MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Hello!
Welcome to the second edition of the Militarism in the NT newsletter. I plan to send out a newsletter with updates on US and Australian military plans and presence in the NT, and perhaps in northern Australia more broadly, every 2-4 weeks.
Further information on the context and intention behind this newsletter at the bottom of the text.
AMENTUM, US MILITARY CONTRACTOR WORKING ON THE CHANDLER WASTE DUMP, MANAGED INCIDENT-PRONE NUCLEAR WASTE FACILITY IN NEW MEXICO
In the last edition of this newsletter, I reported that US military contractor Amentum is working with a company called Tellus Holdings to progress the Chandler nuclear waste facility 15 kms from Titijikala, and 120 kms south of Alice Springs. Tellus Holdings describes its vision for the Chandler nuclear waste facility as “the world’s first multi-national deep geological repository for hazardous chemical and low-level nuclear waste”. The facility would store hazardous byproducts associated with critical minerals mining, and may also store radioactive materials derived from oil and gas extraction.
The US military contractor Amentum employs 53,000 people across 80 countries. The company is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Pine Gap spy base just outside Mparntwe/ Alice Springs, and has a workforce of 400 people in the town. It has operated/ is operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Benin, Somalia, and Libya, and is currently before a US court on charges of human trafficking in Kuwait.
Amentum’s management of WIPP
Amentum managed New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) over a period during which multiple highly hazardous incidents occurred. The incidents transformed the facility, hitherto regarded as “the flagship of the [US] energy department”, into an object of serious concern and ridicule.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant receives transuranic waste from the US’s nuclear weapons program. Amentum formed the Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), a limited liability company, with BWX Technologies. The partnership was responsible for operations and maintenance at the WIPP site from 2012 to 2022.
On February 5, 2014, a truck caught fire within the facility, and six workers were hospitalised with smoke inhalation. A subcontractor under the Nuclear Waste Partnership subsequently sued the company for “gross mismanagement of a major construction contract” involving reconstruction of an underground air-monitoring system that had failed during the truck fire. The subcontractor alleged that Amentum’s heritage company, NWP, “was such a disorganized project manager that it caused repeated delays and cost overruns, resulting in multiple breaches of contract”. NWP, the subcontractor claimed, “used faulty designs that caused chronic problems and forced crews to redo large and expensive parts of the project”.
Less than a fortnight after the truck fire, on February 14, 2014, a barrel containing americium, plutonium, nitrate salts and organic kitty litter ruptured at the facility. The rupture quickly spread contaminants “through about one-third of the underground caverns and tunnels, up the exhaust shaft, and into the outside environment”, exposing 22 workers at the WIPP facility to low levels of radioactive contamination. Following the incident, the site was shuttered for three years. Remediation efforts cost some $640 million USD. The total cost of the incident to US taxpayers was $2 billion USD.
A safety analysis conducted prior to the WIPP facility becoming operational considered the likely frequency of accidents involving the release of radioactive material at the facility to be once every 200,000 years. The incidents of February 2014 occurred just 15 years into the site’s operation.
The US Department of Energy’s decision not to renew NWP’s contract to manage the WIPP facility is attributed partly to the company’s failures relating to the 2014 contamination incident.
CHARLES DARWIN UNIVERSITY DEEPENS ITS TIES WITH MILITARY INDUSTRIES
Charles Darwin University (CDU) has in recent years deepened its ties with military industries.
In 2017, the CDU established the Advanced Manufacturing Alliance with Dandenong, Victoria-based SPEE3D. The SPEE3D manufacturing alliance focusses on advanced 3D metal printing technology that enables metal parts to be manufactured without specialised molds and at ~1000x the speed of competing 3D manufacturing processes by utilising kinetic energy rather than heat.
SPEE3D’s website makes it clear that the company primarily envisions military and extractive industry applications for the technology. Indeed, the company participated in the 2024 Land Forces expo (the largest land-based weapons expo in the southern hemisphere) in Naarm/ Melbourne, as did Charles Darwin University.
SPEE3D’s involvement in war games exercises
SPEE3D has participated in some of the largest war games exercises on the planet.
