Arthur Tange, page 31
Tange’s immediate response to this unexpected thrust was robust. The State Department, he said, had not recognised that the installations were in Australia, not the United States. The issue ‘was a question of access for Australian Members of Parliament in their own country’. Rice said that members of the United States Congress were only briefed on a ‘need to know’ basis, but Tange responded that Australia was not proposing to give briefings other than to the leaders of the Opposition. Access to the facilities, not briefing on their activities, was the essential point. Tange noted the differences between the two political systems. Rice and Tange then discussed the ‘psychological problems’ that would arise if members of either the United States Congress or the Australian Parliament perceived discrimination. By this time Rice was declaring that ‘it might be that the two Governments had practically no point of difference at all’.
Tange acknowledged the American concerns over the secrecy surrounding the installations, but commented pointedly that ‘more than once in recent times Australian Governments had been embarrassed by the erosion of security in the United States’. By contrast, American officials had said that Australian security had been ‘quite magnificent’. The Labor government, Tange said, was deeply impressed by the global significance of Pine Gap and would maintain its cover, ‘but in a democracy the Government had to carry Parliament with it and in Australia the A.L.P. Platform would be implemented’. Tange then set out the purpose of the parliamentary statement and its proposed terms, including the new provision for ‘special access’. The omission of this, he argued, ‘would leave a festering sore’. Rice was not merely placated; he now recognised the Australian Government’s concerns and the need for change, saying that Australia was ‘on the right track’. He clearly implied that he would urge the State Department to cooperate with Australia.
A week later Barnard made his statement to the House of Representatives, along the lines that the Australians had sought. Although critics within his party were not fully satisfied, the statement was enough to ensure the facilities continued to exist while negotiations continued between the two governments. Tange was at Barnard’s side when he met the American Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, in Washington in January 1974, securing concessions that gave greater validity to the title of ‘joint facilities’. But by this time the path was relatively clear. The true turning-point, when disaster was averted and a positive direction ensured, came at the meeting with Rice.
One of the Australians present believed that Tange’s masterful performance on that day had earned him a lifetime’s salary.438 Even the dispassionate official record makes it clear that Rice entered the meeting with instructions to deliver a severe warning that the Australians were placing the future of the alliance in jeopardy, and that he departed assuring the Australians that he would support their cause in Washington. To achieve this U-turn, Tange had given away nothing but had robustly asserted that Australian sovereignty must be acknowledged. His arguments were entirely in support of the goals set by Whitlam and Barnard, to retain the facilities and their contribution to a stable peace, but with concessions designed to acknowledge Australian sovereignty. He had argued his case diplomatically but unapologetically, drawing on his detailed knowledge not only of the immediate issues but also of decades of Australian and American political history. Without his depth of experience, his mastery of the current issues, and the ability and confidence to deploy his arguments effectively, it is entirely possible that the Australian—American alliance might have been seriously, perhaps irretrievably, damaged.
The Tange report
Tange’s twentieth year as a First Division officer, 1973, was in some ways reminiscent of his first, 1954. Once again Tange was not only responsible for a department’s day-to-day operations during a time of high political tension but was also heavily committed to reforming, reorganising and redirecting one of the principal institutions responsible for Australian national security. The pressures were enormous. Whitlam insisted that what would become known as ‘the Tange report’, on the reorganisation of the Defence group, must be completed by the year’s end. Tange was also overseeing the preparation of a new ‘Strategic Basis’ paper and a series of ‘Defence of Australia’ studies, as well as major reviews of the Army and the Citizen Military Forces.439 And at the same time Tange had both to supervise the normal operations of one of the country’s largest and most complex institutions and to assist a new and inexperienced government to challenge many of the articles of faith of the conservative coalition governments during the preceding twenty-three years.
