom, will acquire at least three Virginia-class submarines from the US within 15 years, with an eye to eventually build its own.

Until then, Canberra faces a major gap in its defences, warned the report by the non-partisan Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from Canberra’s defence ministry as well as the US State Department.

“Australia’s traditional reliance upon ‘great and powerful friends’ and extended nuclear deterrence now seems no longer assured,” the authors wrote.

“Australia has options to fill today’s deterrence gap: we just need to look beyond conventional paradigms,” they said.

ASPI, acknowledging Australia’s “inferiority” against adversaries like China, argued that past guerrilla wars like the Chechen insurgency against Russia in the 1990s showed that smaller actors could inflict heavy damage on much larger foes.

“History demonstrates that innovative concepts and asymmetric capabilities can achieve deterrent effects ahead of and during conflict,” the authors wrote.