More than 120 books have been written about the Gallipoli campaign alone, and over the next four years many more will emerge. We now know almost everything there is to know about the Anzacs of 100 years ago – what they wore, how they operated, what equipment and armaments they used, even what they ate and drank. We know intimately the generals who ran the military campaigns of World War I – their strengths and weaknesses and their relationships with one another. With our thousands of military monuments, the crescendo of Anzac bugles, drums and marching boots, and a national day devoted to the military, you could be forgiven for peering down on Australia and concluding that it is a militaristic nation. Many of my American military colleagues have done just that, and historians Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake did so too in their controversial 2010 book What’s Wrong with Anzac? Beyond their very valid questions about the utility and propriety of the Anzac spirit, they saw something darker: the infusion of militarism into many aspects of Australian history and society.
Although the noble rhetoric of Anzac may now spill beyond Anzac Day itself, Australia is not a militaristic nation. Others, too, felt that this claim rang hollow. In the pages of Quadrant, Mervyn Bendle leapt to Anzac’s defence with a frothing response so visceral that you could almost see the flecks of spit hitting the wall. He asked, ‘Are we nurturing a vast and haughty military caste with pretensions to world domination? Are our cities full of arrogant and imperious young junior officers, quick to take offence, their hands always scratching at the carefully cultivated duelling scars on their cheeks?’
Something else has been happening to the way we think about the military in Australia. The space between civil and military worlds has been widening, notwithstanding the steady creep of what the journalist Paul Daley calls ‘Anzackery’. In fact, the gap between our soldiers and our citizens has become a chasm.
The very understandable mistake that Reynolds and Lake made was to conclude that more Anzac equals more militarism. It’s a mistake a lot of other Australians have made, too: do something to promote the Anzac spirit and naturally this must also do something to promote the military. But there are two attitudes bound up in our national obsession with Anzac. In one, Australians are drawn to the experience of war and empathy with the struggle and suffering that arise from military conflict. In the other, Australians recoil from the controversies and complexities of war, and the idea that Australia might need to maintain professionals schooled for its eventuality. The first attitude looks back to old wars; the second looks away from current and future wars. Thomas Keneally, who has spent a lifetime rambling through the Australian soul and who identifies himself in part through Anzac, puts a finger on these deep contradictions: ‘Australia is a strange nation in that it’s non-militaristic, it prefers its citizen soldiers over the regulars, and you never see an armed soldier in the street. It is a blessed country.’ He’s right: Australia has historically been so safe and far from international strife that the prospect of war has never touched modern Australian soil in a deep and sustained way – and that’s something to be extraordinarily proud of and grateful for. But it is not just the absence of war that means Australians do not focus on conflict.
Outside of Anzac Day few Australians see the military. There are few documentaries on modern military life, few military characters in our favourite television shows. Military bases are shifting away from urban centres and our warriors lead relatively cloistered lives. There are no soldiers toting semi-automatic weapons at our airports and rarely do we see armoured vehicles in formation. One of the few times that we see the military operating in uniform is during domestic disaster-relief operations. It’s stretching a little – but only a little – to suggest that most Australians would not have witnessed a soldier performing anything other than ceremonial duties. The military are not often thrust before our gaze. For many Australians, Anzac Day is the only day on which they think about war and soldiers. More than that, war is Anzac Day and Anzac Day is war. Not for nothing does John Marsden’s epic series of novels Tomorrow When the War Began start with a cunning enemy invading Australia on a public holiday – the locals think that the streams of military aircraft flying overhead are bound to commemorate, not conquer. In Louis Nowra’s Anzac-inspired play Inside the Island, a character says of Australians, ‘if the Apocalypse came they wouldn’t know it, they’d think it was a public holiday’. The book Australians at War, produced for the centenary of Federation, concludes that modern Australians:
have no experience of war in their time and no apprehension of war to come. They can enjoy the freedom to be fascinated by their military history without the shadow of war over them. They can be curious about wars long gone, untouched by the controversies that once surrounded those wars and free to wonder about the men who gave their lives for their country. They live in a favoured interim and remain to discover whether that is a blessing or cruel illusion.
