Strategic and Defence Studies Centre

Professor Des Ball
Photograph by Coombs Photography

Ask Des Ball what security issues are looming for Australia and the region, and he pauses to reflect for an instant, then says laconically: 'Let me give you five or six of them.'

He starts at the top: the stability of Indonesia; the growth of China and the nature of the US-China relationship; the impact of transnational crime; the escalating acquisition of both nuclear and conventional arms in the region; the continuing fragility of political and social structures in the near Pacific; and the 'war on terror'. Depending on the US Administration's approach, that conflict could go on for 'a long time'.

Professor Ball has been thinking and writing about issues like these for almost 30 years, since he joined the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University -- longer if you look back beyond the beginning of his academic career, to the time in the early 1970s when he was one of the more visible leaders of the anti-war movement on the Acton campus. The man who has become one of the world's authorities on international security and enjoys the confidence of the Pentagon was once arrested for climbing King George V's statue outside Parliament House carrying a placard that proclaimed 'I Won't Fight in Vietnam'.

Ball's activism has not impeded his career. 'There was nothing averse in the Centre to people with anti-Vietnam war perspectives,' he says.

After a succession of research fellowships, including stints at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, Ball became Head of the Centre in 1982. He gave the job away in 1991 for a Special Professorship and the more congenial task of research.

'I hate administration, with a vengeance,' Ball says. 'One thing I can do in life is research and write critically about issues, and I get extremely frustrated when I'm sitting here writing out memos for the Director or the Vice-Chancellor or whatever. The university gave me a Personal Chair in March 1987 to go back and do my own research. But one of the things I wanted to keep my hands on was the publications program.'

That program has been one of the most successful vehicles for disseminating the Centre's ideas since its first rudimentary booklets were produced internally in the early 1970s. The astonishingly prolific Ball has himself been an important contributor, as author or editor, to the hundreds of titles that have emerged since then. Leaving aside individual monographs, the range of publications has broadened over three decades to encompass several specialist series -- short Working Papers, more comprehensive Canberra Papers, booklets produced for the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, and the Armed Forces of Asia series published by Allen & Unwin. From next month, titles produced under the Centre's own imprint will be distributed and marketed through Pandanus Books, the publishing arm of ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

Publishing was always going to be a core function of the Centre, given founder Tom Millar's passionate belief in the need for an informed, constructive debate on defence and security. Millar, a Duntroon graduate, set an example of active engagement with his book Australia's Defence -- one of the first analyses of the country's defence policy -- and by chairing the committee which in 1974 recommended sweeping reforms of the army reserve system. The Centre has continued along the path Millar staked out.

Its first titles were 'compilations of conference proceedings', soon followed by the original Working Papers, produced as simple A4 booklets. The program progressively became more sophisticated, with forward printing schedules and better designs. Titles that are likely to find a wider audience and turn a reasonable profit often appear under a commercial imprint.

One of them was Ball's seminal A Suitable Piece of Real Estate, a survey of US strategic installations in Australia which caused a furore when it appeared in 1980. That same year Australia was granted full access to installations which in some instances were already passing the peak of their operational utility. Now only 'the least objectionable' facility -- the Pine Gap listening station -- remains. But if the book came late in the day, it had an impact by bringing the extent of the US presence to public notice for the first time.

That accords with the Centre's aims. 'Obviously, because we work so closely with the defence and intelligence communities on issues that have a lot of sensitivities, it raises difficulties with us from time to time,' Ball says. 'On the other hand, discussion of intelligence matters, of American bases in Australia, has always been part of our bailiwick, part of our terms of reference. The key issue for the Centre has always been -- does it contribute to more professional debate on defence issues?'

The answer has been resoundingly affirmative in both policy and technical capability. The Centre's influence within Australia was 'really quite profound' throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ball says.

'We were at the conceptual forefront of the whole revision of defence policy, away from what used to be forward defence and dependence on great and powerful friends towards what became defence of Australia and self-reliance -- how to defend Australia on the basis of our doing it ourselves. Then we got stuck into the force structure side of it, the operational concepts, the relationship between the defence force and the civil community.

'Then, during the course of the 1980s, when I was Head of the Centre, Paul Dibb did a review of Australia's defence capabilities which laid the structure for what is now the Australian Defence Force. The things that were in that review -- the F18s, the frigates -- they're the things we still have and they're going to be with us for another 20 years.'

Ball, renowned for his fascination with military technology, helped to concentrate thinking about materiel. When Australia was looking to replace its Mirage fighters in the mid-1970s he edited a collection of essays that asked decision makers to mull over the airpower structure and capability Australia would need. Part of the purpose was to challenge the favoured idea of buying another single-engined air-defence fighter and advocate instead 'something that had two engines, anti-ship missiles, larger radar, longer range, so that it could be used not just in air combat, but as a strike fighter, particularly as a maritime strike fighter'. The debate paved the way for Australia to purchase the F/A18s that equip the Royal Australian Air Force.

A decade later Ball and his collaborators again prodded the debate along. In Air Power, they argued that Australia had acquired the right basic equipment but needed a more comprehensive approach to air defence. This meant developing its capacities in surveillance, warning and control, joint operations and setting up the infrastructure for a national air-defence and control capability.

While Australian affairs remain a priority, the Centre began looking at regional issues in greater depth during the late 1980s. Working through a host of bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements, it was able to collaborate closely with other institutions across Southeast Asia, some of which it had helped to establish in the 1970s and 1980s.

Each of these Asian institutions runs its local chapter of the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, a forum for academics, defence and diplomatic personnel whose international entity Ball chairs. Many also run their own publications programs and -- as a glance through recent titles shows -- their analysts contribute to work emanating from the ANU. Contributors from across ASEAN have joined Australian specialists to give Canberra's public work new breadth and pertinence.

The administration of the publishing program has been changing. While the bulk of work selecting and editing new titles falls to Ball, the Centre is small enough for responsibilities to be divided up equitably. An editorial board, only recently established, ensures that two readers assess everything before it is accepted. Ball has been an innovator over his long direction of the program but is relaxed at the thought that someone else might now take over the program and put new life into it. For a start, it would leave him more time for research.

There will be plenty to work on. True, Australia has changed markedly since Ball first began writing about strategic and defence issues. 'Australia as a whole has grown up during that period,' he says, 'shaken off a lot of those colonial, Commonwealth, imperial connections, and taken a lot more responsibility for its foreign policy and its defence policy.'

But we never had much more than a down-payment on the peace dividend promised after the Cold War, and now September 11 has made the world a more fragile place. The region is not exempt from strains, as Ball's five or six security issues make clear. It is more important than ever for specialists and the wider public to think about risks and opt for choices that will improve security, resolve conflicts and promote stability across the region. That too might involve the occasional confrontation. But Des Ball has been there before.

He hands over the Centre's latest Canberra Paper, a 325-page paperback titled Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999. 'It's going to cause a bit of a stir,' he says drily. The trials of some of those accused of destroying the former province's infrastructure and brutalising its people are proceeding 'fitfully'. The new book, with detailed evidence against three dozen Indonesian civil and military personnel, is aimed at the wider public debate -- 'to kick it along,' Ball says.

He believes that specialists like him have a job not just to facilitate debate, 'but to really get in and drive the debate itself, to take up issues of national and international importance, even if, as in this case, they might be extremely controversial.

'In a sense, you have to be prepared to stick your neck out, to provide the necessary information for informed public debate. That's what it's about. That's why we're at a university rather than over in an in-house think-tank in the Department of Defence. To question and to criticise. To inform, but to inform critically.'