Agenda for Change 2016: come on over, y’all (Andrew Davies, ASPI The Strategist)

Australia’s defence strategy is a topic much loved by academics, and there’s a rich literature about its various evolutions. In the 1960s the posture du jour was ‘forward defence’. Australia was exercised about communist insurgencies throughout Southeast Asia and the ADF was deployed in Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam. After Vietnam, we got ‘defence of Australia’—effectively a locally focussed strategy gifted to us by President Nixon’s Guam Doctrine. The last few defence white papers have been couched in terms of geographic ‘concentric circles’ with Australia’s security interests and defence posture being defined by distance from our shores

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/agenda-change-2016-come-yall/