Colin Clark, the founding editor of Breaking Defense, is now our Indo-Pacific Bureau Chief, based in Sydney, Australia. In addition to his foundational efforts at Breaking Defense, Colin also started DoDBuzz.com, the world’s first all-online defense news website. He’s covered Congress, intelligence and regulatory affairs for Space News; founded and edited the Washington Aerospace Briefing, a newsletter for the space industry; covered national security issues for Congressional Quarterly; and was editor of Defense News. Colin is an avid fisherman, grill genius and wine drinker, all of which are only part of the reason he relishes the opportunity to live in Australia.
[email protected]
“I don’t rule out that China did it deliberately, but it is equally possible that the aircraft strayed inadvertently into Japanese air space,” Bonnie Glaser, a top China expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said in an email.
“Early indications are that the 3 countries are missing an opportunity to craft a shared defense export control framework devoid of the well-understood structural problems associated with the ITAR,” the US Studies Centrre report’s authors write.
While the incident is in dispute, Jennifer Parker, a naval expert at the Australian National University in Canberra, told Breaking Defense, “China is known to employ dangerous and aggressive manuevering as a tactic.”
This US ITAR reform would reduce by “close to, or slightly over 900 export permits required under our export controls from Australia to the US and the UK, with a value of around $5 billion AUD a year,” an Australian defense official said.
“Nothing in this treaty has changed the known level of risk for what is an ambitious project. In some respects, the agreement of the treaty-level document between the three countries can be interpreted as a risk reduction measure,” Australian naval expert Jennifer Parker said.
“We’re a long way down that path and really, that’s the thing that we need to [figure out] first,” Richard Marles, Australia’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, told Breaking Defense.
Collin Joh, an analyst at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, noted that this effort is part of a “progression from just bilateral to trilateral, and now quadrilateral maritime cooperative activity (MCA) formats” in the region.
“This new contract further ensures these workers have certainty in Australia’s national naval shipbuilding and sustainment enterprise, and helps to grow the workforce required to build and sustain Australia’s future nuclear-powered submarines,” Sen. Katy Gallagher, the Finance Minister, said.
Separately Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said, “We need that infrastructure on the west coast and so it’s going to be really important to put that in place… . We have some time in order to do it, but not a lot of time.”
“You know, gone are the days where we wait for years, and then something gets delivered. What we’ve got now is every nine months there’s going to be a release internally,” Air Commodore Benjamin Sleeman, director-general for integrated air and missile defense, said.
“Singapore, however, will have to somehow de-conflict cooperation with the United States with the digital and cyber cooperation programs it also has with the PRC,” Ian Chong, associate professor at the National University of Singapore, told Breaking Defense.
