This is a short post, more to come later once I’ve digested the documents. For how, Andrew Little has clearly admitted that the NZDF is not able to fulfil what the government needs from it in terms of national security and military deployment options.
He is totally repudiating everything his predecessor did to mismanage the NZDF to it’s current delapidated state. He is correcting his own promise made in 2017 to redirect NZDF funding. He is repudiating Comrade Helen Clark’s nonsense about NZ living in a benign strategic environment:
New Zealand’s Defence Force will ramp up its readiness for combat, taking a more “proactive and purposeful” approach as part of a new government strategy.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/495115/changing-global-tensions-prompt-new-zealand-to-ramp-up-security-and-defence-resources
High-level documents – published Friday morning – warn current capabilities are “not in a fit state” to respond to increasing security threats and the impacts of climate change in the region.
Unveiling the new direction at Parliament, Minister of Defence Andrew Little told guests New Zealand was facing more geostrategic challenges than it had in decades
There is no detail on what a combat credible NZDF looks like. But it’s a welcome admission that the NZDF needs to be combat capable, and sadly is not.
The only NZ media reporting on this has been 1 News and RNZ, one brief article each so far.
National, if they are smart, will call for Peeni Henare to be totally sacked from Cabinet. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for the terrible state of our armed forces.
No Minister 
To be fair to Helen Clark, that statement was made in early 2001 when less than a decade had elapsed since the fall of the USSR, the Eastern Satellite commie regimes, the Warsaw Pact, followed by the breakup of the Soviets themselves, the almost miraculous end of the Cold War, with a China that was rising only economically and was still militarily and geo-politically weak, and before 9/11, which nobody really saw coming.
Granted, in the wake of 9/11 she was flogged for the statement, but even that event and Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda did not present the level of existential threat to any nation, let alone us in the South Pacific, that an actual national military does.
She could have and should have added some caveats around it even at the time, but I’m not going to hang her for that.
It would be more interesting if some journalist not looking for “gotchas” or attacks, sat her down now, took out that statement and asked, in the wake of the global changes over the last twenty two years and especially in the face of China’s rise, whether she still thinks we live in a benign, strategic environment?
Because that’s the real point at issue here, something Little seems to recognise.
Yeah, funny enough she’s just had a tirade on Twitter decrying all this and claiming that it’s a conspiracy to sign up to AUKUS. I’ll write on it as soon as I can.
Was it a Paul Keating style tirade? She is about as relevant now as Lloyd George was in 1939. AUKUS Pillar II with 2nd party partners Japan, South Korea and Canada to join the US, UK and Australia will be revolutionary in terms of not just our security but for us completely transformative with respect to the economic and technological opportunities for this country. But she is too shallow to realise that.
China was even by then a concern for Japan and the rise of China with respect to its military posture was noted by many within the Australasian security community. Robyn Lim was at the time one of those early IR specialists doing so and signposting the decade ahead. Here is an example from 2007 but her and others like Prof. Gregory Clark reading the tea leaves exactly. The Hainan Island EP-3 incident predates 9/11 by 5 months and the PRC were already instruding into Japan’s and South Korea’s AIDZ’s without transponders. This is not new and frankly about time that Little has seen the light.
Click to access ia82.pdf