In truth, Des Ball does not look much like one of the world's leading strategic thinkers. In a world dominated by sharply pressed creases (military planners) and the precision that comes with scientific equations — think overpressure, single shot kill capability, circular error probability, and other detailed calculations — Des is, well, “rumpled”. And apparently, he has always been somewhat “rumpled”. In his interview for the Australian National University's (ANU) Mentors series, he tells of showing up at a dinner party at the house of his mentor, the distinguished Australian strategist Hedley Bull, “probably not wearing shoes, because I rarely wore shoes in those days.” Before leaving for the United States in 1970, Bull slipped Des some additional pocket money “to buy a pair of shoes and to buy a suit, and insisted that when I was seeing his colleagues … that at least I wore those shoes.”

As Des tells it, he sort of fell into his career, graduating from digging trenches and laying building foundations to working on Asia-Pacific economic cooperation (after a chance meeting with Sir John Crawford at the ANU, who noticed his sunburnt neck) and then being nudged into Bull's orbit by Crawford. Bull took the youngster under his wing and opened doors for him in the United States where he did research on his Ph.D. thesis on the strategic force levels of the United States.

That launched an extraordinary career that took Des to every high church in the nuclear priesthood. He clocked time at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies, the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), think-tanks like the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London and the RAND Corporation, and even enjoyed stints at the Pentagon and the underground Command and Control Centre in Cheyenne Mountain. He explored the particulars of strategic thinking with luminaries such as Bull, Robert O'Neill and Robert McNamara. It has been a rich and rewarding (and sometimes infuriating) journey — for Des and his audience, a group that includes policymakers and analysts, students and the countless Australians who have enjoyed (sometimes without knowing) the benefits of his insights and fierce nationalism.

This chapter attempts to tease out key themes that animate Des’ writing on strategic issues.