How Australia Goes To War: Some Lessons Of The Vietnam Era

Dr Peter Edwards is Australia’s Official Historian of Australia’s involvement in Southeast Asian conflicts 1948-75 (Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam) and most recently the author of The Essential History of Australia and the Vietnam War. In response to question about the Vietnam War such as was Australia fighting “other people’s wars”, or was it really “all the way” with the United States, or how valid was the “domino theory”, Peter Edwards has revisited the history of the Vietnam War and come up with some surprising conclusions – not all bad – which re-evaluate the importance of the commitment and how, even as a loss, the war proved vital for other nations of South-East Asia. On Wednesday June 4 2014, Peter Edwards addressed The Sydney Institute to review some of his conclusions.

HOW AUSTRALIA GOES TO WAR: SOME LESSONS OF THE VIETNAM ERA

PETER EDWARDS

Two great themes tend to dominate discussion and debate in Australia, in academe and in the general community, over questions of war and peace.  One is memory: “memory studies” is now a flourishing sub-discipline among professional historians. The other is trauma. Countless books and articles are published on the theme of the trauma endured by those fighting and their families, both during the conflicts and long afterwards. These are both worthy topics, which offer important insights into our society.  But it sometimes seems that they sometimes are allowed to displace discussion of the strategic questions that gave rise to the commitments. How and why did Australian servicemen – and in recent times, servicewomen – come to be in harm’s way? How and why did governments decide to commit forces to certain conflicts, but not to others? Why did some commitments involve tens or hundreds of thousands of Australians, with correspondingly horrendous casualty figures that loom large in our collective memory, while others were carried out by very small forces and generally forgotten?

Public discussion of such topics all too often falls into a shallow contest between those who assert that everyone who served did so for our freedom; and those who denounce almost all military commitments as Australian contributions to “other people’s wars”, with the implication that nearly all the deaths and trauma were futile.

As a former senior officer of the Australian War Memorial, and a former Trustee of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, I have enormous respect for those who have served and all who have suffered some cost; but I think we owe it to them and to future generations to analyse, carefully and dispassionately, the way that strategic decisions on war and peace have been taken and implemented, so that the ratio of costs and benefits of any future commitments can be as favourable as possible. It is, I believe, especially important at times such as the present, when our political leaders and their advisers are seeking to construct policies that will shape Australian decisions on war and peace for years to come.

We have been in somewhat similar situations before. We are entering, as I see it, the fifth cycle of strategic policy.  After Federation and the South African (or Boer) War, after each of the two world wars, after the Vietnam War, and now after a series of commitments from Timor to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Australian policy-makers set out to formulate something like a grand strategy, or national strategy. Ideally this should set out how we see our place in the world, how we define and prioritise our interests and our values, and how we seek to use our assets and frame our international policies – military, diplomatic, trade, aid and all the rest – to promote and to defend those interests and values. Our military strategy is an important part, but only a part, of that national strategy.

In Australia, a particularly important part of public discussions of both national and military strategy, especially at times like this, tend to revolve around two contesting ideas. On the one hand, some Australians have always seen us as a small population in a large continent, with limited industrial and financial resources, in a regional and maritime environment that is potentially hostile to our interests, our values, perhaps our existence: consequently we should work as closely as possible with powerful allies with a global reach, who to a large extent share our values, our interests, even our sense of identity.

The opposing view says that this outlook leads us into what Malcolm Fraser has recently called “strategic dependence”, making us subservient to distant and unreliable allies, whose interests do not coincide with ours, and involving us in “other people’s wars”. Instead, according to this view, we should assert an independent and self-reliant stance, seeking to make friends and to avoid making enemies in our immediate region. That contest has been going on since at least the 1850s, when the New South Wales colonists argued over the creation of Fort Denison, within artillery range of this building, during the Crimean War.

Governments will generally say that their strategy strikes the right balance between alliance and independence, between global values and regional interests, between resources and commitments; they will say that our global alliances and our regional relationships reinforce each other, rather than being in conflict. John Howard said that we did not need to choose between our history and our geography; Kevin Rudd said that we could walk and chew gum at the same time.

