Photo opportunities do not win wars.
When Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles stands solemnly at a National War Memorial, standard media outlets rush to print the same tired narrative. They call it a deepening of bilateral ties. They talk about shared history, mutual respect, and the foundational pillars of regional security. It is a scripted, comfortable ritual that everyone in the defense establishment agrees to pretend is meaningful.
It is a distraction.
While ministers exchange somber nods and ceremonial wreaths, the actual machinery of defense procurement, technological readiness, and strategic capability is rusting out in the open. We are trapped in an era of sentimental diplomacy, where the performance of alliance building has replaced the hard, messy reality of deterrence.
I have spent decades watching defense departments pour billions into legacy platforms while hiding behind public relations victories. The reality is brutal: a wreath laying ceremony is cheap. Building a defense posture that can actually survive the next decade is exceptionally expensive, politically painful, and currently failing.
The Lazy Consensus of Ceremonial Diplomacy
The standard defense journalism complex treats ministerial visits as self-evident proof of strategic alignment. If two nations share a stage and invoke the ghosts of past conflicts, the assumption is that they will stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the next one.
This is a dangerous miscalculation. History is littered with signed treaties and shared memorials that dissolved the moment national self-interest shifted.
Ceremonial diplomacy creates a false sense of security. It allows politicians to signal strength to a domestic audience without committing to the difficult, long-term investments required to back up that signal. When Richard Marles pays tribute at a foreign war memorial, he is participating in a heavily choreographed theatrical production. It looks excellent on a government press release. It does absolutely nothing to fix the systemic vulnerabilities plaguing modern Western militaries.
What are these vulnerabilities? Let us look at the actual metrics that matter:
- Procurement Lead Times: The gap between identifying a strategic need and deploying a combat-ready asset has ballooned to decades.
- Sovereign Industrial Capacity: The inability to manufacture critical munitions domestically, leaving nations entirely dependent on fragile global supply chains.
- Technological Obsolescence: Spending billions on massive, exquisite hardware platforms that are easily neutralized by cheap, asymmetric drone swarms.
By focusing on the optics of respect, the media completely ignores the lack of substance underneath. We are validating a system that prioritizes the appearance of readiness over the capacity to fight.
The Flawed Premise of Modern Defense Questions
When the public looks at international defense visits, the questions asked are fundamentally wrong. The press box wonders: "How will this visit strengthen our regional partnership?" or "What messages are we sending to our adversaries through this display of unity?"
These questions assume that adversaries care about choreography. They do not.
If you want to dismantle the premise of contemporary defense policy, you have to ask the brutally honest questions that bureaucrats dodge:
Does this partnership include immediate, legally binding technology transfers?
If the answer is no, the partnership is a marketing campaign. True strategic depth is not built on shared values; it is built on shared code, shared manufacturing, and interoperable supply chains. If Australia and its allies cannot seamlessly build and repair each other's equipment without navigating years of bureaucratic red tape, the alliance is a paper tiger.
What is the cost-to-utility ratio of the legacy platforms being discussed?
Politicians love big, visible assets like aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered submarines. They look impressive in harbor photos. But in a high-intensity conflict, these massive platforms are increasingly liabilities. The war in Ukraine demonstrated that cheap, mass-produced anti-ship missiles and sea drones can deny access to dominant naval assets. Investing heavily in legacy systems while underfunding decentralized, autonomous tech is a catastrophic error.
The High Cost of Sentimental Deterrence
Let us run a thought experiment. Imagine a scenario where a major regional conflict erupts in the Indo-Pacific. A combined force of autonomous underwater vehicles and hypersonic missiles effectively cuts off critical shipping lanes within forty-eight hours.
In this scenario, does the adversary pause because two defense ministers laid a wreath together five years prior? Do the legacy fighter jets sitting on a runway three thousand miles away matter if their refueling tankers cannot survive the airspace?
No. The only variable that determines survival is immediate, scalable lethality.
The defense establishment’s obsession with historical sentimentality actively undermines this lethality. It absorbs intellectual bandwidth, distorts budget allocations, and rewards politicians for saying the right things rather than building the right things.
The downside to calling out this hypocrisy is that it sounds cynical. It alienates the traditionalists who believe that honor and memory are the bedrock of military alliances. To be clear: honoring fallen soldiers is necessary. But confusing a memorial service with an active defense strategy is an act of supreme incompetence. Respect for the past should never be used as a shield to deflect scrutiny from present failures.
Stop Building Alliances, Build Interoperable Factories
The conventional wisdom says that to counter rising threats, we need more diplomatic summits, more joint declarations, and more ministerial tours.
The conventional wisdom is dead wrong.
If Australia wants real security, it needs to stop focusing on the high-level theater and execute three unglamorous, radical shifts in strategy:
1. Burn the ITAR Bureaucracy
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and similar domestic frameworks do more to protect bureaucratic turf than secure nations. They actively prevent close allies from sharing the cutting-edge code needed to counter modern threats. If a defense minister cannot announce a complete teardown of technology sharing barriers during a foreign trip, the trip was a waste of aviation fuel.
2. Shift 30% of the Capital Budget to Asymmetric, Disposable Tech
Stop buying fewer, more expensive platforms that take twenty years to deliver. The defense department needs to pivot toward mass. This means investing heavily in thousands of cheap, autonomous, attritable systems—drones, loitering munitions, and automated sensor networks—that can be manufactured rapidly in domestic commercial factories.
3. Tie All Diplomatic Visits to Industrial Output Metrics
Every time a politician steps onto a foreign tarmac, their success should be measured by one metric: how many tons of critical munitions or components will be co-produced as a direct result of this meeting? If there is no signed production contract, there is no success.
The Mirage of Shared Values
We are told that alliances survive because of a shared commitment to democracy and the rules-based international order. This is a comforting lie told to citizens to justify the staggering cost of defense budgets.
Alliances survive on utility. When the pressure rises, a nation will look at its partner and ask a single question: "What can you deliver right now?"
If the answer is "a deep sense of shared history and a beautifully worded joint statement," that alliance is over.
The defense elite can continue to write breathless columns about the significance of ministerial handshakes and the profound symbolism of national memorials. They can continue to play their parts in a nineteenth-century diplomatic play while twenty-first-century warfare evolves at a terrifying pace.
But do not confuse the performance with the reality. The wreaths will wither. The speeches will be forgotten. The only thing that will remain when the crisis hits is the cold, hard inventory of weapons that actually work, factories that can actually produce, and systems that can actually survive. Everything else is just noise.
