It is to be hoped that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will take the opportunity of his forthcoming national security statement to move beyond education and revolutionise the national security environment as well.
National security used to be all about the survival of the nation state, but now it is more about the wellbeing of the nation state. This broadens the management parameters of national security considerably.
National security used to be mainly the province of defence, diplomacy and intelligence, now it encompasses a wide range of government entities at federal, state and local levels.
Security challenges today may be internal to the nation state or external.
They may be man-made or naturally created. They include climate change and extreme interpretations of Islam, development of a uniform and unbiased education system, and countering foreign intelligence collection and espionage.
In many ways the nation state has less capability to deal with the external challenges posed by globalisation and non-state actors such as multinational corporations, international organisations (including transnational criminal networks), non-government organisations, terrorists etc than it had in the past to deal with the threat posed by hostile nation states.
In addition, wealthier nation states, like Australia, are expected to take some responsibility for the national security needs of their poorer neighbours, particularly when it comes to disaster relief.
Disease poses a continuously evolving threat. HIV/AIDS is being contained to some extent, but still kills two million people a year. A new naturally evolving pandemic could have disastrous consequences for us if we could not deal with it effectively offshore. In the time-cycle of disease recurrence, the world is overdue for a lethal pandemic.
Do we have the capacity to plan sufficiently to cope with the new challenges, and will our bureaucracy help or hinder in that process?
The Australian government bureaucracy is competent, but unimaginative.
Politicians don't mind because it makes them look progressive by comparison.
New governments often have plans to introduce radical change, but soon become mired in everyday business. Confidential reviews by public servants buy time, but rarely lead to revolutionary change.
What we need in Australia is a rigorous examination from outside the system of our national security requirements looking ahead to 2050. It should result in substantial cuts to parts of the Australian Public Service. Like the Americans, we are good at building bureaucracies, but weak at downsizing them when needs change.
My National Security Masters students have, as one of their final assignments, to make an assessment of credible threats to Australia, using as variables: the scale of the threat, and its proximity in time and geography.
Students usually judge the most immediate threats to national security as pandemics (because they can kill large numbers of people at short notice), terrorism and border security issues.
The serious national security implications of climate change are recognised, but related issues like unregulated population flows to Australia are a prospective national security problem rather than a current one.
They then have to prepare a national security budget allocated between defence, homeland security (which includes policing, protection of offshore resources, quarantine, immigration etc), and foreign aid, intelligence and diplomacy.
To some extent, treating intelligence separately is artificial because defence contains the most costly half of the intelligence community.
But this is deliberate, to make students think about intelligence as a separate entity. Capability lead times are also taken into account.
Traditionally, about two thirds of the national security budget goes to defence. This is primarily because of the high cost of new air and sea platforms needed to project hard power. Today hard power has less utility, although US strategic policy could still lead to hard power confrontations, as with the Bush Administration's miscalculation in Georgia, or its bellicose policy towards Iran.
Notwithstanding the traditional budget allocation mentioned, students (including from government), after working through the 30 or so credible challenges and threats, usually allocate about 35 per cent of the national security budget to defence, give the same amount to homeland security, and about equal amounts from the 30 per cent remaining to intelligence, foreign aid and diplomacy.
Overall though, it does not mean that our national security needs will cost taxpayers more than they do now.
A credible threat-based approach suggests that our defence assets either need to be re-oriented to focus more on homeland security issues and humanitarian relief, or we need to downsize defence to provide additional funds to other areas.
Soft power provides us with considerable affordable flexibility to deal with the kind of external national security problems Australia faces, and will face in the future in our region. (Soft power is the use of diplomacy, foreign aid, economic levers, psychological warfare, intelligence operations, reconstruction support etc.)
Australia will still need hardpower projection capabilities but should we go for a few very expensive state-of-the-art combat platforms, or less expensive multipurpose platforms and more boots on the ground?
Even with a reduced budget, Defence should be able to achieve a more substantial combat capability than it does today.
The British Army, for example, is currently four times larger than the Australian Army, but relatively can field significantly more combat capability. Lieutenant General Gillespie's Adaptive Army initiative is a step in the right direction.
A large part of our defence budget problem is a bloated and stifling Defence bureaucracy, with far too many senior civilian and military staff officers for the size of the deployable force. They make work for each other, pursue single service interests, and absorb funds that should be going to materiel procurement and combat capability.
One radical fund-saving option for Defence would be to move much of the civilian Defence policy bureaucracy to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Another priority should be the downsizing of military headquarters staff.
In sum, we need to make radical national security-related changes to be able to cope effectively with 21st century challenges. As James Freeman Clarke noted, ''A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation''. Will Prime Minister Rudd prove to be the statesman we need?
Clive Williams is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.