The Australian sites that would play a critical role in a US war with China
Australia’s security is so tightly wound up with the US’s strategic posture that the two would be almost impossible to disentangle | See the map.
Etched into the ancient red sands of Western Australia’s Northwest Cape is a network of dirt roads that, seen from above, carve a mysterious network of geometric shapes into the landscape.
For most Australians, clinging to the continent’s east and southwest coasts, the Harold E Holt Naval Communications Station is out of sight and out of mind.
Towering radio masts rise from its central point and each corner of its two hexagonal ring roads, broadcasting very-low frequency signals to Australian and US submarines, including nuclear-armed American “boomers”.
As Australians recoil from Donald Trump, Anthony Albanese has pointedly asserted Australia’s independence in its relationship with the US, praising wartime leader John Curtin in a speech last Saturday for giving the nation the confidence “to think and act for ourselves”.
But the reality is that Australia’s security is so tightly wound up with the US’s strategic posture that the two would be almost impossible to disentangle.
The isolated Harold E Holt station, pictured in a stunning aerial photograph taken last September, is just one example of the array of facilities on Australian soil that would play a critical role in a US war with China.
It’s possible, though Australians will never know, the station’s transmitters relayed messages to the Ohio-class submarine that launched 30 Tomahawk missiles on Iranian nuclear sites last month.
Nearly 1700km southeast as the crow flies is another more well-known national security installation, Pine Gap. It’s been ingrained in the national consciousness, inspiring sporadic protests and one of Midnight Oil’s most famous songs – Power and the Passion. (“Flat chat, Pine Gap, in every home a Big Mac. And no one goes outback, that’s that.”)
Few know, however, that this joint Australian-US facility 18km south of Alice Springs gives the US 20-30 minutes advance warning time of a Russian or Chinese nuclear attack.
That’s long enough for whoever is in the White House to launch a devastating counterstrike. It’s this guarantee of mutually assured destruction that, theoretically, keeps America’s enemies from pressing the button, and gives credibility to the US’s extended nuclear umbrella that protects its allies, including Australia.
Top secret files leaked by former NSA officer Edward Snowden confirmed Pine Gap, codenamed “RAINFALL”, also “plays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations”, feeding in signals intelligence to the US’s ECHELON surveillance program.
Its capabilities include the geolocation of individuals from their mobile phone signals, allowing them to be assassinated by drone strikes.
These sites and a handful of others are the physical manifestations of the Australia-US alliance. Together with new “force posture initiates” allowing the US military to operate from Australian soil, they are critical to America’s war plans. They are what Defence Minister Richard Marles was talking about when he pointed to the contribution Australia’s geography would make to any conflict between the US and China.
“Our continent is more relevant to great power contest now than it’s ever been before,” he told The Australian’s Defending Australia summit in June.
“That is as much of a question in the here and now as is the building up of our defence capability.”
Marles is right. But he is tiptoeing around just how strategically important Australia has become to its closest ally.
Republican congressman Michael McCaul said it more clearly in an August 2024 interview with The Australian, declaring Australia had become “the central base of operations” for America’s military to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
Beijing knows this, of course, making these sites potential targets for Chinese ballistic missiles if war breaks out between the US and its superpower rival.
China has its own high-resolution satellite images of the facilities and knows they are unprotected by missile defence batteries, which the Albanese government has delayed acquiring.
Pine Gap, established under a 1966 treaty, has a US chief and an Australian deputy. It is one of three officially joint Australian-US defence facilities.
The other two are: the Joint Geological Research Station Alice Springs, which plays a critical role in detecting nuclear weapons tests; and the Learmonth Solar Observatory, which monitors solar weather that can disrupt communications networks.
The Harold E Holt facility is in a different category, providing privileged access to the US military under a longstanding collaborative arrangement.
The US has sole access to a number of the facility’s VLF channels to communicate with its submarines, with Australian personnel having no knowledge of the content of those signals.
The new AUKUS Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability, currently under construction on the Northwest Cape, operates under the same collaborative model.
Pictured in another remarkable aerial photograph, obtained from the Nearmap imaging company, it appears as a stylised red-dirt map of Australia.
Known as DARC, it represents the first tangible evidence of the AUKUS partnership, forming part of a network of stations, with counterpart facilities in the US and the UK.
