I found Michael Scott’s Essay 'Army’s Civil Engineers: An in-demand but underused technical workforce under stress' from a post through Twitter, and it piqued my interest. This sentence, “A spiral of capability erosion exists which must be unwound before it is too late” struck home to me and compelled me to add to his voice.

After completing my civil engineering degree in 1986 I was launched into an Army (indeed a Defence Force) grappling with identity. The post-Vietnam hiatus had started to drift away, and the Defence White Paper, 'Defence of Australia', was launched the following year with a raft of effects on the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This White Paper birthed many reviews, and subsequently many Royal Australian Engineer (RAE) units were removed from Army’s order of battle. While no Army tribe escaped the knife of repeated Force Structure Reviews, the most savage cuts were across the enabling capabilities.

There was unrest within the RAE officer ranks as technical versus non-technical and combat vs construction labels were cast about to determine who was more valuable to the ‘new’ Army. The number of the posts coded for civil engineers suffered a significant cut.

History records the turning point for the Australian Army decline as the INTERFET deployment. Personally, I was sitting in Shoalwater Bay conducting exercise preparation for Exercise Crocodile 99 and watching the gradual withdrawal of units from the exercise, but there was a determination to maintain our multilateral commitments. Not long after the exercise, I was in East Timor as we fired all our engineering construction shots over a few short months to sustain the deployment.

In early 2000 there was an event at Parliament House celebrating the success of INTERFET. At lunch I was primed to have an honest chat about how vulnerable our strategic logistics and engineering capability was to any friendly ear. As it turns out I was at a table with the Hon Ian Macfarlane MP who proudly declared “what a wonderful day to celebrate, nothing miserable can be said”. I was deflated and went with the ‘mission success’ vibe. I wonder to this day if my thoughts were written on my face.

Only three years later I was at a briefing for logisticians and construction engineers at Puckapunyal, where an Army Headquarters staff officer informed us that to advance the Hardened Networked Army, it had been decided to take ‘risk’ in engineering and logistics. The audience forcefully pointed out this was one of the greatest areas of strategic risk in the INTERFET deployment, and here they wanted to add to the risk.

In the words of Paul Kelly, “let the part tell the whole”.

Perhaps we might turn our gaze to the broader engineering profession during this same period. In the mid-90s, Max Moore-Wilton (‘Max the Axe’), as Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet did indeed wield the axe of outsourcing and streamlining of government services. He was ably supported by Peter ‘Phonebook’ Boxall as the Finance Secretary who had a phonebook on his desk, and would question why government had an expenditure for an in-house service if he could find it in the phone book. I won’t bore the reader with the deep reasons behind small government and the ideological push to privatise, but it is worth a reflection for those inclined.

Of course, all engineering capabilities whether they be consulting, construction, or IT were in the phone book and easy targets for outsourcing. It should be noted that many engineering firms delighted in the freeing up of government contracts and the ability to bid for long term government services.

However, if you are following matters engineering, you will note the tide has started to turn. Gradually, Chief Engineers have returned to various jurisdictions. The Victorian Premier has signalled the requirement for in-house engineering skills strongly with a new State Electricity Commission, after wholesale privatisation in the late 90s.

So, what for military engineers in the future? I am not going to discuss global contestation and the demands on a modern ADF to respond to high end warfighting demands. Many minds are devoted to this. I will turn to matters within my purvey; climate and energy security, national resilience, and humanitarian action. Perhaps a more mundane aspect of the future you may think.

National security is not an either/or argument. Great power contestation and debilitating climate change can occur at the same time, with a conflation of events that can threaten many. It is a mistake to think we can apply a slow piecemeal approach to the potential risk of one threat and then move onto the next. Indeed, the national security apparatus must be transparent about the wider range of threats and our nation’s vulnerabilities to compounding and interlinked crises.

What happens when climate change takes effect across the globe, where an act of environmental degradation that assists economic advancement for one group while disadvantaging another is determined to be an act of war? Is it possible that these effects can become more than a long-distance potential driver of conflict?

Australia has traditionally ignored the risks and is ill-prepared for the security implications of devastating climate impacts at home and in the Asia-Pacific, the highest-risk region in the world. Unless rectified, this will place great pressure on the ADF and emergency and disaster relief agencies to pick up the pieces in the face of accelerating climate impacts. Higher levels of warming will stretch them beyond their capacity to respond. Australia is falling behind its allies and is failing its responsibilities as a global citizen and its duty to protect its own people.

This inaction has arguably left the nation poorly prepared to face global warming’s consequences. Put simply, national leadership has been absent and Australia has been “missing in action” on climate-security risks.

In times of humanitarian crisis, Australia always strives to relieve human suffering through the immediate efforts of both government and non-government agencies. From colonial times, Australian military forces have trained to fight wars but also have been employed to assist civil authorities during humanitarian crises. Since its inception, the ADF has engaged in humanitarian work that has advanced Australia’s national interests. Defence conducts these Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations, internationally and domestically, in aid to the civil community. Army engineers are always part of these operations.

More recently, Defence has responded to many Federal and State Government requests for assistance. Well trained, disciplined, and competent Defence members perform many tasks they may be directed to with minimal preparation and briefing required. This flexibility is afforded because Defence is prepared and ready for deployment into harm’s way to deliver the necessary capabilities to defend, promote, and project national interests.

The skills involved in providing their ‘raison d’etre’ are costly to grow and sustain and completely inconsistent with the applications for which they are being activated in support of the civil community. While satisfying the political urgency of action visible to the community, Defence’s employment in this way is a concerning amplification of significant shortcomings in Australia’s civil capacity, capability, and most of all: our resilience.

More widely, the engineering profession supports climate security in several ways. Firstly, there is the direct employment of military engineers in support of security operations. These operations apply in a spectrum from peacetime ‘soft power’ to complex conflict and emergencies. Secondly, there is the direct role of engineers in shaping the environment that affects climate security, like dams on life supporting rivers and the engineering effort that is critical for sustaining force projection through ports and airfields.

The third aspect is the dimension of innovation where engineering will address carbon emission, reducing the probability of worst-case climate security scenarios but design in capabilities that will allow the conduct of security operations in a hot and wet world, for instance cooling systems for vehicles. The fourth part is the delivery of wider humanitarian engineering applications in a more dangerous world. Finally, the engineering systems engineering approach will assist others in how to understand and manage climate related risk.

The Army needs civil engineers to face the challenges of the future. It is prudent to not just accept the death spiral of the capability as a self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘conventional wisdom’ of a narrow timeframe of the last few decades, while the world changes in front of us.