‘Why would China even bother to attack if you don’t taunt her’: Sam & Hugh answer your comments

Every fortnight, Sam Roggeveen and Hugh White discuss major developments in international affairs affecting Australia and the region, from an Australian perspective. “I never took never took the Chinese military bases in the South Pacific very seriously as a a military factor, leaving aside the broader political questions, because it's always seemed to me that compared to where we were, for example, when we were worried about Japanese bases in the South Pacific in the decades before the Second World War.” “You know, if Australia plays its cards right, if we build the right sort of armed forces we need, it shouldn't be very difficult for us to be able to neutralize a Chinese base operating within the inner arc of islands for conflict.” “But that doesn't mean they're not useful in a peace time setting, as a kind of a global network or at least a regional network.” “There is a tendency here that I think, you and I, as former intelligence analysts would both be familiar with the problem of mirror imaging. The idea that just because we want something, the other side must want it as well.”

This week, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen joins Hugh White to discuss his article in Australian Foreign Affairs, Plan B: How to defend Australia without submarines, by David Kilcullen “There's two ways it could fail. “One could be that the US Virginia class submarines, which we were supposed to start seeing arrive from 2032, are simply not transferred across by the US government. And there's language in the agreement that allows the president to—sorry—requires the president to certify that the submarines can be transferred without any loss of capability to the United States, and Congress then has to sign off on that” “And earlier in the year, Elbridge Colby expressed concern that US ship builders are not building US submarines fast enough. So, I think that is a flag that even the United States is thinking ‘okay, what if things do not transpire in such a way that we can actually transfer the submarines across.” Compelling conversation, engaging debate and insightful perspectives. This series provides expert insights into Australia’s future in a changing world. Foreign Exchange. Brought to you by Australian Foreign Affairs.

Every fortnight, Sam Roggeveen and Hugh White discuss major developments in international affairs affecting Australia and the region, from an Australian perspective. “This is an extraordinarily serious choice. “Now, we might feel uncomfortable about the idea of the Chinese getting control of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited), for example, the chip fabs. “But boy, you wouldn't pay that price to prevent that. “If you're really worried about that, by the way, what you do is you bomb the fabs yourself, to deny them.” Compelling conversation, engaging debate and insightful perspectives. This series provides expert insights into Australia’s future in a changing world. Foreign Exchange. Brought to you by Australian Foreign Affairs.

Every fortnight, Sam Roggeveen and Hugh White discuss major developments in international affairs affecting Australia and the region, from an Australian perspective. “All of those styles of intelligence except the last one —HUMINT— is, of course, undergoing fantastically rapid change in the last few decades and that doesn't look like ending. I mean, SIGINT, when I first got into the business SIGINT was still largely a matter of, well, intercepting high frequency transmissions — if you go back to the sort of World War One, World War Two era. And, you know, then getting into satellites and so on.” “But these days, intercepting other people's or intruding into other people's computer systems has become a vast part of the process. And so, the whole shape of what we used to call SIGINIT hardly seems an adequate word anymore” “Signals is a very World War two word.” “You know, it used to be the case that when you're trying to intercept other people's signals, you either had to get alongside a cable like the British splicing into the transatlantic cable at the beginning of World War One, sp they could they could intercept what the what the Germans were doing, or listening to high frequency radio, which is a very geographically based business where you could set up your antenna to listen became really critical. “These days, that being what it is, the geography has almost become irrelevant.”

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