Australia's different defence policy

Defence-policy debates in many countries over the past two decades have revolved around the choice between new and old wars. Should we build forces suited to the small wars of the post-Cold War era, especially expeditionary interventions of various sorts against non-state adversaries or relatively weak rogue states? Or should we keep on spending money to build forces suited to the kind of large-scale, conventional wars which characterised the last century? Australia has been no exception to this. Indeed the contest between 's new's and 's old's visions of defence priorities among Australia's small strategic-policy community has been unusually intense.