Australian militarism resurgent

The federal government has announced a plan to substantially increase the Australian military. It will increase the Australian Defence Force (ADF) from around 60,000 to 80,000 personnel by 2040. Combined with civilian support staff, this will bring the number of people employed by the ADF to more than 100,000.

The additional staff will be used to create new departments for information warfare and nuclear submarines, build and operate more Hunter-class frigates and Arafura-class patrol vessels, and expand intelligence and cyber-warfare capabilities.

The expansion will cost at least $38 billion at a time when floods have devastated people’s homes and livelihoods across Queensland and New South Wales, and as both state and federal governments are resisting wage increases for the public sector despite the cost of living steadily increasing.

“Our world is becoming increasingly uncertain”, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced. “It’s important we take steps now to protect our people and our national interest over the coming decades.”

For war hawks in Australia, China is the main concern. Defence Minister Peter Dutton drew the links between Beijing and Moscow in a press conference on 10 March:

“People who believe that President Putin’s only ambition is for the Ukraine don’t understand the history that our military leaders understand. If people think that the ambitions within the Indo-Pacific are restricted to just Taiwan and that there won’t be knock-on impacts if we don’t provide a deterrent effect and work closely with our colleagues and our allies, they don’t understand the lessons of history.”

This argument dovetails with the increasingly hawkish tone adopted by the Australian political commentariat. An editorial for the Australian Financial Review on 25 February pontificated:

“Western politics have become soft and complacent ... The events of 9/11 should have prepared us more for people with visceral pre-modern beliefs, religious or nationalist. But the misstep of the Iraq War also left some Western voters with the impression that the only wars are ones their own misguided governments start—forgetting that for much of their history, the big wars have come to them, and they were not ready.”

This latest push for a more aggressive Australian militarism didn’t start when Putin attacked Ukraine. It builds upon a series of announcements last year, in particular the AUKUS pact with the UK and the US, which indicated a more blatantly anti-China foreign policy.

Dire warnings about the weaknesses of the Australian military were also already commonplace in the press. Last month, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a four-part series on Australia’s lack of preparedness for war.

It is also in line with recent announcements by Western governments that they will be ramping up their own military spending, leading to what the Financial Times dubbed, in an article on 10 March, “the biggest arms push since the Cold War”.

Some have dismissed the federal government’s announcement as just another cynical election ploy. However, while there is obviously a strong dose of political self-interest in the announcement, it is fully in line with the interests of the Australian ruling class.

Often, Australia is portrayed, even by people on the progressive left, as a feeble and essentially peaceful country that gets dragged reluctantly into other countries’ wars because of craven political leaders who want to suck up to America. The reality is quite different.

It is true that, for the last several decades, Australia has had a highly skilled and equipped, but relatively small, elite military force. This was sufficient for Australian capitalism’s needs when its imperialist projects were confined to helping buttress US military power in the Middle East and the occasional “humanitarian” operation in the Pacific.

However, in this new era of heightened military competition between powerful imperialist states such as the US, China, the EU and Russia, Australian capitalists want an expanded military to send a signal to both their enemies and allies that they are serious about military conflict.

As Dutton explained in a 10 March press conference, the military expansion “makes us a more credible partner with the United Kingdom, with the United States and with NATO and Japan and India ... If we are to rely on them, they need to rely on us”.

A similar argument was made by Andrew Shearer, the lead intelligence adviser to the federal cabinet, to a meeting of around 300 chief business executives and political leaders at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit, which took place in the first week of March.

Shearer reportedly warned the gathering that “geopolitics is back, and back with a vengeance”, and explained that Australia could no longer separate its economic relationship with China from geopolitical considerations. Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg also addressed the summit. “Russia’s act of outright aggression is ... redefining globalisation as we know it”, he said. “National security and economic security are now intrinsically linked.”

The underlying imperialist logic behind this military expansion helps to explain the bipartisan support for it. Anthony Albanese used a March speech at the Lowy Institute to announce that an ALP federal government would also raise defence spending to more than 2 percent of Australia’s GDP. Albanese attacked Morrison for wasting money by cancelling the submarine deal with France and emphasised his long support for militarism, explaining that, when he was a minister in the Gillard federal government, he welcomed the establishment of the US military base in Darwin.

The criticism that Morrison’s announcement has elicited has overwhelmingly been that he is incompetent, ineffective and/or unfairly politicising the issue of defence.

The brouhaha over his nuclear submarine deal is an example in point. While it might feel good to laugh at his incompetence or his childish spat with French President Emmanuel Macron, the thrust of the criticism levelled against him is that the nuclear submarines won’t be ready until 2040 and so will be useful only for world war four, rather than any interrogation of why we need nuclear submarines in the first place.

This is why a right-winger like the Australian’s defence reporter Greg Sheridan is jumping up and down about Morrison’s stupidity. This criticism, echoed by the ALP and the liberal media, comes from a desire for a more effective militarism, not a rejection of the interests of Australian imperialism.

Morrison, Albanese and the entire media establishment would have us believe that in a world of heightened tensions the only rational response is to ramp up spending on “our own” military. But we have to reject this self-defeating logic. Contributing to the resurgent militarism across the world will only increase the instability that is pushing the whole world closer to war. It ties the fate of the working class in Australia, and across the globe, to the schemes of the murderous criminals who run our society.