The dance of the four horsemen. (Letters).

SIR: I must apologise to Paul Monk (Letters, November 2001) for my comment (October 2001) suggesting that ten months was not a bad turnaround in Australian strategic debate. It was a poor attempt at sarcasm and reflected my concern that there is so little debate on strategic issues in Australia. I fully agree with Dr Monk that very public and close intellectual engagement with our leading strategic thinkers is required--particularly if the public is to understand the implications of the advice that they provide to government.

Dr Monk's article--and my own--were sparked by Professor Paul Dibb's essay "A Trivial Strategic Age" (July-August 2000). Dr Monk will have been heartened that Professor Dibb has since made his conceptual framework very clear in a controversial piece, published in the Australian on 30th October. In that article Professor Dibb argued that he had "yet to see a respectable intellectual case of how to structure our defence force optimally against so-called transnational threats".

Perhaps the key word here is optimally, because the causes of international conflict are almost invariably transnational in character. A survey of post-Cold War conflicts would suggest that struggles for international and regional hegemony by states have been overtaken by other, more global concerns. Even during the Cold War transnational ideology was a root cause of bipolar confrontation.

Now demographic pressures, fundamentalist religious movements, unregulated population movements, resource depletion, transnational crime, terrorism and a range of other factors spark international conflicts. Consider Rwanda, Chechnya, Somalia, Kosovo and now Afghanistan. These factors, long present in human conflict, complicate the strategist's task. That is however, no reason to ignore these fundamental problems. Strategists cannot pick and choose which of the four horsemen of the apocalypse they wish to contend with.

There may be no such ...