Always amusing to read the comments of the armchair critics.
How about a challenge?
I look forward to a contribution from Geoff of Perth, Chris Lewis and others on the same topic with a similar word length.
Rather than casting juvenile insults, please post an article of greater insight and quality, and allow others to judge your work.
It should not take too much time for people of your obvious superior intellect?
If you are unable to rise to that challenge please at least engage in mature debate about the issues and refrain from schoolyard taunts.

Julie Bishop is just as entitled as anyone to be an amateur historian.

History is universal and it is far better than any TV soapie or film. Its got everything one could want in a good story: war, romance, intrigue, politics, etc., etc., etc.

Good on her for having a wider interest outside of her job.

My only adverse comment is that her history writing tends to be very insipid and ordinary. I hope this is not an indication of what she will be like in the new Liberal cabinet after the September election.

@JonSwift

Try this one http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7401 - written almost five years before this week's Four Corners' reprise on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Chris Lewis also writes good stuff.

Note also that Julie has speechwriters and other researchers who probably wrote today's article. Her researcher's article was not bad on history but lamentable on current strategic estimates and budget realities.

Pete

One only has to look at the enormous amount of wasted resources that we have poured into Iraq and Afghanistan to realise the futility of Coalition in particular, but Labor policy as well.

David

The price of liberty is indeed eternal vigilance.

And I am watching, you better believe that I am watching.

Our of interest, is there any historical correlation between the size of a countries military (or military budget) and their citizens relative freedom?

Borrowing from a Beatles song - poor Julie hasnt noticed that the lights have changed.
Which is to say that we now live in a completely different world than that of the World Wars, the American war against the people of Vietnam and even the first Gulf War.

Furthermore the people themselves are now the primary target in almost all wars. This process began with the American Civil War.

The old warrior culture of face to face combat is essentially obsolete.We now have 24/7 cyber warfare, plus remote controlled drones are going to change everything. Electronics has its own cyber-speed and momentum that brings us to the point at which these technologies are in a condition of uncontrollable runaway feedbacks. Unintended consequences are now the new normal - almost instantaneously.

Such "smart" weapons mean that war cant be played in real time because old time warriors cant respond appropriately and quickly enough, so warriors are no longer going to be a heroic class.
Warfare is beginning to displace itself into other forms and supracultural domains. First it displaces itself into teenage gangs, soccer matches and riots, and retribalized genocide in bosnia and Rwanda.

Patriarchal "culture" is disintegrating via the sheer force/momentum of its technologies. We can watch the disintegration on TV - stay "tuned" for the news! Looked at from the larger perspective of the end of the second millenia, there is no way that patriarchal "culture" is going to survive,let alone evolve into a more benign form. It will perish from its own violent contradictions. Warfare will, and already has, become a self-destructive balkanization of Civilization - or whats even left of it in 2013.

And of course the lying rodent and the coalition of the killing speeded the process of world-wide cultural disintegration up by many degrees by their Shock & Awe invasion of Iraq. An invasion which inevitably created all kinds of unintended consequences.

But then again so did both of the World Wars - inevitably.