In August 2024, SPEE3D took part in a US Army research laboratory exercise testing on-demand parts manufacture for military combat vehicles “in the field” (i.e. close to the site of conflict during wartime).
In the same month, the company took part in the massive and environmentally destructive 2024 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) war games, again testing its parts manufacturing capabilities “in the field”. “SPEE3D is thrilled to be included in RIMPAC, the largest distributed advanced manufacturing demonstration the Department of Defense has ever conducted,” gloated SPEE3D CEO Brian Kennedy.
The 2024 RIMPAC war games in US-occupied Hawaii featured the militaries of 29 countries, including Israel, and were vociferously protested by a coalition of Hawaii-based and international groups. In protesting, Cancel RIMPAC coalition members declared that they were building on the “legacy of past generations of Kanaka Maoli and Indigenous Pacific-led struggles for demilitarization and decolonization”.
Membership in the Queensland Defence Science Alliance
On July 16, 2024, Charles Darwin University announced that it had become a member of the Queensland Defence Science Alliance (QDSA), “a node of the Australian Defence Science and Universities Network”. The QDSA’s mission statement includes “building and supporting a cohesive Defence innovation ecosystem across Northern Australia”, and leveraging “Australian research and industry assured sovereign supply chains to achieve game changing capability for Defence at scale”. CDU’s membership within the Queensland Defence Science Alliance is likely to deepen the university’s ties with SPEE3D, providing the Advanced Manufacturing Alliance with increased access to military research institutions and military industry networks.
CDU employs a dedicated manager for military partnerships
Driving these deepening engagements with military industries has been Victor Abramowicz, the CDU’s inaugural manager for defence and advanced manufacturing. Of the university’s three-member “team” dedicated to developing partnerships with industry and government organisations, two work to progress relationships with military industries, while the third works in “energy and resources”.
Speaking at the NT Defence Week event in Alice Springs in 2024, Abramowicz described his role:
“My job is to expand our role in defense and industry on that defense and advanced manufacturing side… So it’s basically industry engagement, or if you wanna be frank about it, a business development role”.
Concurrent to his role at CDU, Abramowicz was also the principal of Ostoya Consulting, where he “provides advisory and business development services to a range of companies in the defence sector”. In a LinkedIn post from December 2024, Abramowicz announced he was finishing up at CDU.
It appears CDU has not yet hired a replacement.
ABOUT THE MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Many people are aware of US and Australian military presence in the NT, but perhaps less people are aware of just how much this military presence is intensifying as a perennially belligerent US prepares for war with China, and how much a new wave of extractivism in the NT is bound up with the US military industrial complex. For the fiscal year 2024/2025, northern Australia is “the top overseas location for U.S. Air Force and Navy construction spending, with more than $300 million set aside under the U.S. congressional defence authorisations for those years”, Reuters reports. Over the next decade, the Australian government will spend $30 billion on “hardening and upgrading” northern military bases, “partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States”. Less than a fortnight ago, the Australian defence minister heartily acknowledged that AUKUS “represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent, something we very much welcome”.
The Northern Territory jurisdiction has participated in the US/Israeli holocaust in Gaza via the provision of intelligence gathered at the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility in Central Australia to Israel’s Signals Intelligence National Unit, and on to the Israeli military. The Northern Territory government is also busy renewing settler dominion at “home” by imprisoning unprecedented numbers of Aboriginal people. Politicians and the media have once again manufactured a racialised crime hysteria that is seeing Aboriginal children being brutalised by the police, prison wardens and an ever-expanding private security and surveillance apparatus. The mayor of Alice springs has called for the military to be deployed in the town.
The newsletter is motivated by a desire to contribute to activist movements against militarism and extractivism on this continent, and the deprivations of ecological justice and land rights for First Nations they cause. It is conceived as a small contribution to the international fight against imperialism and an effort at solidarity with colonised and subjugated peoples struggling for liberation and justice. It is also intended to precipitate more reporting and investigative journalism on these issues on the part of independent journalists and journalists working within traditional media organisations.
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested and/or forward me their email address and I’ll add it to my mailing list for future newsletters. If you’d rather not receive this newsletter in the future, let me know and I’ll remove your email address from the list.