Today I would like to look at what I regard as the third of five strategic cycles since Federation, the period from 1945 to 1975, which we now tend to think of as the Vietnam era. I am drawing some lessons from my recent book, which is something of a distillation of the nine-volume Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948-1975, of which, as official historian, I was general editor and author of the two volumes on politics, strategy and diplomacy. The book is called Australia and the Vietnam War because the publisher said I could call it anything I liked, as long as it was short and used the words “Australia”, “Vietnam” and “War”. After careful consideration, I contributed “and”.

The book is actually about a little more than that, but the publisher understandably rejected an eighteenth-century title like Australian political and military engagement with Southeast Asia during the ‘forward defence’ era, with special reference to Australia’s involvement in the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Confrontation and the Second Indochina War. But it is important to put Vietnam into the broader, Southeast Asian context. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, anything that could be associated with “Vietnam” – the country’s name being used for the war – was regarded as discredited, dishonourable or fundamentally flawed. That included the American alliance, the domino theory, the Australian tradition of sending expeditionary forces to overseas conflicts, ANZAC Day and much else: to refer to someone as a Vietnam veteran was to imply that they were mentally and/or physically damaged. Today, of course, much has changed: for the second time, a Vietnam veteran occupies the highest position in the land, and even Labor Prime Ministers go out of their way to assert that the United States had a loyal Australian ally in their most controversial conflict in the last century.

So it is timely to look again at the strategy developed and applied during the 1950s and 1960s, generally summarised as “forward defence”. Then and long afterwards, this was derided as racist and crudely ideological, fighting an imaginary enemy which conflated longstanding fears of the Red Peril and the Yellow Peril, a simplistic notion that “we must fight them up there before we have to fight them down here”.

We must concede that some of the government’s presentation of its policies, especially posters during the 1966 election, lent themselves to such a caricature, but during the years it was developed the strategy of “forward defence” relied on rather more sophisticated and reliable analysis. I would go so far as to suggest that “forward defence”, as it was developed from the Korean war through the mid-1960s, had many of the elements of a sound, national strategy, defining its principal interests, balancing resources and commitments, balancing alliance loyalty with a regional focus, balancing hard power and soft power assets. While the challenges facing strategic policy-makers today are different, some of the principles behind “forward defence” are still relevant.

Let me point out some elements which are often overlooked or misunderstood. First, the government of Robert Menzies (Prime Minister from 1949 to 1966) made it clear that Australia would only commit forces to conflicts in Southeast Asia. Despite pressure from its principal ally, Britain, to say that it would, for the third time, send forces to the eastern Mediterranean in the event of a third world war, despite fresh memories of Tobruk and Alamein, the Menzies Government insisted that its sole military focus was Southeast Asia.

Secondly, Australia indicated that, even in Southeast Asia, it would only fight alongside the United States, Britain, or preferably both. The Menzies Government explicitly rejected advice from its most senior officials that it should equip Australian forces to fight independently of the logistic and other support from great power allies. The great rhetorical emphasis that Menzies famously attached to “great and powerful friends” was closely related to the rigid ceiling that the government placed on the defence budget, which meant a diminishing proportion of GDP as the economy grew. When the allies complained – as they did – that Australia was not pulling its weight, the government replied that its best service to the western cause was to promote a sound economy.

Thirdly, there was no simple transfer of “strategic dependence” from London to Washington, either with John Curtin’s statement of December 1941 or with Percy Spender’s negotiation of the ANZUS treaty of 1951. In the 1950s and 1960s Britain’s involvement in any campaign in our region was ardently sought, for several reasons. Its military assets in Southeast Asia, in what are now Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar, were very considerable. The withdrawal from “east of Suez” that actually took place in the 1970s was a foreseen possibility in the 1950s and 1960s, and Australia resisted it, and sought to postpone it as long as possible. Moreover, while it was clear that American military power was unequalled, Australians, especially Menzies, had considerable faith in British political and strategic judgement. During the Korean War and in crises in the 1950s, Australia sided with Britain (and New Zealand) in expressing concern that an American commander, like Douglas MacArthur, might take recklessly provocative actions that would precipitate a catastrophic war with China.