But in 1973, unlike 1954, he was working for a government that saw Australia’s international environment as essentially benign. Treating ‘forward defence’ as being totally discredited by the enduring agony of Vietnam, Labor was determined to shape distinctly new strategic and defence policies that were not based on alliance-driven reactions to imminent threats. The major tensions therefore came not from external crises but from differences of opinion within Australia on the nature, location and likelihood of strategic threats to the nation’s security. The conservative parties quoted the views of serving and retired military officers, who were reluctant to accept the government’s opinion—shared by Tange—that the country faced little threat of major aggression within the next ten or fifteen years. The first draft of the 1973 ‘Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy’ paper, for example, began with the sentence: ‘Australia is at present one of the most secure countries in the world.’ That sentence disappeared in subsequent drafts as the service chiefs and others criticised what they saw as complacency. Nevertheless, Tange fought to maintain the thrust of the assumptions that had for years underlain his outlook and were now shared by his new political masters. After securing the reluctant agreement of the chiefs to the final text, he insisted that they circulate this text, with their explicit endorsement, to the senior officers of their respective services, to minimise the risk of public statements that might cause political embarrassment.440
The drafting of the Tange report therefore took place in an atmosphere of severe tension between the uniformed and civilian leaders of the defence establishment, over strategic policy issues separate from although related to the question of reorganisation. To assist Tange with the report, a working group was formed. It was dominated by civilians. The most important member, included by Barnard on Tange’s recommendation, was Bruce White, the Secretary of the Department of the Army since 1958, who was now designated the Permanent Head Assisting the Secretary of Defence. Much of the initial work of negotiating with the services was carried out by White, who was more familiar with the structure of the service departments and therefore with the implications of the merger with Defence. Nevertheless, as the service chiefs complained, White did not deal with them but only with lower ranks. In any case, some members of the working group definitely felt that they were working directly to Tange, not to White. This was especially true of those concentrating on strategic policy and force development, the areas of greatest importance and sensitivity.441
As Tange had to explain to Barnard and Whitlam, the principal challenge lay not so much in the existence of separate service departments as in the fact that, as noted in the previous chapter, each of the services was run by a board comprising the service chief, senior uniformed officers, the departmental secretary and, in two cases, the minister.442 The new structure was to be quite different. The three services would be maintained but would become parts of a single Australian Defence Force. Tange was delighted to discover that the 1903 Defence Act had referred to a single ‘Defence Force’, although the term had seldom been used in the subsequent seventy years. The boards were to be abolished and each service placed under the sole command of its chief, while the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, redesignated as the Chief of Defence Force Staff (CDFS), would be given command over the three service chiefs. Control of the newly merged institution was to be divided between the CDFS and the Secretary of Defence, establishing the celebrated diarchy, in which the two would share responsibility for administration of the Defence Force but only the CDFS would have command responsibilities.
The amalgamation of the service departments with what had often been known as Defence Central therefore required the reallocation of the statutory powers held by each service board, or its individual members, to either the Secretary of Defence, the chief of the relevant service, or the newly strengthened CDFS. The services naturally resented any loss of power to Defence Central and encouraged public comment to the effect that the process was essentially a ‘civilian power-grab’, a forced transfer of functions from the appropriate military officers to a power-hungry departmental secretary, with no military credentials, and his civilian subordinates. The facts were decidedly more complex. The services fought hard to retain as many powers as possible. Under heavy pressure from Whitlam to have the report completed by the end of November 1973, Tange met the four service chiefs in a series of meetings of a special consultative committee, involving numerous hours of detailed discussion. In a note to Barnard on 8 October, Tange noted that he had already spent ten hours in three meetings with the chiefs and several more meetings were scheduled.443 By the end of the process, as he noted in the report, he had had fifteen meetings and a total of forty-one hours of formal consultations with the service chiefs, as well as many hours of informal discussion.444
The chiefs complained that they were often presented at these meetings with detailed proposals at very short notice, but this was as much a function of prime ministerial pressure as a tactical device of Tange’s. On 7 November Barnard, presumably prompted by Tange, wrote to Whitlam to say that Tange was still heavily involved in detailed discussions with the chiefs. The report was expected by early December but Barnard suggested that the amalgamation be deferred until the end of February 1974, to allow for further discussions with the Public Service Board on its implications. Whitlam replied on 20 November that he still wanted the amalgamation to take effect on 1 December. The deadline was met. Tange formally submitted his report on 28 November and the service departments were abolished on 1 December.
Moreover, the relative influence allocated to the Secretary and the CDFS owed at least as much to ministerial direction as to any ambition of Tange’s. During a meeting with Whitlam and Tange in September, Barnard said that:
he had … explained to the Prime Minister … that the authority of the Chairman Chiefs of Staff would be increased but the total organisation would be under the Secretary of the Department of Defence. The Prime Minister indicated concurrence in this general approach.445
The following day Tange suggested that Barnard might reconsider his dictum—according to Tange, Barnard’s exact words—that ‘the total organisation would be under the Secretary of the Department of Defence’. This, Tange observed with delicate understatement, would not be welcome to the service chiefs and he wondered whether the government would, under pressure, stand by such a formulation. He was therefore looking at ways of making it clear that the new position of CDFS would not be subject to the direction or orders of the Secretary. (He was not averse to the idea that the Secretary might continue to receive a greater salary than the CDFS, although with a lesser differential than currently existed with respect to the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff.)446 Thus the diarchy that emerged in the report, with responsibility shared by the Secretary and the CDFS, was a formula more favourable to the military than one that a truly power-hungry civilian might have sought and achieved.
The outcome was much more of a compromise, or a series of compromises, than the legend of the civilian power-grab implied. The service departments and the service boards duly disappeared, but the services themselves retained not only their identity (unlike in Canada, where in 1968 an unsuccessful attempt was made to merge the three services into one common-uniformed defence force) but also many of their functions and powers. As Tange noted often, the new structure contained not one but four pyramids of appointment and promotion, with Navy, Army and Air offices alongside the Defence Force. Many positions were designated as ‘two-hatted’, having responsibilities to both the chief of a service and either the Secretary or the CDFS. Twelve higher defence committees were established to ensure policy contributions from both the civilian and uniformed sides. The powers and lines of command on the military side were now clearer, with the CDFS commanding the service chiefs and the chiefs in turn commanding their services.
