The Land Forces Exposition 2026, to be held at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre on 6-8 October, will be a three-day extravaganza of exhibitions, talks and luncheons, where the main topic of conversation is how best to kill people. More than 20,000 weapons company executives, politicians and military personnel from around the world are expected to attend.
We have to protest against this outrageous celebration of death and destruction.
Photos from the 2024 event on the front page of the Land Forces website are enough to make you ill. A smiling representative of Anduril, a company specialising in AI-powered warfare, shows off a battle drone. A live demonstration of a robot dog, presumably designed to carry autonomous weapons, takes place on the exhibition floor. A drone as big as a car hangs from the ceiling.
Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms dealer—and builder of the F-35 fighter jets Israel uses to bomb Gaza—will have its latest death machines on display. As will Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons company.
Senior executives from Anduril and BAE Systems will speak on a panel discussing “the realities of Ukraine, Iran and other current conflicts”. Today’s bloodshed used as a case study to make tomorrow’s killing more efficient. What could those “other conflicts” be? Israel’s invasion of Lebanon? One assumes that there’s much these monsters have learned from Gaza, too.
Lockheed Martin and BAE will be joined by Babcock, Boeing, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman and Thales. Aside from all having had significant roles in providing Israel’s weapons for use in Gaza, they are all on the exclusive list of companies involved in creating nuclear weapons.
The list goes on, and on, and on. More than 650 companies will have exhibits on the floor, all of them dealing in weapons, military hardware or AI systems for warfare.
To say the state Labor government is rolling out the red carpet for this smorgasbord of warmongers would be an understatement. It is going above and beyond to keep conference-goers comfortable by pouring $11.5 million into security.
Special legislation gives police the power to set up checkpoints, stop and search anyone for any reason, and ban anyone they like from a significant section of Perth’s CBD, including a major train and bus station, for ten days surrounding the event.
Police Minister Reece Whitby said of the laws: “We saw the scenes that occurred when Land Forces was held in Melbourne in 2024, and we do not want to see anything like that here in Perth”. Whitby was referring to the protest by 1,500 people against the last iteration of this festival of death.
None of this—the war profiteering, the authoritarian police powers, the increased drive towards a world of total war—should pass without protest.
So a coalition of anti-war and Palestine solidarity organisations has called a demonstration against Land Forces on 6 October, 5pm, at Yagan Square in the Perth CBD. We need as many people as possible to make it clear that we reject Land Forces and everything it represents.
