Who Is In Command?

John Rodsted: [00:00:00]

Content in this episode:

1. Today we speak with Paul Barratt AO, Australians For War Powers Reform [00:00:19] 
2. An Insider To Policy and Decision Making [00:03:04]
3. What Role Does Opposition In Parliament Play? [00:04:36]
4. The Australians For War Powers Reform [00:05:38]
5. Is The Response Time An Issue? [00:06:56]
6. Will Politics Get In The Way? [00:08:25] 
7. How to Keep Intelligence Secret? [00:09:39]
8. Who Supports War Powers Reforms? [00:11:37]
9. An Artificial Intelligence Arms Race? [00:14:56]
10. Legal Framework In Decision Making [00:17:14]
11. Bias & Lack of Cultural Knowledge and Sensitivity [00:17:55]
12. An Algorithm Mess [00:20:58]
13. Responsibility For Picking Up The Tab? [00:24:03]
14. Will Killer Robots Be Used If We Get Them? [00:24:56]
15. Weapons and Proportionality [00:25:53]
16. Campaign Vigorously to Outlaw Fully Lethal Autnomous Weapons[00:26:55] 
17. The Role of Universities [00:29:14] 
18. Trusting The Prime Minister? [00:31:07]
19. General info about SafeGround podcasts, Acknowledgement of traditional owners & Stock Credits [00:32:48]

If you have questions or concerns please contact us via info@safeground.org.au

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For access to this and other episodes along with the full transcription and relevant links and information head to safeground.org.au/podcasts. 

Today we speak with Paul Barratt AO, Australians For War Powers Reform [00:00:19] 

Welcome to SafeGround, the small organization with big ideas. I'm John Rodsted. Today. We're speaking with Paul Barrett. Paul has had a long career in Australia's public service since 1966, but what distinguishes him from many others within government and the public sector is his strong conscience.

He's held many senior roles within government, notably within the department of trade, primary industries in energy and the business council of Australia and Secretary of the Department of Defence from 1998 to 1999. It was his senior role in the Department of Defence that put him at odds with the government positions and policy.

This led him to leaving the public service. Since then, he's had a very strong voice on how and why Australia goes to war and the powers that a few have to commit us to war. He's also one of the founders and current president of Australians for War Power Reform. Welcome Paul.

Paul Barratt: [00:01:12] Morning John

John Rodsted: [00:01:13] Originally you studied physics and graduated with honours from the

University of New England. How did you go from serious science to Australia's public service and Department of Defence?

Paul Barratt: [00:01:23] Well, John, throughout my, undergraduate career, I was intending to do a PhD in physics and become an academic physicist. And towards the end of my honors year, I read this interesting little advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, I had sort of had a rough rush of blood to the head and joined the public service.

And that interesting little advertisement said the department of defence was looking for people to monitor scientific developments of defence interest in the Asia Pacific region. So I thought that sounds interesting. And I applied for it months later and security clearances later, and what have you? I turned up for work and discovered that the scientific developments of defence interests were China's nuclear program. And so that, that launched me on a very interesting, couple of years in the intelligence community. And it was a time when China's, program really was nice and they just had their third test when I started and the cultural revolution was just beginning. So it was a very interesting time in Chinese history and in the history of our region.

John Rodsted: [00:02:31] When you entered the department of defence in 66, it was right in the early days of Australia entering the Vietnam war. You were in the department of defence during the war. How were Australia's policies and actions shaped, and then by who?

Paul Barratt: [00:02:44] The policy to go into Vietnam was shaped very much by the prime minister Menzies himself. And, I was in the fortunate position of being just one year too old to be called up in the first draft for Vietnam. but some of my university friends were conscripted and set off the fight in a war that we should never have been in.

An Insider To Policy and Decision Making [00:03:04]

John Rodsted: [00:03:04] As a public service insider, you became privy to how policy and decisions were made. And this is, was not always a fair and honourable process. What kind of things and opinions did they drive Australia towards?

Paul Barratt: [00:03:17] Well, if we stick to the defence domain, quite often the real consultative process wasn't around whether or not we should get involved in a war, but how we would get involved. So the prime minister would make a decision that we should go off to fight alongside our American ally. And then first thing that would come to cabinet would be, what form will this assistance take? There's too much power and too few hands at the beginning.

John Rodsted: [00:03:44] So It would sort of come down to the US would effectively insist that we entered a war, supporting them. And as long as the prime minister agreed to that, then, we were committed.

Paul Barratt: [00:03:56] Actually, it's worse than that, John. More often we would insist on participating in a war to which the US hadn't invited us. And that was very much the case with Vietnam. We, our government persuaded them that they should have us along. The US military was not particularly enthusiastic because they find it easier to fight alone and feel that they've got the capability to do so. That turned out to be wrongly in most cases, but they feel they can do it. But the American political system likes to have some extra flags on the poles show that they're involved in a major coalition. The same thing happened with Iraq and Afghanistan. John Howard volunteered us into those wars. The Americans didn't ask us.