Tange’s report proposed that the policy and management functions of the department be divided into five ‘major organisations’ and two ‘specialist organisations’. The five would be concerned with strategic policy and force development, supply and support, resources and financial programmes, manpower, and organisation and management. One of the specialist organisations was to be responsible for research, development, trials and evaluation; the other was the Joint Intelligence Organisation. Tange also proposed the uniting of the services’ medical and legal services under, respectively, a surgeon-general and a judge-advocate-general, each reporting to the CDFS.
At the heart of the proposed reform was the establishment of the strategic policy and force development organisation. Linking these two areas, with a strategic and international policy division and a force development and analysis division reporting through one of the deputy secretaries to the secretary, was crucial to the development of Defence as Tange wanted it, and as it was to operate for the following decades. This arrangement was intended to ensure, first, that the government received the best possible advice on strategic policy and, second, that the force structures and associated equipment and weapons were directly related to the endorsed strategic assessments. The obvious intention was that both the military and the civilian public servants would contribute to policy-making in an integrated organisation. At the same time, the service chiefs would lose much of their previous latitude to initiate ‘requirements’ for weapons platforms and weapons systems, without necessarily paying close regard to the periodic reviews of strategic policy. Now they would put forward ‘bids’ for inclusion in the Five Year Defence Programme, and those bids would be subjected to careful analysis to ensure that they were consistent with the government’s overall strategic assessments. Buried in the undramatic text of the report, and especially the chapter on the strategic policy and force development organisation, was something of a revolution in not only the structure of Defence, but in the whole approach to the making of defence policy.
The result was not perfect. To achieve the compromises necessary for agreement in the time available, the report envisaged an unduly generous number of senior positions (both uniformed and civilian) and high-level committees. Another major weakness in the reorganisation was the inadequacy of the staff allocated to the CDFS. His title was ‘Chief of Defence Force Staff’, not ‘… the Defence Force Staff’, which, in the eyes of the first occupant of the position, Admiral Sir Victor Smith, carried the implication that he commanded everyone in the Defence Force, not just his small central staff, but this meant little in practice. The three services retained a considerable degree of autonomy in their doctrine, operations and culture. The principle of the superiority of the joint commander was established, but the reality would take time to arrive.
In the long run, the report inevitably entrenched some of the already strong tensions between military and civilians. The analysis of military ‘bids’ by civilian analysts, a process strengthened by the Fairhall-Bland reforms and further reinforced in the new structure, was inevitably controversial, not least because of the time taken. The military continued to complain that it produced ‘paralysis by analysis’. The civilians retorted that stringent analysis of a major procurement decision was necessary, however time-consuming it might be, and that sometimes ‘a decision delayed was a decision well made’.447
The title of the report, Australian Defence: Report on the Reorganisation of the Defence Group of Departments (shortened on the reports cover to Australian Defence Reorganisation) reflected the author’s profoundly nationalistic instincts. It was consciously framed by Tange as an Australian response to an Australian need. As he noted in the introduction, many other countries had moved to bring together command, policy control and administration of their armed services into a single ministry of defence. Tange had been following these developments closely since before the 1972 election. As his later memoir revealed, Tange took a close interest in the difficulties faced by British leaders, especially Harold Macmillan, in establishing the Ministry of Defence in London. When the Canadian Minister for Defence visited Canberra, Tange questioned him closely on their practices. But Tange recognised that differences in the structure of government, m the role of the armed services, and in strategic situations meant that organisational responses were different. His purpose was to learn from others’ successes and mistakes, not to emulate uncritically. In his report Tange noted curtly: ‘I have not felt that essential wisdom lay with any particular overseas model.’448
The measure of Tange’s achievement was not to have achieved perfection, or anything close to it, but to have laid down a sound and enduring framework for such a complex reorganisation in so short a time. Only someone with considerable breadth of intellect and experience could have understood the issues and translated them into structural terms, understandable and acceptable to politicians, civilian public servants and the military. Only someone with considerable force of personality and character could have driven the project through while meeting an extraordinarily demanding deadline. Tange’s natural inclination was to seek rapid results but in this case he was responding to extreme pressure from Whitlam who calculated, correctly, that the best would be the enemy of the good. The essential aim was to have the service departments, and the service boards, abolished and the framework of the new structure erected with all possible speed. To spend more time seeking consensus and elegance might well have been counterproductive, allowing the project’s enemies to gather strength. The combination of political will on the part of Whitlam and Barnard, and intellectual and administrative capacity on the part of Tange and White, achieved a result that many politicians and administrators thought long overdue.
