MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Hello!
Welcome to the fourth 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 northern Australia roughly monthly.
Further information on the context and intention behind this newsletter at the bottom of the text.
The 2025 ‘Talisman Sabre’ war drills
The 2025 ‘Talisman Sabre’ war drills – described as “the most expansive and complex warfighting exercise ever conducted in Australia” – are occurring now across the north of this continent. ‘Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025’ is taking place from July 13 – August 4, 2025, and involves 35,000 military personnel from 19 countries. The exercise is jointly organised by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Australian Defence Force Headquarters Joint Operations Command, and incorporates all branches of the global US war machine – U.S. Space Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, as well as Australian Defence Forces. The war drills are among the biggest in the world. Previous exercises have involved about 20,000 US troops and 10,000 Australian troops.
The war drills are occurring near Rockhampton and Townsville, Tully and Shoalwater Bay, the RAAF base Tindal, Darwin, the Bradshaw and Mount Bundey training fields in the NT, RAAF base Curtin and Derby in north-west WA, Christmas Island, and include a number of locations in Papua New Guinea.
Environmental and Health Impacts
The Talisman Sabre exercises will have significant environmental and climate impacts. As the Independent and Peaceful Australia Alliance notes, “all military operations include the use of chemicals, many of which are toxic. TNT and heavy metals including mercury seriously affect the well-being of whatever they come in touch with”.
The 2025 war drills feature a marked surge in missile launches – both in volume and in the diversity of systems being used. The Australian army is conducting live-fire exercises with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) recently acquired from the US, the Japanese military is firing surface to ship missiles at targets at sea, the Canadian navy is firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles and the US military is firing the Lockheed-Martin Typhon mid-range missile system at a target in waters off northern Australia.
These war drills are a significant health risk to nearby communities, many of which are Indigenous. Perchlorate, the primary ingredient in rocket fuel, has been described as “the chemical causing the most concern worldwide with regards to the U.S. [Department of Defence’s] operations”. The chemical, already contaminating groundwater in 20 US states as a result of its use on rocket test ranges and military bases, “has been linked to thyroid problems, birth defects and newborn development” issues. A 2020 study of military training exercises in Puerto Rico found that “the sudden end of bombing practices is associated with a 56–79% decrease in the incidence of congenital anomalies of nearby populations”.
A 2015 public environmental report for Exercise Talisman Sabre listed 25 endangered or critically endangered species, 32 vulnerable species, and 3 ecologically sensitive communities as occurring in Talisman Sabre exercise areas. The climate footprint of the exercises is likely to be enormous, with at least 20 major warships transported to Australia for the war games, and dozens of military cargo aircraft deployed for the exercises. The US military, the biggest player in these war drills, is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth and one of the world’s biggest industrial polluters, generating 750,000 tonnes of toxic waste annually.
The Shoalwater Bay training area, where live-fire exercises, amphibious landings, tank maneuvers and air combat operations are taking place, is located within the Shoalwater and Corio RAMSAR-listed wetlands on the lands of the Darumbal people. The site contains nine ‘coastal’ and nine ‘inland’ wetland types supporting vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered species and threatened ecological communities. Shoalwater Bay is part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, home to dugongs, turtles, migrating whales and vulnerable snub-fin dolphins.
The Bradshaw field in the Northern Territory, just outside of the majority-Indigenous community of Timber Creek, is also being used in these war drills. The Bradshaw field occupies 871,000ha of rainforest, woodlands and grass plains on the lands of the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples. Thirty-nine rare or threatened species and four ecologically sensitive habitats are listed as present on the field, and the area is estimated to contain 5% of the total population of the endangered Gouldian finch.
On July 16, 2025, the US military announced that it had fired the Typhon missile system from the Bradshaw field at an offshore target.
US military equipment to stay on this continent?
The ABC reported on May 9, 2025 that subcontractors at four Australian ports (including Darwin) would soon be handling “indefinite quantities” of explosive US military cargo “containing gases and radioactive material”. Some of these explosives, which include “rockets, missiles, warheads and devices”, will likely be used during the 2025 Talisman Sabre war drills. More transparency around what US weapons will be imported into this continent is not forthcoming.
