What role will tanks and submarines...even any kind of warship...play in the new kind of warfare ?

Autralia's wars will be fought at home by our children and grandchildren, for the Howard Government has invited our enemies to assault us at railway stations, airports, sporting events and crowded restuarants. They accepted the invitation to assault our citizens in Bali where they were congregating. It could be just a sample of what is to come.

Defence money needs to be spent on diplomacy and on restoring our image to a world that, thanks to John Howard, now dislikes us greatly.
What could the world do with the $12bn per month spent by the US on its immoral, unjustified attack on the innocent people of Iraq ? How much are we spending to help them ?

If I remember we didnt invite anyone to blow up our people in bali.

This happened almost a year after 9 11.

With our defence i remember well the downsizing off our forces, thank you labor.

They also created a new compo scheme to save money and if you got injured whilst on training you can say stiff.

The manning was so bad that exersises for training were half manned and that gave grave safety issues but nobody cared.

But this did give labor the chance to lease a building from themselves to get themselves out of debt that they were in instead of going bankrupt like they did to the rest of the nation.

What do we have now teachers,nurse going on strike for what penny pinching labor.

plerdsus wrote: "The fact is that Australia was very lucky in WW2."

I think the whole world was lucky in WW2. If Germany had attacked the USSR in May instead of in June they could have won before the onset of the winter of 1942. It has been said that the Japanese would have done better to have attacked the USSR from the east while the Germans attacked from the west instead of attack Australia, Britain and the US There are a number of other ways it seems that the course of the war could have been different, but that is really beside the central argument here.

In regard to the Japanese launching an attack before late 1941, Andrew Ross considered that carefully and concluded that it would not have been feasible as almost certainly the US would have intervened. Presumably the Japanese gave it some thought also.

Yes, technology was simpler back in 1941, but that does not alter the fact that Australia was amongst the world's most technologically advanced societies. If it was possible to gain that edge back then it should have been possible to have maintained it since then.

However, this has been lost in my opinion because of the adoption of free market economics which has caused us to export much of our manufacturing capacity to low wage third world economies.

Apologies for the error in the second sentence of the second paragraph in the previous post. It should have read:

"If Germany had attacked the USSR in May 1941 instead of in June 1941 they could have won before the onset of the winter of 1941."

The attack was delayed because it was necessary for Hitler to invade Yugoslavia and Greece to rescue Mussolini's disastrous attempt to invade Greece.

If the Germans had adopted the simple measure of adding one or two extra cogs to their Enigma encryption machines used for their radio communications, then the allied codebreakers would have been forced to search for a needle in 1,000 haystacks instead of a needle in only one haystack. The Battle of the Atlantic could easily have been lost.

So there are many ways in which it was possible for events to have turned out for the worse, and the world divided between the US and the Third Reich depicted in Robert Harris's "Fatherland", or something even worse, could well have emerged.

However, as things stood, even if the US had lost the Coral Sea and Midway naval battles and New Guinea had been over-run, Australia would still almost certainly have been able to resist a Japanese invasion. The US would still have before long have been able to recover with its massive industrial capacity and have been in a position to disrupt the Japanese supply line to it's forces in Australia.

In the unlikely event that the US agreed to a separate peace with Japan, then a Japanese may have succeeded but even then I don't think it would have been a walkover.

Ross's essential point stands. The depiction of a helpless Australia as being saved from an invasion by the Japanese only by the battle of the Coral Sea is factually wrong.

We need to question why Australia's past proud past history of "self-reliance" has seemingly been deliberately buried by even our supposedly fervently patriotic Prime Minister. Certainly if it were not, his policy of always buying American would be much harder to justify.

James Sinnamon (author)

One thing I have never been able to fathom is why the Libs are seen as the saviours of the Defence Force?

In both major World Wars incumbent conservative parties were tossed out soon after the commencement of hostilities & Labor governments installed. After both of these conflicts were won, the returning vets then reinstalled conservative rule. The only time the Libs have run the show during any conflict, with our reliance on American firepower, it has only ended in failure e.g. Korea, Vietnam & now Iraq.

Iraq is such an interesting conflict, when the Hawke government joined the UN in assisting to push Hussein out of Kuwait, they set achievable goals & were prepared not to test the limits of Arab support, rightly or wrongly. When Howard joined Bush in his UN unsupported 'Saddam Hunt', not only did they fragment Arab support & unleash the horror of a war without end, but Howard even made Australia a target! Tough on Terror rhetoric ... blah

With Vietnam, I accept that the Vietnam vets relate the Waterside Workers strike & the Labor Party as part of the reason for it losing that conflict, but hey, lets face it, the unions were more in touch with what was happening on the ground in SE Asia, than LBJ or Holt. At least they knew that there was no way of winning the 'hearts & minds' of any group of people with the use of napalm on children. Those vets ought to thank the unions & the Labor party for extracting them from a conflict that was unwinnable & a waste of resources & human life.

To me, while the Libs continue to buy shiny (second hand) toys & talk tough, it is the Labor Party who, when push comes to shove, gets down & gets the job done ... period

TINMAN,

The popular image of Australia seeming to be unprepared in the earliest stages of the war is consistent with Andrew Ross's thesis. This is because Australia's political leaders judged, correctly in Ross's view, that the Australian economy could not for all the years that war seemed imminent maintain defences forces and the necessary defence industries that would have enusred the defeat of any possible threat. Instead forces suitbal to defeat "light raids" by small contingest of Japanese soldiers were maintained whilst factories and laboratories which would become the core of a much larger defence industry.

This plan worked, on the whole, very well although many mistakes were made as has been pointed out by others on the forum at: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=860

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csaw59,

You raise some interesting questions. In fact, Andrew Ross argues that Lyons, who died in 1939, and Menzies who succeeded him did manage our defence capably. (However, in the case of Menzies, some questions remain. As the war was engulfing the world, he and a few other ministers seemed overly obsessed with fiscal management to the detriment of arming the country, and he doesn't at all discuss the "Pig Iron Bob" matter.)

The view, presented by some left wing historians of a Government sycophantically serving the interests of their British overlords was wrong. They certainly were not as servile as Howard is today toward the US. Certainly they had to give the appearance of deferring to British interests, but they were, in fact, playing a double game which entailed protecting Australian manufacturing industry to the detriment of British manufacturers, whlst taking advantage of favourable trade terms for Australian primary produce. As Ross shows, the British could have chosen to import more of their primary produce, including beef, from Argentina instead, which, at the time, produced a better product.

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In regard to the Vietnam war, I wrote the following letter, which was not published, to the Courier Mail newspaper in response to Lord Mayor Campbell Newman's outrageous attempt to denigrate opponents of the Vietnam War as reported on 17 November at http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22771554-5007200,00.html:

(tobecontinued)