AN ARMCHAIR WARRIOR: A KNIGHT ERRANT OF INTERSERVICE RIVALRY

 FROM Alistair Pope at QUADRANT ONLINE:

"Is it really likely that any review will conclude the French submarines represent the worst possible option, starting with spending billions of dollars on an as-yet-unfinished redesign. This stage alone, the French say, will cost us another $6,000,000,000 to complete. When $6 billion is written out with all the zeroes it really looks impressive, doesn’t it?  Think of it as $240 for every man, woman, child (and the 55 other genders) in Australia.  And at the end of this ‘process’ what we expect to have is — drum roll, please — ‘The Design Plan’. Then we get to spend countless further billions actually building the useless things."

"Alistair Pope is a former Australian Army officer and a regular contributor to Quadrant....." who has given us a detailed and believable account as to what is wrong with the French submarines and what a waste of money they will be if they ever get beyond the design stage.

Aside from all the genders possibly involved, we can call that $6,000,000,000 the Hardware Money. Pope’s subtext however, appears thus: that money would have been far better spent on army gear. Obvious as the nose on your face!

Highly relevant to all this is A Fatal Rivalry by former Air Force Chief David Evans, who laid out the mutually-destructive details of inter-service rivalry, then let it sink in by presenting a most persuasive case for giving the lion's share of defence spending to (guess what?) the Air Force!

However, Pope writes as if he is completely ignorant of the Dibb Report of 1986 which stated that any future attack on Australia was likely to come in the memorable phrase "from or through Indonesia."

When assessing the prospect of one or more nations in our region turn nasty, one studies not stated intentions, which can change with the breeze, but capabilities. "THE questions that I have never seen asked directly,” says Pope, “far less answered, are: who are our submarines to be used against, where are they to be deployed, what are they expected to do and how are they expected to do it?  Finally: why is a conventional submarine the best answer to any of these questions?

"Unfortunately, I cannot answer any more than can our Lake Burley Griffin sailors. First, we are loath to name our most obvious potential adversaries for fear of upsetting them. The ADF overcame this issue in the 1980’s by creating the mythical Musorians from Orangeland.  The Musorians were equipped very much like the Russian military and their mythical threat to Australia guided some of our organisational structure and equipment purchases, also determining our capabilities in preparation for the conventional war we aimed to be ready to fight. Combat involvement in Malaysia, Borneo and Vietnam did not prompt the ADF to reflect on the Army’s infantry battalion structure, naval requirements or the use and capability of our air force.  After our commitment to Vietnam ended in 1972 we reverted to a Fortress Australia policy where, rather than fighting on someone else’s soil, we would fight our battles in Australia.  To meet that scenario a conventional force structure made sense, with a strong naval and air force capable of defending the northern sea gap by making the landing of major forces in Australia a difficult proposition."

Since 1949, China has loomed like the colossus it is over all western strategic thinking. Since Mao died, the bureaucracy which runs it has reverted to its old imperial stance. A quite ruthless faction of antiliberal and antidemocratic communist bureaucrats is now dominant, and it gave China and the world the Tienanmen Square (Beijing) Massacre of 1989.

Ironically, Australia's illustrious WW1 military hero Sir Robert Menzies sent Australia's army into the 1965-75 ongoing atrocity of the Vietnam War in order to counter what the US and her allies were presenting to the world as all about Chinese expansionism. But it really was the ongoing Vietnamese anticolonialist revolution. Moral: never underestimate the profound ignorance of politicians and their acolytes. Vietnam had been fighting for over 1,000 years AGAINST the Chinese and FOR its own independence. (See Robert S MacNamara, The Fog of War.)

Since 1945, Vietnam has steadily beaten off every colonialist and invader out to give it bother. And Pope is right; at least about the possible squandering of fortune on complex military hardware, Australia should arguably follow the example set by the Vietnamese, who made their country unoccupiable . In so doing they could have been following the text set down by David Martin (see his Armed Neutrality for Australia.). That would involve a number as close as possible to the whole population, armed and trained, and organised for local self-defence; and minimum investment in the sort of complex military hardware that is likely to be turned to junk shortly after any serious conflict begins.

We could also begin with a sincere and humble apology to the Vietnamese for our part in what has become known as The Vietnam War, and with meaningful and significant financial and other aid by way of reparations. Some of the proposed Hardware Money would do. We could also do a whole lot worse than enter into a military alliance with Vietnam, as any move southwards by the dominant communist faction that gave China and the world the Tienanmen Square Massacre would inevitably involve Vietnam: against whom in military conflict over the last thousand years or so the Chinese military has ALWAYS come off second best.

David Martin was a poet and writer of books for children. But his Armed Neutrality for Australia, (Melbourne, Drummond, 1984) is a masterful piece of thought. If Alistair Pope is right on the money about the French submarines, it is also long overdue for a fresh publication. (It is at time of writing in March 2021,  available on Amazon for a mere $768.57, with ‘2 Used’ from $618.05.)