An innocence of war might be one thing, but Australia’s disengagement from war looks more like neglect. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the nation’s parliament.
When Kevin Rudd became prime minister, he convened a great summit in Parliament House to map a vision for Australia in 2020. A thousand Australians selected from all walks of life spent two days huddled over whiteboards and butcher’s paper, mapping the country’s future. Although two in five federal government employees work on defence issues, only two military personnel were invited: the then chief of the defence force, Angus Houston, and his predecessor, Peter Cosgrove. Defence accounts for 6 per cent of government spending, some of Australia’s most expensive capital projects, and involves extraordinarily serious and complex issues – not least the power to use lethal force in pursuit of policy objectives. But at the 2020 Summit this policy concern was peripheral; there were three times as many actors as military people invited. It’s an apt metaphor for the low frequency of debate on defence in recent parliaments. Scour the pages of Hansard and you’ll find little that might shape an understanding of how Australian politicians think about using the military, or sending forces to war. Many well-intentioned politicians are profoundly ignorant about how to shape policy on the use of military force.
Parliament – although at times it might not seem so – is the marketplace and clearinghouse for the nation’s political priorities, so it isn’t entirely surprising that it is not much concerned with the military. There is little natural constituency for security and defence issues in Australia. Despite the national passion for Anzac, overall levels of community interest in contemporary military issues are surprisingly low. As an example, defence accounted for only 1.3 per cent of all commonwealth Freedom of Information requests in 2011–12. Before the last election, just 5 per cent of Australians rated defence as an important issue and one on which they would cast their vote. Electoral tacticians of all political persuasions will advise that there are only two federal electorates in which defence issues can actually shift votes: Darwin’s Solomon and Townsville’s Herbert, home to the army’s 1st and 3rd Brigades respectively. Although Clive Palmer MP invoked ‘the ghosts of Anzac’ in his maiden speech to parliament, his Palmer United Party didn’t feel troubled by the need to have a defence or national security policy. Bob Katter’s Australian Party’s only defence pledge was to manufacture all Australian military uniforms in Australian factories. Even Australia’s most jingoistic political parties are uninterested in thinking about their principles for the use of military force or effective maintenance of a defence capability. It took ten years and ten combat deaths before the parliament became sufficiently interested in the Afghan War to debate it formally. Six months earlier, however, it had found the time to debate petitioning the UK government for a pardon for ‘Breaker’ Morant, who was court-martialled in 1902, during the Boer War.
Although it is customary for politicians to speak of defence and national security as the first priority of any government, knowledge of defence policy and military matters within the parliament is extremely low. This is understandable, as parliamentarians are unlikely to have had many dealings with the military before being elected to office. This is a problem unique to defence. After all, in another similarly complex government portfolio, such as health, a parliamentarian is likely to have visited a hospital, met doctors or had some exposure to the basic policy issues. Defence is an enormously complex portfolio, but accessing information about defence policy is a tricky prospect for even the best-connected outsider – not least because much of what happens in the portfolio is necessarily secret. Service in the military before parliament is no guarantee of a sophisticated perspective. Indeed, some of parliament’s most expert interlocutors on defence and issues of war have never served or worked on these issues before being elected. But military service does help to familiarise people with the basic concepts and the language of war.
It has been thirty years since we had a defence minister with military service. Almost 8 per cent of those elected to the last parliament recorded some form of military service. This might seem a reasonable figure, but in half of the cases service was limited to brief stints in reserve training units, such as university regiments. Not a single member of the forty-third parliament had served in a combat command position. Only one had experience in the military after the events of 11 September 2001. In the United States, there is much concern that the percentage of veterans in congress is at its lowest level ever – 19 per cent. In Canada, the percentage of parliamentarians with military experience is 5.5 per cent, but levels of operational experience are higher than here.
