Have you ever heard of Combined Joint Headquarters (CJHQ) Top End? Before you go racing to Google, it doesn’t exist! Yet Australia and its partners need such an arrangement. It’s time to leverage our strategic geography and make a bold commitment to maritime security and multilateral military cooperation by establishing just this kind of headquarters. At the very least, a CJHQ in northern Australia could help to coordinate humanitarian assistance and disaster responses in a region facing more frequent and intense weather events.
In the 2020 defence strategic update, the government committed to invest ‘approximately $270 billion over the coming decade in new and upgraded Defence capabilities’ in order to ‘project military power and deter actions against us’. Unfortunately, there’s little mention of how the Australian Defence Force will command and control all these new capabilities.