The “MacArthur factor” was also a factor in the fourth element. Australia wanted its commitments in Southeast Asia to be fought not only alongside its powerful northern hemisphere allies but also within a multi-lateral environment, involving a large and multi-ethnic coalition. In some engagements the Commonwealth filled that role: Australia was happy to fight alongside Britain (Gurkhas as well as those from the UK), New Zealand and Malayan/Malaysian forces. In Indochina, Australia welcomed the formation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), for many reasons, including the hope that it could exercise some control over American military leadership and also give access to American strategic and military planning, a longstanding (but always frustrated) goal for Australian governments. Australian political rhetoric and military planning gave much more emphasis to SEATO than to ANZUS. It had long been planned that General John Wilton would become Chief of the General Staff (today known as Chief of Army), so it was significant that his last posting before he took that post was head of the SEATO Military Planning Office in Bangkok. The Menzies Government clung to the pretence that SEATO was relevant to its military presence in Indochina, long after its weaknesses were all too evident.

But having a national strategy, and within that a military strategy, that was realistic and focused, balancing resources and commitments, balancing global alliances and fundamental values with national interests and regional relationships is necessary, but not sufficient. The care with which the broad strategy was implemented was crucial to success. I would argue that in this period, essentially the third quarter of the twentieth century, the handling of Australia’s military commitments to Southeast Asia reveals both strengths and weaknesses in the government’s statecraft, which had a significant impact on the eventual outcomes.

First, Australians – not only policy-makers but also commentators and the general public – were more interested in, and knowledgeable about, the band of islands and peninsulas from Sumatra and the Malayan peninsula in the west to the eastern tip of New Guinea, than they were in mainland Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). Indonesia was always central to Australian concerns, even when it was not obvious. We did not know as much as we should about Indonesia and its neighbours, but we knew even less about Indochina.

Secondly, the strong rhetorical support given to our northern hemisphere allies, encouraging them to remain committed to the region, did not necessarily mean uncritical acceptance of those allies’ military and diplomatic approaches. In some instances more than others, our political and military leaders engaged in vigorous discussions with their great power counterparts; and in some instances more than others, Australia engaged in vigorous, independent diplomacy in regional capitals. The Australian government did not respond immediately and positively to requests for military support: on the contrary, it adopted a practice which became known as “graduated response”, under which it moved through a sliding scale of different levels of support, with the crucial step, putting infantry boots on the ground, generally coming as final step, reluctantly conceded after considerable bargaining.

And thirdly, a good national strategy must have strong parliamentary and public support. Ideally it should have bi-partisan political support; if not, the government’s policy should divide the opposition. But the old aphorism applies here as elsewhere: good policy is good politics. When the policy is well based and skilfully implemented, political benefits will generally accrue: but when foreign and defence policy decisions are unduly influenced by short-term electoral considerations, long-term costs can be suffered.

Let us then look quickly at the three commitments that Australia made in Southeast Asia under the general rubric of “forward defence”, and assess them against these criteria. As mentioned, I am here distilling arguments from my recent book, which is itself a distillation of the nine-volume Official History. Hang on for a quick ride through some very dense documentation.

Within the first year of his post-war prime ministership, Robert Menzies was faced with pressure to support Britain and its Commonwealth allies to counter the Malayan Communist Party’s insurgency in what was known as the Malayan Emergency. In political rhetoric, Menzies’ devotion to Britain and all it stood for, and his opposition to communism, could hardly have been stronger: but that did not translate into unquestioning agreement to requests for military support.

At the political level, Menzies and his ministers asked probing questions about the relationship between nationalism and communism in the Malayan conflict. Political and military leaders questioned British strategies, most particularly the relevance of bombing in a counter-insurgency campaign in the Southeast Asian jungles. They ensured that the most relevant British officials came to Australia to make the case for commitment, both to policy-makers and to the public.

The government sent a substantial and well-qualified military mission to Malaya to make an independent assessment of the military situation, and even to offer advice to the British on how to conduct the campaign. In the upshot, the government despatched transport aircraft – very useful but unglamorous and politically uncontroversial; only very reluctantly, and in special circumstances, did they agree to send RAAF bombers.

They then ensured that Australians had a large role in controlling their operations, as well as gaining useful command experience: an Australian was appointed to command all RAF and RAAF units in Malaya. Australian diplomats educated their superiors on the subtleties of ethnic and ideological factors in local politics, and established close relations with the leaders of the principal nationalist party, UMNO, even before independence. Australia did not send troops to Malaya until 1955, and then primarily as a contribution to what was called the British Commonwealth Far East Strategic Reserve. By this time it was clear that the communist insurgency would be defeated, and Australian troops were involved in what were often called “mopping-up operations”, suffering low casualties.

