Military mop ups after floods, fires and Covid leave ADF unprepared
A former top Army commander has revealed the brual failings that have left Aussie armed forces not ready for conflict.
National
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Military mop-ups after fires, floods and Covid has left the Australian Defence Force at its lowest state of readiness for decades, at a time when the nation faces its greatest challenges since Federation, a former top army commander has warned.
Former major general Mick Ryan has blasted the way the Federal Government has used the military in the past two years, “significantly impacting” training capacity at a time that China has accelerated its coercive behaviour.
In a wide ranging review on the state of our military during a lengthy interview with Sky News, the retired officer also said the national security budget needed to double to four per cent of GDP to deter or combat emerging threats.
He specifically called out the Chinese Communist Party’s coercion – including cyber, informational, political, economic and military activities – as “well beyond” anything the nation had seen since Federation.
“So it’s not just about military readiness, it really is about the government convincing the Australian people that they need to be ready for what might come in the next decade,” the veteran officer said in a three-part documentary called Are We Ready For War?, airing from Wednesday.
When asked if Australia was ready for war, the 35-year veteran said no and pointed to a domestic shift by troops “far outside” its core mission.
“At a time when there were lots and lots of people sitting at home on JobKeeper, the government chose to have soldiers, sailors, and aviators checking in people into Covid hotels and checking passes on state borders. That probably was not the right thing to be doing because we now have a military that is at a lower readiness than it needs to be.”
“It doesn’t take long for a military organisation to lose readiness when it’s not able to practice what it does, so our readiness now would be less than what it was before Covid, and even that was less than what it needs to be, to be able to undertake the kind of deterrent activities that the government talked about in its July 2020 defence update which talked about a shape, deter response strategy.”
He said the fault sat with government, not Defence, which just had to respond to the call-outs.
“What it does is, when we respond to large scale disasters here and overseas, it takes away defence assets. It is the first call of the government and when you have large amphibious ships and large parts of the army cleaning up after floods, fighting bushfires, or overseas, they’re not able to train for what is their principal role, which is to be a deterrent against threats against Australia or to respond to those threats in a military way.”
The Brigadier General did praise the government for starting to introduce a narrative to the public on the kind of threats we face, notably calling out China. He said any war between the US and China would be catastrophic, Taiwan was a trigger point but so were other areas like the disputed but uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Both Japan and China claim the islands and have been involved in tense military stand-offs as recently as this month.
Any conflict involving the US would also include Australia under the AUKUS arrangements, Gen Ryan said.
It was Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s “manifest destiny” to take Taiwan back in his lifetime and the People’s Liberation Army have been war gaming how to do it over the last decade, he said.
Sky News Are We Ready For War? premieres Wednesday 15 February at 7:30pm AEDT, 6:30pm in QLD and 7pm in SA
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Originally published as Military mop ups after floods, fires and Covid leave ADF unprepared
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