Australia gets close to Uncle Sam

New Zealand's defence policy is an example Australia should follow, say many voices across the Tasman. Australia correspondent GREG ANSLEY reports.

This week, Australian Defence Force Chief General Peter Cosgrove, who won the Military Cross as a platoon commander in Vietnam, conceded that his country should have stayed out of the war in Indo-China.

On the same day, he met Admiral Thomas Fargo, the new commander of the United States Pacific Command, whose aircraft carriers, warships, planes and troops dominate the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

High on their agenda was President George W. Bush's war on terrorism - one rapidly looming consequence of which may be Australian involvement in another foreign adventure, and one which is already exacting a price from Canberra.

Last week, Iraq punished Prime Minister John Howard's support for a US military strike on Baghdad by cancelling a planned order for 500,000 tonnes of Australian wheat under the United Nations oil-for-food programme and warned of a total ban on trade worth A$830 million ($965 million).

If Washington does go to war against Saddam Hussein, Australia has indicated strongly that it will also send combat forces.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has been preparing ground at home with the argument that anything less than full support for the US is appeasement as ugly as Britain's vain bid to placate Adolf Hitler.

The language and stridency of Canberra's advocacy of American policy on Iraq reflects its earlier encouragement of US combat involvement in Vietnam to support its own strategic goals, and its determination to commit Diggers come what may.

In a broader sense, this is casting the shape of defence policy and military hardware for decades to come, a position that will be confirmed in a new foreign policy white paper and a defence strategic review which will appear in the next few months.

But a small but influential voice is now questioning the planned future of the Australian Defence Force, suggesting that Canberra has tied its own perception of the world too closely to the view from the Oval Office.

Included in this argument is the heresy that Australia's military planners are out of step with most of the rest of the world, and that Canberra should instead consider following New Zealand's path to smaller, lighter forces designed for the little wars that are the worst most armies will ever need to face.

This view is not welcome in a country that fervently believes in its ability to protect itself and in the need for a strong and binding alliance with the US.

It has been this way since Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942 and Australia switched Britain's security umbrella for America's, linking their interests and working energetically to keep the US engaged as closely possible in this part of the world.

In the 1960s this led to Canberra urging Washington into Vietnam - even though it understood that a military victory was unlikely - and its determination to commit Australian troops regardless of US needs or South Vietnamese wishes.

In 1991 Bob Hawke's Labor Government showed similar enthusiasm for the US-led Gulf war and was among the first to volunteer for a second round.

More recently, Howard has spoken of a "rebalancing" of Australian priorities that has seen lonely support for US intervention in the Taiwan Strait, backing of a renewed Star Wars programme, the first invocation of Anzus to join the war on terrorism, and willingness to join US action against Iraq.

But former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, a staunch advocate of the US alliance, worries that Australia may be too closely identifying its interests with those of America.

He recently said that America no longer played by the old rules of national sovereignty if they did not suit, witnessed in Washington's attempts to weaken international treaties such as nuclear and chemical weapons treaties and conventions, the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto greenhouse agreement - also abandoned by Australia.

"Australians are among the closest allies the US has," Keating said. "We share aspects of its culture and understand it better than most of the world does ...

"But the US is the last remaining ideological great power.

"Does President Bush's rhetoric speak to us? I don't think so. And if it does not speak to us, how can it speak to the other great cultures - China, India, Africa. What can it say to them?"

Labor leader Simon Crean, a similar supporter of the alliance, also fears American domination.

"The problem is that Australia no longer has a genuine foreign policy ... " he wrote in the Australian. "The idea that there has to be a choice between Australia's loyalty to the US alliance and independent policy is a false dichotomy and should be exposed for the weak thinking that it is."

But world events and Australian policy have already produced a new military framework that has nudged emphasis away from the fortress Australia thinking that shaped the 1986 defence review and its huge spending commitments, refurbishing in modified form the old concepts of forward defence and distant deployments.

This year's A$14.6 billion ($16.5 billion) defence budget will grow at a real 3 per cent for the next decade, funding a acquisition programme that includes new strike fighters, warships, airborne early-warning and control aircraft, attack helicopters, minehunters and patrol boats, armour, missiles and pilotless aircraft.

Because of the remorseless need to keep up with the Americans, existing equipment will be continually upgraded until replaced.

Key among this will be replacements for F111 bombers and FA/18 Hornet fighters, almost certainly by the yet-to-be developed American Joint Strike Fighter, possibly without essential software. The ultimate cost may well exceed estimates of A$8 billion ($9.3 billion).

Canberra has already launched its fleet of troubled Collins class submarines, plagued by problems with their engines, propellers, noise, combat and communications systems, and - most recently - new American torpedoes that will require modifications worth A$200 million ($233 million).

And it is planning a new class of sophisticated air defence destroyers to protect its fleet from attacks.

But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think-tank established by the Howard Government and comprising the best strategic minds in Australia, has questioned the thinking behind this and the immediate focus on the war on terrorism.

In a recent paper it suggested there were more pressing problems closer to home requiring far more attention - Southwest Pacific states struggling with ethnic and tribal violence, separatism, economic decline, social deprivation, political corruption and institutional decay.

"The Solomon Islands is already a failed state; Papua New Guinea is becoming increasingly dysfunctional ... and East Timor still faces an uphill struggle to succeed as an independent nation, even with the best wishes of the world."

In a separate paper for the Australian Journal of International Affairs, institute director Hugh White notes that while the chances of Australia being drawn into a major conventional war are "by any standards ... very low", Canberra is one of the few developed countries to still design its forces to fight such a war in its own region, in defence of its own territory.

"Around the globe, from Western Europe to New Zealand, other governments and their defence ministries are reordering priorities to put less emphasis on conventional conflict," he writes.

"They are concentrating instead on new military tasks such as peacekeeping, and on what have traditionally been non-military tasks, such as border protection.

"They judge that such major wars as they may face in the future will occur far from their borders, and will be fought by US-led coalitions in which they will play at most a subsidiary role."

White argues that while only New Zealand has so far followed the argument all the way by axing its air combat wing, other Western governments will slowly move away from investments in the high-tech systems needed for large modern wars.

The only exception will be the US, which will be so far ahead that everyone else will stop trying to catch up.

"So on current trends, industrialised countries around the world will slowly follow New Zealand's lead by moving out of the expensive capabilities needed in old-fashioned wars, and will move further down the road to forces dominated by light, highly deployable land forces suited to the new tasks which have become so common ... since the Berlin Wall came down."

White says Canberra will inevitably have to face this.

"The key question for Australian defence policy over the next few years is simply this: will we remain out of step with most of the rest of the industrialised world, our defence forces focused on the remote possibility of a conventional war?

"Or will we reorient our forces to meet the much more credible demands of peacekeeping and other lower-level tasks apparently more relevant to our immediate security needs?"

But he concedes: "It would take a tectonic shift in Australian attitudes to align Australia's defence policy with contemporary trends in Europe, New Zealand and Canada."

nzherald.co.nz/defence