The Australians, fighting alongside British, New Zealand, Malayan and other Commonwealth forces, were happy to adopt the political and military strategies developed primarily by the British, involving close coordination of civilian, military and police agencies, and tactics that emphasised small units, quiet patrolling and ambushes. The Australian role was welcomed by the local authorities as well as our great power ally: after independence was granted in 1957, the new post-colonial government invited the Australians, and other Commonwealth forces, to remain and complete the task. The despatch of Australian troops happened to coincide with the great Labor split of the mid-1950s. Thus a relatively small commitment acquired great significance in domestic politics, as a litmus test of whether a Labor supporter belonged to the anti-communists who formed the DLP or the remaining ALP, which suffered electorally for years to come. Menzies and the conservative coalition thus benefited from the Malayan commitment, but this was a fortunate by-product, not a short-term motive for the commitment.

In 1960, the Malayan Emergency was declared over, with the rump of the communist forces retreating to the Thai border. From the Australian perspective, it was an unqualified success, reinforcing the British – and British Commonwealth – presence in the region and establishing good relations with an independent, pro-western Malayan government with demonstrable popular support. This success gave Australian politicians, not least Menzies, confidence that it was possible for the west to intervene in a former European colony in Southeast Asia to ensure that the independent, post-colonial government would be pro-western and anti-communist. It gave the Australian military, especially the army and especially the infantry, confidence that they had the appropriate doctrine, training, equipment and tactical skills to carry out such an intervention.

That confidence would be tested in the early 1960s as two crises emerged simultaneously in Southeast Asia, with Australia’s two powerful allies pulling in different directions. Britain supported the proposal, initiated in 1961 and implemented in 1963, to form a new federation of Malaysia, incorporating Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawak. Indonesia’s President Sukarno declared a policy of “Konfrontasi” or Confrontation, apparently seeking to emulate the combination of rhetorical, diplomatic and low-level military action which had gained him success, with the support of the United States, in securing control of the western half of New Guinea. British officials portrayed Sukarno as a Southeast Asian Hitler, with expansionist ambitions stretching far across the region; but they had long made it clear that they had no appetite for intervention in the former French Indochina.

The United States, by contrast, saw Indochina, most especially the fragile state of (South) Vietnam, as a crucial theatre in the global Cold War; and they urged the Commonwealth countries (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia) to handle Sukarno with the utmost restraint, in order not to force him into even closer collaboration with China. In the critical years 1963 and 1964, these divergent pressures created a demanding challenge for Australian policy-makers. Eventually Australia committed a battalion of infantry to Confrontation in January 1965 and another to Vietnam four months later. (The 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam commitment is likely to be overshadowed by the centenary of Anzac; the 50^th anniversary of the Borneo commitment will, I suspect, pass totally without notice.) What concerns us here is the remarkable difference in statecraft in the Australian handling of the two commitments.

In the case of Confrontation, Australia was again committing forces within a Commonwealth context, fighting alongside British, Gurkha, New Zealand, and Malaysian units. While giving strong rhetorical support to Britain and Malaysia, the Australians vigorously challenged many of London’s diplomatic approaches and military assessments. A particularly notable feature of Australian statecraft was the role of the Minister for External Affairs, Garfield Barwick, and his diplomats. Credit has sometimes been given, quite rightly, to the performance of KCO “Mick” Shann as Ambassador in Jakarta and Tom Critchley in Kuala Lumpur, but no less credit is due to senior officials in Canberra, like Arthur Tange, Keith Waller and Gordon Jockel, as well as Barwick himself. Their diplomacy was, as they saw it, shaped by Australia’s national interests, “refined but not defined” by alliance considerations.

The policy of “graduated response” to British and Malaysian pressure to commit forces, particularly infantry and the SAS, was not easily achieved. It emerged from robust, sometimes tense, discussions between ministers and their advisers, both civilian and uniformed, especially between the Prime Minister’s and External Affairs departments. An extraordinarily subtle policy emerged, aimed at resisting Indonesian ambitions while not prejudicing the long-term relationship with our most important neighbour. Even while Australian and Indonesian forces were engaged in low-level combat, with fatalities on either side, Canberra kept open its diplomatic, trade, aid, educational and other relations with Jakarta; Australian and Indonesian officers even studied in each other’s staff colleges. Only after rejecting several requests did Australia finally agree to send an infantry battalion. Close control was exercised over the way in which the Australians fought: they were able to use their preferred tactics and methods, under effective systems of command and control, alongside allies in whom they had full confidence. Those tactics were not only effective, but also consistent with the aim of causing minimal provocation to the Indonesians. Strict secrecy was maintained over cross-border operations.

