MICHAEL McKINLEY. Australia and the wars of the alliance: fragments for a coronial inquiry – Part 2: United States strategy.- A REPOST
















  1. Andrew Glikson says:

    According to Upton Sinclair’s writings and those of other, and consistent with the history of Rome and the Roman legions, once superior military forces are created they and the industries which support them need to be fed and given active roles, namely permanent or repeated wars. The pretexts for these wars may vary from time to time but the underlying factors remain — the military-industrial complex needs war and leads to war, as indicated by Dwight Eisenhower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

    • Michael McKinley says:

      Thanks for this. Norman Dixon, a former British Army Officer (Artillery) , who became a experimental psychologist, and author of an extremely fine work, The Psychology of Military Incompetence, made a similar and telling observation at the time of Desert Shield. The US was claiming to be focused on diplomacy but at the same time building up its troop numbers in the Gulf – a development which prompted Dixon to write that war was becoming inevitable. It was an acerbic insight which went as follows: the rule which applies to diesel engines and sexual prowess also applies to a large body of armed men – use it or lose it.

  2. Julian says:

    Well done Michael. The breadth and insight of your historical perspective is excellent especially in relation to the US, closely followed by our own failures. While it is certainly the case that the Mil/Ind complex in the US has created and maintained its own terrible inertia, in some respects we are not that far behind. I have heard some Australian commentators say, without any sense of irony, that over the last 15 years or so, the AMF has had “excellent training opportunities”.

    • Michael McKinley says:

      Thanks Julian.
      In another, more accurate context, this abuse and misuse of the ADF would be called for what it is: a blood sacrifice.

  3. paul frijters says:

    I am missing some sense in these pieces of how wars come about and what the effect of the security apparatus in the US is. Because that perspective is lacking, these pieces (and many others like it on this blog) put far too much emphasis on the US in explaining the large increases in Australian defense spending.

    Whilst it is easy to quote the 1961 speech of Eisenhower where he warned of the political influence of the Industrial-Military complex, the reality is that in GDP terms, the US army is one-third of the size now then it was under Eisenhower, and the arms-purchasing part is now only about one fifth of what it was in his day. Less than 1% of US GDP is spent on weapons. Arms exports manage to lift it closer to 1%, but no more. 2/3 of US army spending is basically on personel, bases, and other non-weapons stuff. At 3% of total GDP spent on the army, the US is in historical terms not a big army spender at all, and Europe is enjoying decades of peace dividends by spending far less than that.

    On top of that, the world has hardly known a more peaceful and prosperous period than the last 30 years. It has not lacked wars, but the really nasty ones (the wars in the Congo in particular, but also the recent carnage in Syria for which you really have to blame the Syrian regime and the Arab peninsula, not the West) have had relatively little to do with the West, and levels of world violence are very very low. Wars between nation states are rare and civil wars have become less bloody. The increase in wealth, literacy, life expectancy, education, etc., in the world has similarly been spectacular these last 30 years. To say the world population is doing badly on average is just false.

    So the narrative that the US weapons industry and security apparatus is masterminding some kind of continuous world war game to keep the public subsidies coming simply does not ring true. Of course the security apparatus plays scare tactics and lobbies for contracts and powers, just like every other interest group, but from an historical perspective we live in fairly tranquil times with relatively small armies.

    We thus need a more balanced perspective. Blind hatred of the US army (‘coronial inquiry’? Really!) is just as silly as blind adherence. Indeed, since we all here are pretty much on the same side as the US despite our reservations (to varying degrees), we have a joint interest in having a strong US army.

    So I would seek Australian reasons for the surge in defense spending, not US reasons. It is because of domestic drivers that Australia has this huge increase in secrecy laws and spending on its security apparatus. It would seem to have almost nothing to do with the US (which has capped military spending) or the actual world security situation, though both are of course used by opponents and proponents as straw men. Don’t lose sight of the real game.

    So the right questions to ask are very different and follow the money: what is the budget being spent on? Who lobbied and got commissions for the spending changes? How much is actually spent on foreign adventures that is not personel-related?

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