Australian Journal of Defence and Strategic Studies, volume 2 number 2

This issue starts with Prime Minister Scott Morrison's address, delivered at the Australian Defence Force Academy, to launch the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan. The speech outlines a significant defence policy reset to strengthen our force posture and sharpen Australia's focus on our immediate region, as a response to a global security environment where we face greater threats and uncertainty.

Next are two peer-reviewed papers. The first, by Greta Nabbs-Keller, highlights the tensions facing Indonesia to balance complex domestic political sensitivities and international pressures in its relations with China. Then, Jeffery Meiser brings greater clarity to the concept of strategic leadership and its practical importance to our professional literature. To examine his strategic leadership theory of military effectiveness, he presents an exploratory case study of General Matthew B Ridgway's revival of the Eighth Army during the Korea War.

In the commentary section: Scott Dewar draws our focus to the transformations underway in the realm of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), Jason Thomas asks, 'Apart from the benefits of education and promoting necessary dialogue, what is the further benefit of defining an additional level of strategy as “grand?”, and Shane Halton's describes how the military technologies coming fully online in the 2020s (hypersonics, cyber and electromagnetic warfare) will be so fast that in many cases human operators will not be able to operate 'in the loop'.

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