Editorial comment.

• Author: Ayres, Philip
• Position: Australia orders additional military equipment - Peter Costello's retirement - Cultural heritage remembering for the youth - Editorial
• Pages: 4(4)

Strong defence budgets: good for all regional powers

Reacting unofficially to the Rudd Government's new defence plans, Chinese military strategist Rear Admiral Yang Yi initially called them "stupid", "crazy", and anti-China; but official Chinese reaction has been positive, recognising that Australia's economic and strategic importance within the East Asian region demands that it have credible defence forces. Japan also reacted positively. Australia is ordering 100 of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, 12 additional submarines, 46 Tiger helicopters, boosting the number of its armoured vehicles by 100, and upgrading its high-tech capacity in electronic warfare.

This reflects the fact that American defence policy will increasingly be hamstrung by oceans of debt, and that America's role as global policeman is over. There are now six nuclear-armed powers in our Pacific/Indian Ocean region: the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. As China and India continue to boost defence spending to match their growing economic clout, and North Korea expands its nuclear weapons capability (it won't turn back), Japan will have to begin the long debate over whether it needs to become "nuclear-ready"--to have the necessary bits and pieces to assemble nuclear weapons within hours.

As Flavius Vegetius observed 1700 years ago, "If you desire peace, prepare for war". Most wars are triggered by the appearance of weakness in one of the sides. No one readily attacks another if he thinks he will be killed or badly blooded in the affray. Some try to argue that Australia is unlikely ever to employ its 100 F-35s in all-out aerial combat--which is the whole point.

That still leaves the growing threat of unconventional, low-level conflict and the danger of terrorist attacks, of course; but these (which have to be guarded against by different means) have nothing to do with the first proposition, that we, and our neighbours including China and Japan, need to have strong defence forces to preclude, up to 30 or 40 years into the future, any conventional attack by a hostile neighbour. Had China not been militarily weak and politically divided in the 1930s Japan would not have attacked her, in a war that produced enough animosity in China and Korea to last for centuries.

In the current situation, where the United States will be a less-controlling element in the strategic mix, the regional powers need, each of them, to be militarily strong, and thus balanced...