In domestic political terms, the government developed and implemented its policy despite not only criticism from within its own ranks, but also a degree of populist, bordering on irresponsible, criticism from the Leader of the ALP Opposition, Arthur Calwell. The policy was, however, understood and supported by Calwell’s ambitious deputy, Gough Whitlam, contributing to the ideological and leadership tensions in the Labor Party. All this contributed handsomely to the Government’s political position; but the policy came first, the partisan benefits were a fortunate by-product.

This successful exercise in statecraft, which Garry Woodard has called international “best practice”, was displaced remarkably quickly from memory by the Vietnam experience. When I was originally commissioned to write the Official History, it was to cover the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. I had to fight for some years to ensure that Confrontation was included. It would seem that anything to do with Indonesia and Australian-Indonesian relations is so sensitive that governments of all persuasions are reluctant to talk about one of Australia’s most successful exercises in statecraft.

And so I finally come to the Vietnam War, Australia’s third largest commitment, surpassed in casualties by only the two world wars, our longest war of the twentieth century, the war that sparked enormous political controversy and social division, one which shaped the political views of a generation and by which the whole era is now known. Let me make some points about the strategic policy-making, measured against the criteria I set out earlier.

This was not simply a matter of fighting America’s war, as is so often asserted. The United States was certainly looking for support from its allies, not least Australia, but that support was more than willingly given. For Menzies, the Vietnam commitment was designed to ensure that the United States would continue to fight a war that was in Australia’s interest.  As he told Parliament, alliances are not cost-free; small powers must expect to pay a premium for the security assurances. But in this case Australia had an immediate and direct national interest, which was directly related to Indonesia and the tensions in the Australia-United States-Indonesia triangle. Australia had long been troubled by the American role in Indonesia’s acquisition of West New Guinea. Moreover, Menzies and his colleagues were also very concerned by the evidence that they could not expect whole-hearted support from Washington if Indonesia raised the level of conflict in Confrontation, either against Malaysia or – a constant if seldom expressed fear in Canberra – across the almost indefensible border between Indonesia’s new territory in west New Guinea and the Australian-administered territories in the east, today’s Papua New Guinea.

Given the number of areas of conflict and potential conflict in Southeast Asia in 1964-65, and given the nature of the Australian-American relationship at the time, some commitment to the Vietnam War was probably both desirable and inevitable. But the way in which the crucial early decisions were made, in the last year of Menzies’ long Prime Ministership and the first of his successor, Harold Holt, displayed many flaws in Australian statecraft, and contributed greatly to the social and political costs inflicted on the country.

First, there was little questioning of American political aims or military strategy. It was clear to the world that there was great division between the hawks and the doves in Washington, and that the hawks were floundering in their attempts to develop a coherent and realistic political-military approach. But Menzies seems to have assumed that the only danger was from American isolationism, not from overreach; and that, once the United States was fully committed to a war, victory was assured. Perhaps it is understandable that someone who was a young man of military age in 1917, and Prime Minister from April 1939 to August 1941, should have thought that the great challenge in world affairs was to ensure that the United States did not hold back from a global struggle in which Australia and other British nations were engaged. But it was a major miscalculation. Menzies unwisely disregarded the longstanding view of British leaders, including Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, that Indochina was perilous territory. He did not question whether the United States had a political and military strategy with a realistic chance of success. Instead, Menzies committed Australia to a war in which, for the first time in its history, it was not fighting alongside Britain.

As to the dynamics of political forces in Vietnam and neighbouring countries, Australia generally knew much less than they did about Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. Australia had no diplomatic representation in Hanoi or Beijing, so it lacked sources of information on which to base independent assessments, and lacked opportunities to conduct independent diplomacy. Menzies seems to have formed many of his views during the two years, 1960 and 1961, when he was Minister for External Affairs as well as Prime Minister. During this time successive crises arose in Laos, which were in effect early rounds of the Vietnam War (which should more properly be called the Second Indochina War, for Hanoi always saw all of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as one battlefield). For a variety of reasons, Menzies saw these crises primarily in terms of Australia’s relations with the United States and other great powers; and his government on three occasions formally decided that, if war should break out in Indochina, Australia should support the United States, even if Britain, other Commonwealth partners and other SEATO members failed to do so.