When it commences operations in 2026, its radar dishes will track, identify and monitor space objects for all three AUKUS partners, including space-based weapons systems that will increasingly threaten Western interests.
The US also relies heavily on another collaborative facility – the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station, near Geraldton in Western Australia.
Like Pine Gap, the Australian Signals Directorate-run site contributes to the US’s ECHELON network, hoovering up communications from adversary nations’ satellites, and likely those of friendly countries too.
The joint and collaborative facilities are rarely spoken about by the government, except in irregular parliamentary statements by defence ministers to reassure the nation that they operate with Australia’s “full knowledge and concurrence”, or FK&C for short.
As Marles told the House of Representatives on February 9, 2023: “Australia’s co-operation with the United States through joint and collaborative facilities is one of our most longstanding security arrangements.
“These joint and collaborative facilities support the effectiveness of the extended deterrence commitments the United States provides. This is a fundamental contribution Australia makes to the alliance and from which we derive great benefit.”
Laying out the FK&C principle established by the Hawke government, he said “full knowledge” meant Australia had a detailed understanding of US capabilities and activities on Australian soil, while “concurrence” meant Australia agreed to those functions. But the arrangement is an arms-length one.
“Full knowledge and concurrence does not necessarily mean Australia approves each individual activity or task undertaken,” Marles said. “Instead, it means we agree to the purpose of activities conducted in Australia, we are aware of the capabilities being used, and understand their expected outcomes.”
The governing principle also applies to US “force posture initiatives” that began under the Gillard government in 2011 with the commencement of annual rotations of US Marine Corps personnel to Darwin.
About 2500 Marines now train in the Northern Territory for six months a year, while the arrangement has been expanded to include US Army personnel and rotational deployments of US Navy ships.
In the event of an Indo-Pacific conflict with China, US troops could deploy into the region from Darwin, taking positions on isolated islands to launch attacks on enemy ships, aircraft and ground forces.
Even more militarily significant are the US’s rotational bomber deployments from Australia’s Top End bases.
Under the obliquely named “enhanced air co-operation initiative”, commencing in 2017, nuclear-capable B-52s, B2 stealth bombers, and B1B Lancers operate regularly from Top End bases including RAAF Tindal, which the US has spent nearly $900m upgrading in co-operation with Australia. Improvements include bulk fuel storage tanks, munitions storage, a longer and heavier-duty runway, and expanded aprons to cater for larger aircraft.
Under the AUKUS agreement, US and British nuclear-powered submarines will also begin operating from Western Australia’s HMAS Stirling, near Perth, within two years.
The base will receive major upgrades to accommodate the boats, while improvements will be made at the Henderson naval precinct to undertake maintenance on the visiting boats.
While these are all “rotational” deployments, rather than US bases, their significance is clear – the US expects to be able to use Australia as a forward operating base if it finds itself in a conflict with China.
As US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate’s Armed Services Committee last month, “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific”, and the US “is laser focused on strengthening deterrence” across the region.
He said this involved “strengthening our forward posture in the region and working closely with our allies to enhance their own defence capabilities”.
“In fact, we have already expanded the scope and scale of our co-operation with Australia, Japan and The Philippines to deter China, including with new understandings for enhanced posture in the future,” Hegseth said.
Until now, Australia has been happy to accommodate such arrangements because – as with the alliance itself – they offer a level of deterrence Australia’s boutique military could never provide on its own.
But the Prime Minister’s declaration in his Curtin Oration that Australia will speak for itself and its foreign policy will not be “outsourced” suggests a mismatch between the US’s expectations over its use of the continent and Australia’s ability to shift the goalposts if it wants to sometime in the future.
It’s a point that former Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo – a strong supporter of the alliance – believes should be subject to an honest public debate.
“Do we accept his characterisation of the US force posture initiatives in Australia – as being aimed at deterring China?” Pezzullo told The Australian.
“Even if one takes the view that in the end the US won’t go to war with China, and that Hegseth is not an influential figure in the administration, the mere fact that he says that China is preparing for war; that the United States is seeking to deter China, and that force posture initiatives that are undertaken with Australia and others are aimed at deterring China, should be discussed and debated in Australia.”
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