Keating’s one good point: we need a debate on hosting US forces

A Royal Australian Air Force F-35A Lightning ll during pre-flight checks at RAAF Base Curtin, Western Australia, during Exercise Talisman Sabre.

Paul Keating argues that Defence Minister Richard Marles has ceded power to the US in a “dark moment” by confirming that Australia’s geography would be crucial to the US in any war with China.

Keating argues that we compromised our sovereignty when the Gillard government agreed in 2011 to the rotational deployment of US marines in Darwin. The Abbott government then codified this betrayal in the 2014 Force Posture Agreement.

Keating is certainly right to say Australian policy has been transformed radically since 2011. Before then it had been the decades-long policy of successive governments that no foreign combat forces would be based, hosted, rotated or otherwise directly supported in Australia and that we would defend ourselves with our own combat forces.

US Force Posture Initiative

Keating is also right to say this change has not been tested with the electorate. The US Force Posture Initiative, to use the program’s formal title, has been run within the Department of Defence, until recently, as an estate and property activity. If one were cynical, one might think that this had been done to conceal a profound revolution in policy within an innocuous infrastructure and facilities management program.

The strategic rationale of this radical change in policy has never been fully explained to the electorate. Not since General Douglas MacArthur’s arrival in 1942 has Australia seen a larger build-up of US forces. (There is a useful summary in Nigel Pittaway’s article for the Defence supplement this week). Marles appears to have told us why they are coming – because Australia’s geography would be an important operating location in any future war against China. He was not quite so stark, but it would be difficult to read him in any other way.

Personnel from 40 Commando Royal Marines are transported to shore by a Royal Australian Navy LHD Landing Craft, prior to amphibious assault activity, during Exercise Talisman Sabre 2021.

There are not, as yet, significant numbers of US personnel here. What is being put in place is the infrastructure and enabling services that would be required to support a rapid inwards surge of US personnel and assets at a future time of growing tensions.

One does not need to have access to the classified plans to see the US is doing this to be able to conduct combat operations against China on a north-south axis from, or through, Australia.

Militarily, this makes sense. Australia’s geography provides US forces with depth and protection. They could use distance and the vast space of Australia’s interior to shelter and to position themselves.

Australia’s geography also allows for US force to be projected through the littoral waters and airspaces of maritime Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean, which would help to mask and conceal those movements.

Whatever one thinks of the “China threat”, and that is a matter for another day, there now needs to be a full ministerial statement to the House of Representatives on the rationale for this US military build-up.

Australia-US warfighting alliance

Furthermore, such a statement would need to address the following issues: Is there any standing, preauthorised agreement for the US to undertake certain types of combat operations from, or through, Australia? How would our agreement be sought for specific operations? Are we being consulted by the US on its war plans to operate from, or through, Australia? Would the government have a right of veto, given that we would be a co-belligerent in the event of war? Are there agreed war plans for the joint defence of Australia in the event that we were to be attacked as a result? Most fundamentally, how does this revolution in policy square with the longstanding policy of defence self-reliance?

Last year I suggested that to deal with these questions properly, ANZUS should be transformed into a standing Australia-US warfighting alliance, with the requisite political-military structures that one would expect to see in such an alliance (“ANZUS and the fabric of peace in the Pacific”, The Strategist, 4/6/2024).

As occurs in NATO, this would allow for policy mechanisms, strategic planning process, command arrangements and operational planning structures to be put in place, where these issues could be addressed and managed under the political leadership of the two governments.

This would mean US forces could not unilaterally “give the nod”, to quote the 1982 Midnight Oil song lyric. Rather, a combined Australia-US command structure, operating under the political control of both governments, would “give the nod” to all combat operations that were to be mounted from, or through, Australia, where these involved US forces.

Even if one could reverse all that has occurred since 2011, Australia would still find itself in the role of belligerent in any US-China war. Under ANZUS, Australia is obligated to act with the US to “meet the common danger” in the event of an armed attack on the US, its island territories in the Pacific or its armed forces in “the Pacific Area” (which has never been defined and therefore limited geographically). It is hard to see how we could, in strict treaty terms, avoid being drawn into a US-China war, whether or not US forces were here.

Further, since 1963, when the Menzies government agreed to host a US submarine communications facility at North West Cape, Australia has been increasingly integrated into the warfighting capabilities of the US through the joint defence facilities and variety of intelligence, surveillance, communications and other activities that are performed through these facilities.

Australia has long given prior “concurrence” to unfettered US use of these facilities, ever since the Whitlam government’s reluctant acceptance in 1974 that the US could communicate with its submarines through North West Cape without veto or interference otherwise by the Australian government (see James Curran, Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War, 2015). Our hosting of these facilities would see us take a belligerent role on the side of the US in any US-China war, whether or not US forces were based here.

Keating’s indignation is directed at the US force posture initiatives. However, he and those who agree with him need to consider this: from Beijing’s point of view, a US submarine nuclear launch order that might one day be communicated through North West Cape would also signal Australia’s belligerence towards China, whether or not the receiving submarine was based in Australia. Critics should logically thereafter also be opposed to our hosting of the joint facilities.

The choice then is stark. We accept that we are already warfighting partners of the US in the “Pacific Area” (however defined), and are therefore willing to provide support to our ally in direct and indirect forms, preferably on the basis of structured arrangements, where we get a decisive say; or we should terminate all relevant arrangements, including those that were agreed as long ago as 1963.

Otherwise, the indignation is selective.

We should thoroughly and openly consider the matter, for the sake of our democracy. On that score, Keating is right. The Marles statement provides the opening. Let the debate begin.

Michael Pezzullo is a former deputy secretary of defence and was secretary of home affairs until November 2023.