There was no robust policy debate within Canberra over Vietnam, as there had been over Confrontation. Instead, the policy-making process in the crucial months of late 1964 and early 1965 was manipulated, so that Cabinet ministers did not receive advice that might have led them to question or to qualify the approach on which Menzies was set. After Barwick was elevated to the High Court, he was succeeded by Paul Hasluck, who was never inclined to challenge Menzies. The principal advisers on defence and foreign policy, especially the diplomats in External Affairs, were removed or bypassed, and Menzies relied heavily on the consistently belligerent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Scherger. At a crucial meeting with American commanders in early 1965, Scherger disregarded the brief prepared by senior officials, which instructed him to be non-committal and to ask probing questions, and instead virtually thrust an Australian battalion on to the Americans. At that time, the Americans were uncertain of their own military strategy, had not sought Australian combat troops and were only tentatively asking for more advisers. Menzies was trying to lead the Americans, not to follow them. As he told his key ministers, “We are looking for a way in, not a way out.”

There is evidence that Menzies thought that the commitment of combat troops to Vietnam in April 1965 would drive another wedge between the right and left wings of the Labor Party.  After the “36 faceless men” episode and other events in the preceding years, this was not an unrealistic expectation; but, in this case, the Labor Party resisted the pressure.  Calwell made the finest speech of his long political career, carefully crafted to unite the party in opposition to the government. (It was written by Graham Freudenberg, with input from John Menadue, which is why, when one reads it in Hansard, it is easier to imagine it being spoken by Whitlam than by Calwell.) Menzies, I believe, put electoral expectations ahead of prudent policy-making. In the short term, it succeeded; the commitment was initially popular and Harold Holt won the 1966 election with the biggest majority ever achieved in the Commonwealth Parliament to that time. But, in the longer term, the commitment proved very costly to the Liberal Party, Menzies’ own creation.

The absence of the prudent and cautious policy-making applied to the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation had enduring results. Australian forces were committed with no exit strategy, with no limits placed on the size or duration of the commitment, with complex and confusing command and control arrangements, and with inadequate influence over the operational methods used by the task force. Australia did gain strategic benefits from the commitment, both in terms of showing loyalty to the alliance and in stabilising the region against a potential domino effect. But those benefits had largely been gained by 1968 or 1969. By this time the security and stability of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and, most importantly, Indonesia were quite different from what they had been in 1964-65. But the war went on and on, with most Australian forces being withdrawn only in 1971 and 1972. John Gorton, Prime Minister from 1968 to 1971, clearly wanted to get out, but was trapped by the way in which his predecessors had committed Australia.

So let me briefly draw some lessons from the Vietnam era, which may help to guide our strategic approach in the coming years. First, Australia needs something that could be called a national strategy, an appreciation of our place in the world which sets out our principal interests and values, balancing resources and commitments, balancing hard and soft power assets, balancing the demands of alliance and independence. Those interests are not identical to those of any other power, even our closest ally, even though alliance management is an important interest in itself. The importance of Indonesia should never been underestimated in Australian calculations: even matters which appear to be related principally to the Australian-American relationship often turn out to be related to the Australian-US-Indonesia triangle.

Having a sound national strategy is necessary, but not sufficient. When taking military action, policy-makers need a clear political aim and a military strategy to achieve it. They should not entertain unrealistic definitions of “victory”, but understand that preventing, or delaying, a bad outcome can be a valuable contribution to security. The exercise of force should be very cautiously handled, with a clear exit strategy, and control over the size, duration, location and operational methods of any commitment. Even when working closely with allies, Australia should exercise independent diplomacy with a competent, experienced and well-resourced diplomatic service in which the government of the day has confidence. Our ministers and their advisers should seek the fullest possible information on the policies and processes not only of our potential enemies but also of our friends and allies. They should engage in full and frank discussion and debate, to ensure that the government’s political, diplomatic and military actions are coherent, consistent and realistic.

In short, when we look forward to the potential strategic challenges of the next generation, we should recall how, and why, the statecraft of an earlier generation gained good results in two conflicts, and a rather more equivocal outcome in a third.