FIRING LINE

Correspondence

Malcolm Garcia

In his timely and important Quarterly Essay, James Brown states that there are few things more important for a nation to decide than what it is willing to fight for. I would contend that in Australia, in the absence of public interest in the study of conflict (due to a combination of Anzac-fixated neglect and a peculiar concern, identified by Brown, that to talk about war is somehow to make it more likely), our national security establishment has made a determination on our behalf. In their minds, what we are willing to fight for is maintenance of the Australia–America alliance.

Freed from the need to explain to a largely uninterested Australian public why the government has, since 1999, almost continuously been sending soldiers, sailors and airmen into harm’s way, the Canberra establishment has been able to act more deftly than its foreign equivalents. Through skill and intelligence, and some luck, it has contributed to American-led military operations, demonstrating a desire to shoulder some of the burden of the Australia–America alliance. It has also been able to minimise the likelihood of casualties which would cause public questioning of what our military is doing, and, by extension, of the value of the alliance.

Like Brown, I find it difficult to place my experience of the Iraq War in the national political discourse. In mid-2003, I had the first of several deployments to the Middle East as part of an RAAF AP-3C Orion detachment. Soon after my arrival, the mission of this detachment experienced a major change. Until then the Orions had almost exclusively been conducting patrols of the Arabian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. But now the detachment was to conduct missions over Iraq. The Orion crews were largely untrained for these overland flights and the aircraft themselves had only recently been fitted with new equipment to conduct the task. Each with their complement of ten aircrew, the Orions proceeded to inspect the electricity powerlines of Iraq. The reason for the task was that former regime elements (FREs, just one of the acronyms used over the years to describe enemies of the Coalition) were powerlines to cripple the country.

Each sortie lasted upwards of eight hours, and the video collected was painstakingly examined by analysts for evidence of damaged powerlines. Reports and images were then dispatched to military headquarters in Bahrain, Qatar and Baghdad. After several weeks, staff from the Orion detachment inquired about the result of the missions and the usefulness of the reporting. The response from headquarters was that while the information produced was greatly appreciated, this task should ideally have been assigned to unmanned aerial vehicles, not to the Orions. Subsequently, the powerline reconnaissance task stopped.

To the national security establishment the Orion detachment was a neat response to American requests for a contribution. The aircraft and crews had trained with their American counterparts; the air threat environment was relatively benign; and the missions conducted provided a possibly useful, but not critical, contribution – they showed we were “doing something.” But the “set-and-forget” nature of Australian military contributions, as discussed by Brown, raises the question: if Orion detachment staff had not inquired about the result, how much longer would these aircraft and crews have been conducting the mission?

It was not only in the Iraq War that we made low-risk, nominal contributions to the Australia–America alliance. Canberra’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – which was only repulsed after a massive campaign of air strikes and assault by armoured vehicles – was to send three RAN ships. And in the aftermath of 9/11, a detachment of RAAF F/A-18 Hornets was sent not to the battlefields of Afghanistan, but to the isolated atoll of Diego Garcia, 1800 kilometres south of the subcontinent, to conduct uneventful patrols over the American base there for six months. Both of these contributions fit the template of a cost-effective alliance, even though they were unlikely to fit public perceptions of contributing in a valuable way to something Australia has decided it is willing to fight for.

Brown also highlights the difference between Australia and the United States when it comes to open discussion of military matters, pointing out the Australian government’s desire to portray the basing of American marines in Darwin as nothing special and its reflexive denial of possible deployment of American bombers to Australia. This difference is also seen in the ways America and Australia have publicised their military presence in the South China Sea. While a US Navy Poseidon aircraft invited a CNN news crew aboard for a sortie (accompanied by the commander of American maritime patrol aircraft in the Pacific) to show the encroach of China, an Australian Orion patrol was only accidentally discovered to be in the area by a news crew from the BBC. The response from Canberra to this was that the Orion patrol was routine and that challenges from the Chinese military were not unique.

It is because military decision-making is in the hands of our national security establishment that there is an instinctive culture of secrecy. The members of this establishment have dealt with classified material for hours of every day over several years of their careers, with little requirement to explain what they do to the public, or even to the country’s elected representatives. The longevity of tenure in the national security establishment probably also helps explain why there is not the same tradition of selected leaking as in America, as well as why there is a dearth of retired senior officers offering opinions on military issues.

What can be done to improve the situation? I disagree with Brown’s suggestion to establish a national security council with a new national security adviser (NSA). Such an organisation would almost certainly be filled with longstanding members of the national security establishment, with an NSA who would likely have senior officer experience in the SASR (Special Air Services Regiment), which is coincidentally one of the most secretive parts of the ADF.

Brown points out that compared to other nations the decision to go to war in Australia lacks substantial political oversight. Perhaps if prime ministers were required to secure the approval of both houses of parliament before deploying troops overseas – for any deployment longer than ninety days, so as to allow for rapid response to a crisis – the public would be better informed about the goal of the mission and when it will likely end. Parliamentarians from both sides of the aisle should be considered mature enough to be entrusted with information that can make our elected representatives part of the important discussion of determining what our nation is willing to fight for.

Malcolm Garcia

Malcolm Garcia is a former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force who served in tactical, operational and strategic positions. He is the author of several novels, the latest being Kill-Capture.