There are renewed calls for greater parliamentary oversight of Australian military deployments to overseas conflict zones.

They follow claims from a military scholar that former prime minister Tony Abbott considered sending thousands of troops to Ukraine after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed in 2014.

Staff within former prime minister Tony Abbott's office allegedly discussed sending up to 3,000 soldiers to Ukraine after the MH17 disaster in which Australians died.

That is the claim of a military expert and research director at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

It had been reported previously that Mr Abbott flagged sending up to a thousand to provide protection at the crash site, but Associate Professor James Brown goes a step further.

He says Mr Abbott's military planners worked up options for sending as many as 3,000, although it would have included a contribution of Dutch forces.

An army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr Brown suggests sending troops to a conflict zone bordering Russia, a major global military power, would not have been in the national interest.

He calls it a quick decision with the potential to exhaust considerable Australian Defence Force resources and put Australian soldiers in danger.

And Dr Brown, who wrote about the issue in the latest Quarterly Essay magazine, argues the case raises questions about a prime minister's power over military deployments.

"Prime ministers, traditionally, in the last 20 years at least, have not had a lot of experience with the use of the military before they've come to office. They don't have much experience with it in the parliament. It's very hard to get information on how to use the military before you become the leader of the country. The second issue is that you'd want there to be some review and some check of that process. Now the parliament should be doing that, but isn't. Most of the time decisions to deploy troops are presented to the parliament in a pretty perfunctory way, and our committee system really doesn't review these decisions at all."

The constitution lacks clarity on who makes the decision to deploy Australian troops, indicating the power lies with the governor-general, the Queen's representative.

But James Brown observes, since the Second World War, governors-general have increasingly been notified after a decision has been made by the government of the day.

And he says there is no requirement for parliament to ratify military deployments.

He points to Mr Abbott as the clearest case in recent times of a prime minister struggling, as he puts it, to grasp the limits of Australian military power.

And Dr Brown -- son-in-law of Mr Abbott's successor, Malcolm Turnball -- suggests some of those who came before them also lacked adequate experience.

"I don't think you would describe Julia Gillard's use of the military as particularly acute. She presided over a debate on Afghanistan that went for days but changed nothing. Prime Minister Rudd was also quite enthusiastic about the potential use of military force, according to some descriptions of him from some of the WikiLeaks cables. The question comes down to, 'What kind of advice are these prime ministers getting?' Now, mostly, the advisers they have are of their own choice, but there needs to be a little bit more institutional support for them on important national security decisions, and I think we need to look at having a National Security Council along the lines that the UK has developed in recent years."

The strategic research and advocacy group the Australian Defence Association supports the recommendation.

Executive director Neil James says a National Security Council could bring police commanders, Defence Force representatives and other military and security experts into the process.

At present, they are only able to sit in on some meetings of the Cabinet National Security Committee.

Mr James says the committee functions well but problems within its supporting mechanisms affect the way advice is channelled to members and subsequently analysed.

He suggests there is room for improvement on parliamentary oversight but says the decision on whether Australia goes to war should be made by the government.

"The problem with coming up with a better system than we've got at the moment is that all the ones that are suggested to replace it don't actually work. For example, if you were to have a parliamentary vote required for every time we deployed the Defence Force overseas, there's any number of reasons why that wouldn't work, from a loss of deterrence to political paralysis to an inability to handle crises quickly. There are some imperfections in the current system, but it's certainly better than any one that's been suggested. We should, perhaps, move towards the model the British are moving towards, where they have a parliamentary resolution in support. But the bottom line is that the executive government of the country must retain the decision to go to war and parliament must retain the power to pay for it. That's a pretty good check-and-balance, but we probably need to fiddle a bit, to tweak it, make it even better."

Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie has been advocating for years for the national parliament to have the final say.

He is a former senior intelligence officer who resigned in 2003 over Australia's involvement in the United States-led invasion of Iraq.

The invasion is now widely accepted as having been based on flawed intelligence.

Mr Wilkie says increasing parliament's powers would not put the government's ability to function at risk.

"No one's suggesting that the government shouldn't have such emergency powers, that, if they had to act immediately or within days, they'd be able to act, they'd be given that freedom of action. The issue, though, is more to do with circumstances like we faced in Iraq in 2002 and 2003 when, for many, many months, there was a public debate -- and, to some degree, a political debate -- about whether or not to join in the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. In a situation like that, there was ample opportunity for the Australian parliament, in a regular sitting, to have debated and voted on whether or not to go to war. And in some circumstances, it could even be an extraordinary sitting of the parliament."

Andrew Wilkie says failing to restrain prime-ministerial powers over troop deployments means Australia is being left behind.

"It's almost become more and more entrenched that this is just the way it is and the way it's always been and the way it should always remain. There has been some pressure for change, but, within the broad community, I think there's probably a naivety of the fact that our prime minister in Australia can unilaterally send us to war, can unilaterally dispatch large military forces overseas, and this is completely at odds with near on every other developed country in the world. You look at countries as diverse as Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United States. In all of those countries, there is a requirement for what we would recognise as parliamentary approval."