What Role Does Opposition In Parliament Play? [00:04:36]

John Rodsted: [00:04:36] With any dissent that may be either within government or within parliament, how are those voices then heard?

Paul Barratt: [00:04:43] Well, with great difficulty. There's unlikely to be dissent within government when the threshold decision's already been made, backbenchers will feel that if we're off the war, their job is to support the government and support the troops in the field. And when first, contingents went off to Iraq, Simon Crean, the then opposition leader leading a party that was opposed to the war, took very great care to distinguish between being opposed to the war. But on the other hand, wishing the troops all the best. We support our troops in harm's way, but we don't think we ought to be there. But that's a pretty difficult thing to navigate.

And as for parliament that depends on whether the government permits the matter to be debated at all. We committed ourselves to Afghanistan in 2001, and the very first parliamentary debate on Afghanistan was in Julia Gillard's time.

The Australians For War Powers Reform [00:05:38]

John Rodsted: [00:05:38] You're a strong advocate for changes on how we go to war. You helped form and chair the Australians for War Powers Reform. What's the organization? And what do you want to see change?

Paul Barratt: [00:05:49] The organization had its origins in something that, in 2012, we call the campaigns for Iraq war inquiry. Our first objective was to get something like the Chilcot inquiry that was going on in the UK to find out how the decisions were made and what could be learned from that process. But the real aim was to use this as a case study in why, the power to deploy the ADF into international armed conflict or to be relocated in the parliament. We expected and we knew a lot about how the decisions had been made or able to infer a lot by research. And putting various bits and pieces together, but we wanted an open public inquiry, which would demonstrate that our decision-making processes were flawed. And that it was too dangerous to leave it in the hands of a very small number of people.

And so now what we want is to relocate the power to send the defense force in any kind of armed conflict, to be relocated to the parliament. A decision only taken when the parliament, and in our view, both houses have accented to that.

Is The Response Time An Issue? [00:06:56]

John Rodsted: [00:06:56] If you take the decision away from the prime minister, removed the so-called captain's call, wouldn't it take too long to respond to any threats in a real timeframe?

Paul Barratt: [00:07:06] No, that's a great, great misapprehension. Most of the Australian defense force quite rightly is held in a pretty low state of readiness. So it's training and doing practice manoeuvres and what have you, but to get your equipment into a fighting state, it requires a lot of preparation. For example, when we went to Timor, Admiral Barry and I advised the national security of committee of cabinet in February 1999, that we ought to get ready have the option to deploy, to Timor as that plebiscite was looming, because we could see that there might be a, breakdown of the situation there. They were finally ready to deploy in September. So it took us seven months and the expenditure of almost $300 million to get everything really up to scratch and to get commanders at various levels used to commanding operations in the field at that kind of level. So we have a ready reaction force in Townsville, which is basically a battalion, and associated elements. And I would be quite happy to say, to have a framework in which anything that the ready reaction force could handle could be done on the decision of the government, because that would be an emergency type situation. But anything that required a larger deployment, ought to be debated and authorized in parliament.

Will Politics Get In The Way? [00:08:25] 

John Rodsted: [00:08:25] if the decision had to go through parliament, couldn't it get held up by minor parties or in the Senate or whatever, just people being divisive because they can playing politics with the decision?

Paul Barratt: [00:08:36] That's an argument we often hear. If there was any genuine threat that any major political party would be opposed to the deployment and of course, any situation in which the ALP agreed with the government or the coalition, agreed with the ALP, depending on who's in government. If the major opposition party agrees with government, the minor parties have no role at all. So that concern sounds to me like a concern that it might be difficult for the government to engage in wars of choice. And of course, that's the whole point.

John Rodsted: [00:09:11] And I suppose that separates it perfectly between threat and adventure. One, you're actually going to respond for a real threat, that's threatening Australia and Australia's interests. And the other is getting involved in an adventure that's got nothing to do with us, and that would be the separation

Paul Barratt: [00:09:27] To put it brutally, I would say to government of either's side, if you can't persuade the opposition, that our national security, isn't just a really engaged here. We ought not to go.

How to Keep Intelligence Secret? [00:09:39]

John Rodsted: [00:09:39] So if the party that was in power that had government, at the time had access to secret intelligence that they can't talk about, how would they with this?

Paul Barratt: [00:09:46] There is a couple of ways you could deal with that. That's an argument we often hear and it's sometimes it's a bit hard to keep a straight face. When people talk about that when we reflect back to the WMD in Iraq that turned out not to exist and everybody knew they didn't exist. Hans Blix United nations weapons inspector certainly knew they didn't exist.

