Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)
Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
Israel, Iraq, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea are fairly obvious, whats Australia afraid of, China?
They are involved in the fight against ISIL. They provided forces for Iraq. Instability in Indonesia and other pacific island areas is sometimes an issue with them. They did deploy in East Timor back in the 1990s and in the Solomons a decade ago. They sent four battalions to Vietnam during the Vietnam War. They are a regional power in SE Asia. They are concerned about the expansion of Chinese naval capability. Their homeland was repeatedly attacked by the Japanese aircraft in World War II. They have some legitimate defense concerns.
The same can be said about NZ, to some extent. They would be last on the list, when it comes to being attacked, with ultimate backing by the US and UK (I doubt that they would abandon them). Furthermore, its strange that they did not invest into domestic weapon systems, procurement dependence is not always desirable. I would argue that SK and Japan have a considerably more dangerous situation (and they are affluent countries as well), but this is more about the abililty to conduct oversea interventions and not home defense, making my comparison useless. I doubt that these prices actually reflect the situation in all of the states, the former British colony most likely has benefits and will receive refunds due to its geostrategical position (compare WW2), i.e. they are just a big harbour for their allies – Australia expects protection in return (they were not particularly willing to sacrifice men during any war).