To help rectify such deficiencies, the ADF Parliamentary Program commenced in 2001. It resembles a work-experience program for MPs and senators. They sign up for short placements with military units. Some have been attached to military patrols in Northern Australia, to maritime surveillance flights, to ships and to operational units in the Middle East and Melanesia. More than a third of the parliament have taken up the offer, some more than once. Parliamentarians may be given uniforms to wear during their placement and repeat participants are awarded military insignia: one boomerang for each placement, a gold boomerang for three or more. In 2012 six parliamentarians received their gold boomerangs. Senator David Feeney, the then parliamentary secretary for defence, publicly congratulated them on their ‘promotion’ to the ‘coveted Boomerang Club’. Parliamentarians return from the visits full of glowing reports and empathy for the soldiers. The Greens senator Scott Ludlam, one of the few parliamentarians who has deeply researched modern warfare, was inspired to write poetically after he undertook an exchange with units in Afghanistan:
Today I’ve driven a six-wheeled monster, felt the ugly kick of a steyr and watched the bullet impact on the hillside, and gaped at attack helicopters pulling away to god knows where. Our last session [was] with the commanding officer of the SOTG, special operations task group, who very calmly removed any lingering innocence we might have had as to the point of this place: he has more than a hundred special forces soldiers in the field tonight. They’ve been in Helmand killing fields and are making their way back to their extraction point. The briefing is careful and technical; later we see on IR feeds from surveillance drones the villages in their area as a cursor on a map lights up their position. 20 or so Afghans are dead. The Australians are on the ground alone in the badlands of Helmand, on foreign ground about as far from home as it’s possible to get. But they also have access to predators, F16s, Apache helicopters, fixed wing gunships and aeromedical evacuation. The kids they fight inhabit a different century entirely – no-one from their side tracks their movements on widescreen TVs and calls in air support or medevacs them home. Maybe they wondered about Australia, where it was, why they were being hunted by people from so far away. Probably not. Who knows. They’re dead now, and my fact finding tour won’t uncover their names, who they were or what war they thought they were fighting … What a crazy, lonely place this is.
These are fact-finding tours in only the most basic sense, too brief and too tactical to allow more than a cursory sweep over issues and conditions. The focus is on empathising with the working conditions of soldiers, not assessing the strategy and performance of Australia’s defence forces, let alone the complexity of applying military force to political issues. For parliamentarians not appointed to a defence committee or working in an executive role in government, there are few opportunities in the parliament to engage deeply on defence and strategic issues. In the realm of military ideas, Australian elected officials are not players.
Political debate on defence is characterised by a lack of critical analysis of soldiering, operations and military campaigns. Politicians do not seem comfortable discussing military detail or analysing operations. Australian generals in Afghanistan speak privately of their surprise at VIP visitors’ lack of interest in the details of the war. Platitudes are spread thickly, which is understandable given the hallowed position of the digger in our national psyche, but can be corrosive. Some politicians who have not served seem acutely embarrassed by this. Prime Minister Tony Abbott is fond of quoting Samuel Johnson when he visits troops: ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ This cringe can be a barrier to effective parliamentary oversight. It might explain why parliament’s debate on Afghanistan was a debate in name only, far less insightful or conclusive than those in other democracies around the world. It certainly speaks to why politicians feel most comfortable discussing military history and the commemoration of Anzac.
The absence of defence expertise elsewhere in Australian society makes the need for informed critical analysis by the parliament even greater. There are few journalists exclusively covering defence issues in the national media, and only one has had experience in the defence department or ADF. There are few think-tanks or civil society organisations working on defence and strategic issues in Australia compared to the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The Australian War Memorial, though well resourced and superbly run, does not critically analyse defence or strategic policy, or study the science of war. It is a museum first and foremost, as well as a hub for commemoration. Outside of academia, my position analysing military policy at the Lowy Institute may well be the only privately funded one in the country.
