US Defence Budget and Indo-Pacific, Australia in Hormuz & Tweets from China

In this episode; Marcus Hellyer talks to guests from the US Studies Centre on their recently released paper, 'Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-Pacific' (16:45). Two of our grumpy strategists, Marcus and Malcolm discuss the recent announcement of Australian support for operations in the Straits of Hormuz (9:05) Tom and Elise from our Cyber team discuss their preliminary findings of the recently released Twitter and Facebook data dumps of Chinese bot driven accounts (1:25). Mentioned in this episode: China’s information warfare darkens the doorstep of Twitter and Facebook: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinas-information-warfare-darkens-the-doorstep-of-twitter-and-facebook/ ICPC initial findings: https://twitter.com/elisethoma5/status/1163949710832328704 https://twitter.com/JakeWallis_ASPI/status/1163755593305210881 Averting Crisis: American strategy, military spending and collective defence in the Indo-Pacific: https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-strategy-military-spending-and-collective-defence-in-the-indo-pacific Back to the Middle East, but at what cost?: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/back-to-the-middle-east-but-at-what-cost/ Speakers: Marcus Hellyer: https://www.aspi.org.au/bio/marcus-hellyer Ashley Townshend: https://www.ussc.edu.au/experts/ashley-townshend Brendan Thomas-Noone: https://www.ussc.edu.au/experts/brendan-thomas-noone Matilda Steward: https://www.ussc.edu.au/experts/matilda-steward Malcolm Davis: https://www.aspi.org.au/bio/malcolm-davis Tom Uren: https://www.aspi.org.au/bio/tom-uren Elise Thomas: https://www.aspi.org.au/bio/elise-thomas Music: "Scuba" by Nul Tiel Records via the Free Music Archive.