But let's take your question at face value. There's a couple of things you could do. What we do right now is, in any national security situation, the government iwill brief the leader of the opposition, in private and in secret. That happened in relation to operations in Syria. you could have a proper national security intelligence kind of committee in the parliament, in which those members of the committee were security cleared to receive all the information that's available so that you would have all parties involved in looking at the available evidence. And they could go into the parliament and say, well, we've seen the intelligence and we are convinced.

 It's rare that secret intelligence is the only thing you've got. Very often there is information in the public domain as well. In fact, I think most intelligence agencies should devote more effort to analysis of what's in the public domain because you can learn a lot from that. An option would always be available to government would be to say; Here what you're seeing in the public domain, and a simply without elaboration, say our secret intelligence bears out what we've concluded from the open-source material. So if there's a will to do it this way, you can certainly find a way to navigate your way through that real difficulty of, how you handle secret intelligence.

John Rodsted: [00:11:31] The secret intelligence effectively just becomes a confirmation of what is a greater information stream.

Who Supports War Powers Reforms? [00:11:37]

Yeah. What kind of support have you had for your organizations aims and ideals and where should it go from here?  

Paul Barratt: [00:11:44] We've had support from various members of various parties and a lot of public support and I'll come back to the public support. The most tangible support we've had from a political party is a resolution that was passed on the floor of the ALPs national Congress in 2018 in Adelaide when there was a vote on the floor that an incoming Labor government would establish an open public parliamentary inquiry into how we go to war. And I think that was a very, positive step. I think that's a very good way for a political party to get into it because in not pre-committing themselves to change the way we go to war, but they're committing themselves to establish the facts. It would give those who are seeking a change, the opportunity to put their case. And it would put the people who dismiss it in through the various arguments that we've just discussed. They would have to defend it in that kind of forum. So we would end up with a more honest debate.

Another element that these people will tend to use to argue against us is that it's really wouldn't make any difference because everyone had just vote on party lines. What I would say, in such a parliamentary inquiry, I think you would find that being asked to take responsibility for, something that would involve death and destruction on both sides; I'm putting the young men and women of the ADF in harm's way and do inevitably involving civilian casualties. You would end up with something that looks very much like a conscience vote. I don't think you can assume that everybody would vote on party lines. If we have a parliamentary inquiry, we can flush all these arguments out.

I'd like to see that commitment find its way into the ALP platform, but I very much hoped that, an incoming Labor government, such time as that happens, would proceed along that those lines. Our movement would like to persuade all major political parties that, this is a desirable change. That once one's on board, I think it will be easier to get the others on board.

You've had some pretty good support from some fairly major players within the Australian government and former Australian defense. Can you talk a little about the opinions of some of the others who are involved in your organization and why they think it's a good idea to change the threshold for going to war and the captain's call? 

Well, I think were unanimous in feeling that, the responsibility for this order rest with the federal parliament and it ought to be debated and, fully thought through. One of the things that don't happen when it's just decided by cabinet or by the prime minister is a proper analysis of the legality of going to war. And what we would all like to see, is before parliament takes a decision that the Attorney General or Solicitor General tables, a formal written opinion about the legality of this war. Because the best legal opinion about the Iraq war is that was illegal. And no one takes very seriously the reliance that we had, on very old UN security council resolutions that were passed for another purpose.

So, apart from in our movement, we've had people like former Chief of Army, saying that this move ought to take place.

An Artificial Intelligence Arms Race? [00:14:56]

John Rodsted: [00:14:56] Can we shift the discussion a little towards the current arms race that's starting to get going, which is the development of killer robots? Just the talk of killer robots sounds like a bad dream, but they're real and governments worldwide are developing and investing in them. What do you understand these to be and how would they be deployed in the battlefield, for that matter into urban environments? 

Paul Barratt: [00:15:19] I think the word robots conjures up in the public mind, things that might move along the ground and have maybe have arms and legs. But what we're really talking about is any kind of lethal autonomous weapon. And that very often would be a more advanced form of armed drone that would have its own decision making capability. And, that would take human agency out of the decision to launch a lethal strike.

Now it gets to a little bit fuzzy because I was reading this morning, someone from the US army talking about the progress they're making with them. And they're saying that they'll never take human agency out of making the decision, but they're saying the way these drones, the way these weapons work, you have a collection of sensors that will bring a lot of data together and then make a recommendation. And that recommendation would include which weapon located where would be the best to use for this purpose. Now this US army spokesman was talking about reducing the decision making time from the censors to someone pressing some button from 20 minutes to 20 seconds. 20 seconds, doesn't sound to me like a lot of time for someone to make a considered decision to launch a lethal attack on someone. So the word...