Opinion: Major General Jered P Helwig’s chiselled American features sharpened in the Sydney sun, his array of insignia blinking like a ship’s signals as he stood upon a Royal Australian Navy vessel to proclaim his nation’s military alliance with the country.
As Helwig appeared before rolling news cameras last month at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, tethered next door was the US Navy’s newest vessel, the USS Canberra, which became the first US warship to be commissioned in a foreign port.
Just in case anybody missed the point, the Canberra has a star-spangled kangaroo affixed to its side and the promise of an Australian naval officer always being part of its 80-odd mission crew.
“I can think of no better symbol of this shared future,” said the US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, joining in the back-slapping as Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Richard Marles, mingled with his US counterparts.
The following week, across Australia’s north, the largest peacetime defence exercise ever conducted in the country began. A total of 30,000 troops, mostly from the US and Australia, conducted landing assaults and live-fire battles including the retaking of a mock Queensland island seized by hostile forces. US F-35 jet fighters screeched in low, their missiles flaming the hill, a US Hercules aircraft gunship thumped its rounds into that long-suffering ridge and US-made Himars rockets – the game-changing weapons sent to Ukraine – blazed across the sky. Your correspondent was among a bevy flown in by the Royal Australian Air Force to watch.
To add to the drama, China obligingly sent a large spy ship to monitor the war games from just outside Australia’s waters off the Queensland coast – though few excited media bothered to mention that the US and Australia routinely mount intense intelligence-gathering efforts close to China.
A massive realignment of Australia’s defence forces is underway in which it will work with the US on a larger and more intimate scale. This has profound implications for how China, in the event of conflict with the US over Taiwan, will view Australia.
The realignment began with Australia’s decision under the previous Scott Morrison-led government – and confirmed under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – to acquire up to five second-hand US nuclear-powered submarines over the next decade and to later obtain a fleet of new vessels using US and British nuclear-propulsion technology. The subs, expected to cost A$368 billion, are primarily intended as a bulwark against China.
In the words of Bob Carr, a long-serving New South Wales premier who became Australia’s foreign minister in 2012, the deal clinches the country’s reputation as a “deliriously loyal, entirely gullible US ally”.
As well, Australia, with US help, is beefing up air force bases across the north so they may be used by American war planes. The US is preparing to locate up to six B-52 heavy bombers close to Darwin, from where, according to new analysis by Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Programme, the aircraft would probably be aimed at China’s nuclear infra-structure, such as missile silos.
Likewise, four US subs to be rotated at a base in Western Australia from as early as 2027 would be aimed at destroying Chinese warships or enforcing a blockade of Chinese ports.
Basing US aircraft and submarines in Australia is now necessary, believe US military planners, because the growing threat from China’s ballistic and cruise missiles makes existing US bases in Guam and Japan vulnerable.
The cost is that Australia becomes a target.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