It seems that the Talisman Sabre exercises provide something of a cover for the US military to import large amounts of military equipment into Australia, some of which will remain after the war drills have ended to fill a new Townsville “stockpiling” and “prepositioning” hub, as well as potentially other sites across the continent. In the Philippines, analysts have accused the US of “using [military] exercises to de facto deploy key weapons to the region”. Will the same occur here?
During the war drills, the US military is building out what it describes as a “joint theatre sustainment distribution centre” in Townsville that will store US military equipment and supplies required for prolonged war-fighting. The word “joint” in the title notwithstanding, the impetus for the facility clearly comes from US military logistics planners, specifically in the US military’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command in occupied Hawaii, and the US Army Pacific Command. This warehouse, according to the U.S. Army Pacific Command commander, will “enhance [the US military’s] logistical and sustainment operations in preparation for potential protracted engagements in the region”. A similar facility has already been constructed in the Philippines, and others are proposed for what the U.S. Army Pacific Command commander describes in imperialist-speak as “the first and second island chains” in the “Pacific theatre”.
The Talisman Sabre war drills feature the first use outside the US of the Lockheed-Martin Typhon missile system. Another Typhon missile system was transported to the Philippines in April 2024 as part of the Salaknib war drills. It has remained in the country ever since, where it is within striking range of mainland China. US officials claim that the weapons system remains in the Philippines at the request of the Philippines government. A spokesperson for the Philippine military has contradicted this claim, saying that it is “up to the United States Army Pacific (USARPAC) to decide how long the missile system would stay”. A Chinese defence spokesperson has described the missile deployment as “a strategic offensive weapon reminiscent of the Cold War”. Chinese officials continue to call for the removal of the weapons system from the Philippines.
Declassified Australia reveals F-35 parts sent from Tindal to Tel Aviv
Last week, Kellie Tranter and Peter Cronau revealed that on at least two occasions this year, F-35 fighter jet parts have been sent from the RAAF base Tindal, just outside of Katherine, to Israel to meet parts shortages there and allow Israeli F-35 jets to continue to carry out bombing campaigns on Gaza, southern Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. The parts were sent from the RAAF base Tindal to the RAAF base Williamstown, near Newcastle – one of three regional hubs for maintenance and warehousing of F-35 joint strike fighter parts (the other two hubs being in the Netherlands and the US). The parts were then sent on commercial airlines to Tel Aviv, Israel, via Thailand.
As Kellie Tranter details in a follow-up article, the Dutch F-35 warehousing facility has ceased sending parts to Israel since February 12, 2024 after “a Dutch appeals court ordered the Netherlands to stop exporting and transiting F-35 parts to Israel, saying there was a clear risk they were being used in ‘serious violations of international humanitarian law’”. Since this court ruling, the Asia-Pacific regional hub for the F35 fighter jet, located at the RAAF base Williamstown, has picked up the slack, providing ongoing operational support to Israel’s F-35 fleet via its parts transfers.
Lockheed-Martin’s distributed military procurement program for the F-35 jet, involving some 1900 companies in 8 countries, has proven a useful alibi for producer-states in overcoming pressure to end the supply of parts where the jets are implicated in atrocities. When facing legal challenges over the supply of F-35 components that may be involved in Israel’s genocide, Western governments have repeatedly cited “the global nature of the F-35 production program”. Insisting that because components get “fed into centralised global distribution hubs in the United States and in Netherlands”, and they simply don’t know which parts go to Israel, and which parts go elsewhere, Western governments have effectively argued that the military and diplomatic significance of the F-35 joint strike fighter program takes precedence over their legal obligations under international law to prevent genocide. Now even this alibi has been taken away from the Australian government as the evidence of direct arms transfers from Australia to Israel continues to pile up.
Lockheed-Martin’s global defence procurement program for the F-35 fighter jet features heavily in United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese’s most recent report on corporate actors profiting from the genocide in Palestine. Albanese was promptly sanctioned by the US government for exposing the role of US corporate actors in Israel’s Gaza holocaust.
“Components and parts constructed globally contribute to the Israeli F-35 fleet, which Israel customizes and maintains in partnership with Lockheed Martin and domestic companies,” she writes. “Post-October 2023, F-35s and F-16s have been integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power to drop an estimated 85,000 tons of bombs, much of it unguided, to kill and injure more than 179,411 Palestinians and obliterate Gaza”.
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”.
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.