I think biggest threat of invasion for Australia is illegal immigration.
It’s happened before, and Australia has used discrete and unconventional means to disrupt it.
RAN could probably surge 3 Collins boats depending on timings of depot level maintenance.
P8 paired with C17/C130 used as arsenal planes to saturate PLAN air defence and F35 hitting hard targets with LRASM would make it a slaughter.
PLAN’s recent live fire exercise in the commercial air corridor between Australia and NZ single handedly justifies increased defence spending for ANZ.
Personally, I think China’s horrible demographic wall it’s about to hit at 100kph combined with a stagnant economy(140+ car makers today that will surely drop to 20 or less by 2035) leaves Xi with plenty of domestic crisis to solve.
The risk is if Xi needs(or needs to create) an external crisis to activate nationalism and deflect away from domestic strike(akin to Argentina-Falklands 1982).
Even Taiwan might be a stretch too far. Xi will need a guaranteed win.
I need to push back on your analysis on this. Quite hard actually.
Indonesia lacks the force projection capability to even project an expeditionary force into Northern Australia.
Sustaining an expeditionary force into Northern Australia by Indonesia would leave it incredibly vulnerable to air and sea supply chain interdiction.
With first hand professional domain experience, and without arrogance or hubris, an Indonesian invasion of Northern Australia would be disastrous for Indonesia.
China invading Australia would entail a much more capable, but entirely untested, expeditionary force over much longer and far more vulnerable supply chains.
With just FVEY intelligence support and FVEY forces already forward deployed into Australia, the likelihood of China successfully establishing and sustaining a beachhead to break into Australia with a conventional invasion would be similar to that of Indonesia, due to very long and very vulnerable supply chains.
Unless China glassed Australia with nuclear weapons, any attempt by Xi and the CCP's PLAN/PLAAF/PLA to conventionally invade Australia would be a moon shot too far.
China's fleet steaming south would be severely attrited transitting limited maritime traffic route bottlenecks that would be akin to cattle chutes in a slaughter house, while China's own energy/food/raw industrial materials commercial maritime supply chains would be existentially vulnerable.
That's just to Australia's current fleet of Collins class submarines and tanker supported F35s.
Australia's AUKUS nuclear submarine investment will magnify that current independent threat to China's maritime supply chain.
Which is odd, considering this comedic skit is partially true:
I think some are too focused on recruiting or conscripting citizens for fighting a kinetic conflict.
For the Five Eyes(Canada, US, UK, Australia, NZ) that don’t ever need to worry about conventional invasion, it’s far more about national resilience that relates to national defence.
How does a nation rapidly adapt to warfare that is occurring beneath the threshold of conventional warfare, and in some cases general public detection.
It’s not about fighting future trench warfare, it’s likely more about adaption to disruption to the nation of the electrical grid, logistics systems, and digital platforms.
A contemporary civil defence optimised not to defend against nuclear war but to defend against cyber, informational, psychological, and supply chain warfare.
Less continuity of government(as per Cold awards doctrine), more continuity of economy.
But if it mimics the rise of the same idea in Japan, it could indicate peak real estate as coincided relatively closely with the introduction of the 50 year mortgage in Japana,
Different circumstances, different “song”. But perhaps a similar tune.
It’s happened before, and Australia has used discrete and unconventional means to disrupt it.
RAN could probably surge 3 Collins boats depending on timings of depot level maintenance.
P8 paired with C17/C130 used as arsenal planes to saturate PLAN air defence and F35 hitting hard targets with LRASM would make it a slaughter.
PLAN’s recent live fire exercise in the commercial air corridor between Australia and NZ single handedly justifies increased defence spending for ANZ.
Personally, I think China’s horrible demographic wall it’s about to hit at 100kph combined with a stagnant economy(140+ car makers today that will surely drop to 20 or less by 2035) leaves Xi with plenty of domestic crisis to solve.
The risk is if Xi needs(or needs to create) an external crisis to activate nationalism and deflect away from domestic strike(akin to Argentina-Falklands 1982).
Even Taiwan might be a stretch too far. Xi will need a guaranteed win.