Australian Participation in Regional and Global Maritime Security Operations

摘要

Maritime security has always been vital to Australia. Experience in both World Wars has demonstrated that an aggressor can cause more damage, in terms of both the disruption of Australia's economy and the allocation of resources to maritime security operations, from simply making sporadic attacks on maritime trade than from the physical losses inflicted by those attacks. This is always true when one faces an asymmetric threat. Much of this wartime experience remains valid for Australia's security in the early 21st Century. While the threat from other nation states, using conventional naval and/or military forces, is now less prominent in the long list of acknowledged threats to maritime security, others have increased: terrorism; transnational crime and piracy; environmental destruction and resource degradation; and illegal seaborne immigration. Australian maritime security operations now encompass the seaborne security measures necessary to maintain good order at sea, by protecting the global maritime system against all such threats.