The situation in academia is not much better. There is an excellent and growing Centre for Strategic and Defence Studies at the Australian National University and a handful of academics working on military thinking at the Australian Defence Force Academy. But Peter Dean, now director of studies at the ANU centre, concludes: ‘you would be hard pressed to locate an academic that would identify themselves as a traditional military historian at any of the other 37 universities in the country’. In his view:
interest in Australia’s military past has never really been at the heart of academia. First, the ideological approach of some of these historians makes them, in essence, anti-military. Second, the study and writing of military history in Australia has long been rejected by the tertiary system. This can be generally attributed to the rise in post-war university education in Australia, which coincided with the political and social backlash against the Vietnam War. As Professor Joan Beaumont has argued, ‘for the majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences, opposition to conscription became almost “de rigueur”. War was almost instinctively seen as a morally suspect activity’. This rejection of traditional military history by the university sector … is, at least in part, responsible for the oversight of Anzac and military history in previous decades … This … has meant that the vast majority of texts on Australia’s military history are written by journalists and amateur historians. Many of these books are unbalanced, overly nationalistic and lack considered analysis … This is a situation that is peculiar to Australia …
A rejection of the legitimacy of military force surrounds much Australian thinking on war, and tinges Lake and Reynolds’s What’s Wrong with Anzac? I understand being against war – everyone is, or should be. Chris Masters puts it well when he adds the caveat that ‘I am also anti plague and pestilence.’ Too many debates on the use of the military and war in Australia are split between shrill anti-war activists on the one hand and technical military experts on the other. The middle ground falls away: one that accepts that military force will sometimes be the best policy option but should not be used capriciously. My view has always been that to end war you must first understand it, and that includes the instruments that prosecute it and the political machinations behind it. Avoiding a detailed knowledge of today’s military because you are against war is akin to being a cancer surgeon who never tries to understand the malady he must fight or the tools he has to fight it, but instead splits his time between emotive descriptions of its horrors and fantasies of its cure. Cursing war won’t help Australia make better decisions about when and when not to send troops to fight, any more than will unthinking homage to Anzac. This lack of intellectual analysis of war is accompanied by the constant dissemination of simplified stories of Anzac and other episodes from Australia’s military history, most of which do not deepen understanding of war.
In fact, they may well sometimes make it more superficial. When speaking to people who have not had experience in the military, I am struck by their conceptual bedrock for what a threat to Australia’s national security would look like. Most envisage it as a direct invasion and occupation of the Australian continent. This is only to be expected, because for decades we have reinforced the idea that war involves boats arriving on a coastline and disgorging their martial cargo to invade and conquer. To explain the complexities of sea-lane protection, coercion of sovereignty and global security norms, a defence analyst must first burn through the ingrained belief that war is linear, chiefly concerned with invasion, and that what matters most are tactical actions born of courage. Australians seem not to consider the possibility of war deeply enough or the need to maintain a professional fighting force seriously enough.
All of this combines to produce a gaping hole where Australia’s military strategic expertise should be. Military strategy is particularly important in Australia because we face some very vexing strategic problems. We are a small population with a large expanse of territory and many global interests to protect. We are located far from our allies, without the strategic depth afforded by powerful nearby friends. We do not manufacture much of the technology and industry necessary to equip our defence forces. And although we have one of the higher global defence budgets, Australians do not seem naturally inclined to spend much on defence during peacetime, preferring instead to maintain a core force that it is hoped can be expanded in time for war. Clever military strategy has been and will be the means to bridge the shortfall between these problems and the resources we have allocated to solve them. Yet you can count the strategists to be found in Australia on one hand, and they speak of a missing generation beneath them.
This is true of generals as well. A little over a year ago I asked a group of federal parliamentarians a simple question: how good are Australia’s generals? One answered immediately that they were very good indeed. But how do you know, I asked him, and how would you prove it? Uncomfortable silence. To say that parliament, the media, the public and even the military themselves do not reflect deeply on modern-day generalship is an understatement. Little of the concern for slain soldiers or the ingrained (and mostly false) history that says Australians were poorly commanded at Gallipoli has jumped the firebreak into a concern to ensure that today’s military leaders are up to the task of leading a war.
