Reassessing Australia's defence policy (part 2): What are our strategic priorities?

The strategic policy chapter in the 2016 defence white paper doesn’t provide a framework to determine priorities for force structure, posture and employment. Old concepts such as ‘self-reliance’ have become divorced from their original strategic rationale, while a focus on what should be instrumental ‘partnerships’ has become an end in its own right. Calls to give greater definition to strategic policy often argue for giving clear priority to the defence of Australia, regional stability or global stability. But all of those could be affected by a range of threats, so framing strategic policy around them requires many assumptions—each of which should be made explicit.