The Australian Government’s recently released 2024 National Defence Strategy highlights Defence’s intent to adopt a Strategy of Denial within the Indo-Pacific. This approach “aims to deter any conflict before it begins, prevent any potential adversary from succeeding in coercing Australia through force, support regional security and prosperity, and uphold a favourable regional strategic balance” (Department of Defence 2024). 

To deter conflict, Army is required to generate a credible force that is willing and capable to adapt to the enemy’s approach to warfare in a strategic environment where the warning time for conflict is rapidly decreasing. Given the swift pace of strategic developments, the distinctive challenges posed by littoral terrain, and the array of threat capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region, it is imperative that the Australian Army is prepared to adopt a warfare approach aligned to the tenets of positional warfare enabled by attrition. To achieve success, this will require an understanding of the geographical conditions of the littoral environment, further exacerbated by enemy capabilities, the advantages and requirements of a positional approach, and the implementation of a force design aligned to this type of warfare.

The inherent conditions of the littoral environment are not conducive to the same scope of large-scale manoeuvre one would see on the plains of Eastern Europe or the deserts of the Middle East. Manoeuvre warfare requires a specific combination of conditions consisting of asymmetric mobility and the ability to leverage terrain conducive to manoeuvre (Fox 2021). When examining a littoral environment in relation to the tenets of manoeuvre warfare, it is feast or famine in terms of cover, concealment, and mobility – with little overlap of ideal conditions.

The natural geography of this region, which has not changed since the great campaigns of Kokoda or Malaya, is typically mountainous with thick jungles, concentrated over small landmasses, making movement slow and arduous. This is further exacerbated by the propensity of the littoral to contain clustered urban centres in an already congested area of operations, adding additional frictions in terms of the human dimension and constraints associated with operating in the urban environment (Watling and Kaushal 2019).

In contrast to this are the open waterways that serve as mobility corridors for ‘brown water’ manoeuvre. These waterways lack cover and concealment, limit dispersion due to watercraft dependence, and add significant risk to land-based forces at key transition points such as disembarkation. These frictions inhibit an army’s ability to achieve the key components required to adopt a manoeuverist approach and are further amplified when considering adversary capabilities.

The Indo-Pacific strategic environment encompasses capable, peer and near-peer adversaries, with the means to employ an anti-access/area denial capability within the region. This capability, supported by the appropriate equipment, personnel, and resource depth enables a strategy of attrition, further exacerbating the frictions of operating within a littoral environment. Based on lessons learned in Ukraine, adversaries of the current rules-based international order within the Indo-Pacific know that few Western powers have the same scope of depth within their armed forces and may potentially see a strategy of attrition, with the appropriate industrial capacity scaled to this type of conflict, as a cornerstone to their theory of victory (Watling and Reynolds 2024).

If Australia’s adversaries know it is not ready for this type of conflict, it represents a critical vulnerability to the Australian Army’s success in the Indo-Pacific. Regardless of how an army hopes to conduct operations, the nature of war dictates that if its adversaries have the means and ways to conduct a strategy of attrition, it will be forced to address this challenge. Western preferences to small batch, boutique precision systems and platforms with minimal depth, compounded with the issues associated with lengthy Western defence procurement timelines, further support an adversary’s preference to a strategy of attrition.

When examined with the geographic conditions of the littorals, Western strategy and doctrine underpinned by manoeuvre warfare is no longer tenable due to an inability to create surprise, speed, standoff, dispersed movement, and concentration of force (Fox 2021). If the Australian Army chooses to pursue a traditional manoeuverist ‘knockout blow’ at a perceived enemy weak point while having a significant equipment and resource disadvantage in relation to its adversary, the entire campaign could be at risk if it fails to deliver a decisive victory. By coupling adverse geography with greater adversary resource depth, it is reasonably concluded that given current Western land-based force structures, ‘small’ failures at the tactical and operational level may have disproportionate effects on strategic objectives.

With these considerations in mind, the littoral environment of the Indo-Pacific requires a positional strategy enabled by attrition. Jack Watling and Sidharth Kaushal describe “the primary operational aim of positional warfare is dislocating an opponent’s capacity to respond adroitly and using the windows of opportunity that this creates to secure key objectives early” (Watling and Kaushal 2019).