The US writer Thomas E. Ricks penned a study of the performance of generals in Iraq and Afghanistan and concluded:
Generalship in combat is extraordinarily difficult, and many seasoned officers fail at it. During World War II, senior American commanders typically were given a few months to succeed, or they’d be replaced. Sixteen out of the 155 officers who commanded army divisions in combat were relieved for cause, along with at least five corps commanders.
The very notion of a general is inimical to many of the Australian myths of military service, which play down the professionalisation of the military and the need to develop highly specialised expertise in order to prosecute a war successfully. As late as World War II, two in five Australian generals were not military professionals but rather drawn from the militia. Then, journalists such as the war correspondent Kenneth Slessor could capably compare the strengths and weaknesses of Australia’s generals.
In a 1943 dispatch, Slessor stressed the range of quality he had observed: ‘some have been good generals, some have been bad; some brilliant, some pompous, some pedantic, some eccentric, some assertively democratic, some inhumanely aloof, apparently mere machines, others authentic leaders’. When Slessor was writing during World War II, Australia had twenty-seven generals on the active list. Now it has forty-six, and another forty-five equivalent senior civilians. There must be quite a range within that group, and not all of them are likely to be excellent at their job. Some might be appallingly bad. Our journalists, politicians and academics could take a greater interest in the men and women who will lead our soldiers if and when they next have to fight.
In the last decade only three Australian generals have written books that give an insight into their qualities and personalities, as well as the civil–military relationship. One of these authors, retired Major General Jim Molan, is firmly of the view that Australia doesn’t train its most senior military leaders properly. Another, Major General John Cantwell, shone a harsh light on the professional interaction between generals and two of the three defence ministers he served:
In 2008, as the senior military officer running the force structure review as part of the present defence white paper, I spent long hours over many sessions briefing the then minister, Joel Fitzgibbon. It was a painful process. Fitzgibbon was out of his depth. He simply didn’t get it. Not only could he not understand what we were trying to tell him, he didn’t put in the time to try to get across his brief. When he was required to sell the concepts and costs to his cabinet colleagues, I found myself having to prepare additional PowerPoint charts to explain to him the briefing that had already been simplified to the point of banality. He was an auto-electrician in a suit.
… [When] Stephen Smith made his first visit to the troops in Afghanistan, I made sure he understood what was going well and what wasn’t. I warned him of potential problems. I briefed him on the nuanced, often sensitive relationships with our coalition partners in Afghanistan. I provided a frank assessment of the quality of Afghanistan security forces we were training. Throughout, Smith sat immobile, taking no notes, making no comment. At the conclusion of this briefing, to which the then chief of the Defence Force Angus Houston added his insights, I asked if he had any questions. There were none. It must have been a cracking brief.
Fitzgibbon chose to respond in kind with an op-ed entitled ‘Bring Defence to Heel’:
They haven’t worked it out yet but our leaders in uniform need protection from themselves. They need civilian-imposed boundaries, which in turn become a tool in their own hands when dealing with those under their command.
We’ve seen how well this works in the parent–child relationship; kids appreciate boundaries and learn to work within them.
Those who make up our first line of defence are as good as any in the world, but what they are taught and how they are nurtured and developed is often inconsistent with societal and organisational norms.
It produces a culture of entitlement and an environment in which challenge and accountability are not appreciated. It often leaves those who are a part of the organisation with a sense of superiority and priority – that is, the view that everything they do is more important than anything else others do and the idea that they know best how to do it. Of course, in many ways this is true.
As defence minister, I saw this attitude manifest itself in many ways including a propensity to cover up, to mislead and to ignore the direction of their political masters, all in the name of the national interest, of course. My consultations with other former ministers confirm similar experiences.
At the most senior levels the civil–military rift is wide, poorly understood and, for all we know, may be widening. That’s a problem, because the professional military in Australia needs closer scrutiny and reform. Reversing the rift will require the public and parliament to take a much greater interest in professional military issues, and to ask deeper questions about how well the ADF is performing.