Rather than reflecting political imperatives, Australia's force structure should be reconfigured to meet strategic needs-in particular the recognition that Australia cannot provide for its strategic defence outside the context of alliances that provide larger security, as well as advanced technology. Lack of amphibious capacity is a glaring omission24 A radical reorganization of the army would see it reorganized into something like a marine corps interoperable with the USMC.
Australia's strategic needs, and the RMA, pose a particular challenge for the army, which has borne most of the cost of recent changes. Reorganization of the army is changing the traditional division structure into seven self-contained joint task forces, with only 30,000 personnel in total, whose focus remains continental defense.
Australia needs both to be able to defend the continent, and to contribute to allied efforts beyond its shores. Because Australia must be defended at a distance, and in good company, forces which would effect "defence of Australia" must be operable with allies, and emphasise maritime capability. Australia's 'sea air gap' ends not in Timor just off Australia's northern coast, but on the southern coast of East Asia, including the Korean peninsula.
1Russia is little more than an interested onlooker, with arms sales its only means of influence.
2 'Constrain' does not mean 'contain'. The response must be commensurate with the threat. China does not pose the same threat as did the old Soviet Union, when it stretched across the whole of Eurasia, disposed of enormous military power, and threatened US allies at both ends of Eurasia. In any case, China is not land-locked, and cannot be contained in the same way. Nor would US allies support a containment strategy, which would include all economic measures, and would be tantamount to a declaration of war.
3 Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands (not to be confused with the Coco islands off Burma) are Australian terntories.
4 Australian casualties were 60,000 killed, out of a total population of only 5 million. This was the highest casualty rate among all belligerents. But those who claim that Australia served only remote Imperial interests fail to ask the question of what would have happened had Germany won, as it nearly did. Denied the protection of the British navy, Australia would have become part of the spoils of victory.
5 Extract from Australian Defence, November 1976.
6 Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities, Australian Government Publishing Service, March 1986, p.46.
7 See Robyn Lim, "The ASEAN Regional Forum： Building on Sand", Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 20 No. 2, August 1998, pp. 115-136
8 The current population is 18.7 million.
9 See David Homer, ed., The Battles that Shaped Australia (Allen and Unwin, 1994) Nearly one million American servicemen were staged through Australia between 1941 and 1944.
10 For an account of how the breakdown of the balance of power in Europe had an impact on East Asian security, see Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War： Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II. (Oxford University Press. 1988)
11Colin Gray notes that "The geopolitical and geostrategic architecture of the new Western alliance (NATO, 1949) was classical indeed. Offshore powers, the United States and Britain, would lead and help finance a mixed maritime-continental coalition for the purpose of denying European hegemony to a great land power". Colin Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power： The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War, (The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1992), p.271
12 Thomas-Durell Young, "Enhancing" the Australian-U.S. Defense Relationship： A Guide to U.S. Policy, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, November 1977, p. 19
13 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (BasicBooks, 1997) p. 151
14 A.D. McLennan, "Balance, not Containment： A Geopolitical Take from Canberra", The National Interest, Fall 1997, p.53. (A.D. McLennan was Deputy Director-General of the Office of National Assessments from 1981 to 1990.)