Attrition is “the methodical use of battle or shaping operations to erode or destroy a belligerent’s equipment, personnel and resources at a pace greater than they can replenish their losses” (Fox 2017). The lack of clear ground movement corridors in littoral terrain and the ability of an adversary to allocate significant mass against these corridors demands attrition as the primary shaping effect to create a window of opportunity to secure an objective. At the tactical level, it is the creation of windows of opportunity using attritional fires and the denial of enemy situational awareness that allows manoeuvre elements to methodically ‘bite and hold’ key terrain.

This denies the adversary the benefits of maintaining its current tactical disposition and forces them to withdraw to facilitate tactical symmetry, similar to strategies employed in congested, urban environments like the battles of Marawi or Mosul. At the operational level, this consists of a series of ‘bite and hold’ operations along island chains, potentially ‘leap frogging’ islands, again negating the effectiveness of forward enemy positions and forcing a withdrawal.

At both levels, a temporal advantage is achieved through the application of attrition to seize key terrain, minimising reliance on manoeuvre as the key requirement to achieve geographic superiority. To enable this within the context of the Indo-Pacific environment, a focus on the implementation of a force design aligned to fighting a positional strategy is required.

Aligning to Australia’s primary strategic defence objective of deterrence, its Army must prepare for the prospect of large-scale combat operations in a littoral environment. Success requires a nuanced understanding of the benefits of positional warfare, enabled by attrition and augmented with the resources to demonstrate it has the ways and means to succeed. From the Australian Army’s perspective, this can be achieved through a force design dictated by the requirements to achieve tactical success in a littoral environment.

Broadly speaking, this requires a holistic understanding of the Indo-Pacific region as well as Australia’s potential adversaries and their assessed theories of victory. One can reasonably conclude the intersection of these factors with how the Australian Army would like to conduct combat operations will reveal the true nature of conflict. Effective force design requires an alignment with the assessed true nature of warfare with an understanding of how the Australian Army envisions the scale and scope of its contributions among allies. This includes the implementation of policies and procedures necessary to rapidly enlist, train, equip, and support the force structure required to conduct a positional strategy. Simultaneous to this effort, is the requirement to develop a force sufficiently robust to mitigate the vulnerabilities associated with an adversary’s strategy of attrition, where no element within the force is a single point of failure.

A positional approach enabled by attrition is not preferred because it is the better form of warfare. It is required because of a combination of geographic constraints in the Indo-Pacific region, enemy capabilities and intent, and the vulnerabilities of pursuing a manoeuverist strategy without the equipment and resources seen in modern campaigns like Operation Iraqi Freedom. By accurately assessing the operating environment in terms of how an army wants to fight, the adversarial approach to warfighting and establishing the framework to build a force that can operate effectively within this domain, the Australian Army will be better adapted for warfighting in a littoral environment within the Indo-Pacific region.

References

Department of Defence (2024). 2024 National Defence Strategy. Commonwealth of Australia.

Fox, A.C. (2017). A Solution Looking for a Problem: Illuminating Misconceptions in Maneuver-Warfare Doctrine. [online] Available at: https://www.moore.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/2017/Fall/4Fox17.pdf [Accessed 22 Apr. 2024].

Fox, A.C. (2021). Manoeuvre is Dead? The RUSI Journal, 166(6-7), https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2022.2058601.

Watling, J. and Kaushal, S. (2019). Requirements for the UK’s Amphibious Forces in the Future Operating Environment. [online] Whitehall: Royal United Services Institute. Available at: https://static.rusi.org/201911_op_requirements_for_the_uks_amphibious_forces_in_the_future_operating_environment_kaushal_watling_web.pdf [Accessed 25 Apr. 2024].

Watling, J. and Reynolds, N. (2024). Russian Military Objectives and Capacity in Ukraine Through 2024. [online] Royal United Services Institute. Available at: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-military-objectives-and-capacity-ukraine-through-2024 [Accessed 26 Apr. 2024].