Understand the Global Environment

Introduction

Climate change matters to Defence and has a direct effect on warfighting.

Australians need to rapidly reassess their China-Taiwan calculus, because as it stands we are overstating our global importance and understating realities.

Bringing Iran in from the cold would not only undercut a potential axis with China and Russia, it would allow the US to concentrate on its main game.

History is sometimes less about logical decisions than it is about the confluence of forces and the egos of humans.

China has long charted its own course towards a defined destiny, while the West drifts from the path of unity towards a destination unknown.

As this decade progresses, more and more learned Australians are joining a gospel choir.

Democracies need to shed the ethical baggage associated with counterpropaganda and harness the integrity of their institutions to engage in positive information offensives in a hyper connected age.

‘Whatever works’ is what the world’s military wants to purchase. But what is working in the current Ukrainian crisis?

The influence of religion at its worst on violence, and its best on peacemaking, is relevant to military leaders today.

Russia’s act of aggression against Ukraine has finally proved the frailty of the UNSC design against belligerent behemoths.

Beijing is closely watching the West’s response to the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine for its own plans regarding the eventual subjugation of the independent country of Taiwan.