MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Hello!
Welcome to the fifth 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, roughly monthly.
Further information on the context and intention behind this newsletter at the bottom of the text.
Washington-based think tank recommends northern Australia be “fortified into a military stronghold”
A Washington-based think tank closely aligned with the US military establishment, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has issued a new report recommending that northern Australia be “fortified” into “an allied military stronghold for the region, with more air bases, ports and a long range-strike arsenal”. The author of the report, Thomas G. Mahnken, is a former officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and served as a member of the 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy Commission. The same think tank issued a report more than a decade ago shortly after Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in US foreign policy, recommending that northern Australia “become a supportive sanctuary for US forces operating in the Indo-Pacific”.
That report was reviewed by socialist Peter Symonds at the time:
“The CSBA report makes for chilling reading. Its detailed analysis of basing arrangements, missile ranges, submarine transit times, aircraft types and infrastructure requirements, as well as the tactics and strategy of battle, underlines the advanced character of the US preparations for conflict with China. The Pentagon is drawing up war plans not for decades into the future, but for the years immediately ahead. Moreover, while the report deals only with a conventional war with China, the authors are well aware of the danger that it will expand into nuclear war”.
The new report veers between presenting China as an ominous and imminent military threat to Australia, and enthusing over the role this continent can play in a future war with China. On the one hand, the report insists that “Australia’s strategic situation has gotten worse due to Beijing’s expanding ambitions” over the past decade, and “no longer lies beyond harm’s reach”. On the other, the report claims Australia is located in a “geographic sweet spot” – not too close to China but not so distant as to be “operationally irrelevant” – heaven forbid. This “geographic sweet spot” makes northern Australia “a critical piece of real estate… vital for US force projection in the western Pacific”.
The Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments clearly sees great value for the US military in the large military training areas located in ecologically sensitive areas across northern Australia that have just been used extensively in the Talisman Sabre war drills – places like the Tully and Shoalwater Bay, Bradshaw and Mount Bundey training fields.
One particularly frightening aspect of reading the report is the realisation that many of its recommendations appear to have already been met, or are in the process of being actioned. For example, the report’s recommendation that the Australian government invest in “creating a world-class training, exercise, and experimentation infrastructure to help Australia and its allies”, seems obsolete given the recent massive investments in the Bradshaw field and Mount Bundey training areas. The Bradshaw field training area, near Timber Creek, the Delamere air weapons range, 60 kilometres south of Darwin, and the Mount Bundey training area, 120 kilometres south of Katherine, are electronically wired into the North Australia Range Complex, a network of major military training areas and ranges intended for large-scale multinational military exercises. The electronic networking of these ranges and training areas allows military personnel to use them for unified training exercises, effectively simulating wartime operations across a vast area.
The experimentation infrastructure the report enthuses about would presumably involve more missile launches like those that have occurred throughout the 2025 Talisman Sabre war drills, including the firing of the Lockheed-Martin Typhon mid-range missile system by the US military from the Bradshaw field, or the Precision Strike Missile fired by the Australian army from the Mount Bundey training area.
Military bases in northern Australia, the report muses, “would be particularly important for supporting long-range strike aircraft such as the B-2 Spirit [recently responsible for dropping bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities and bombing Yemen] or B-21 Raider, as well as high-value support aircraft such as refueling and sensor aircraft”. Another recommendation: Australia could extend the reach of its F-35 jets by stationing them outside of Australian territory. And just in case neither of these measures are sufficient, the report also recommends the Australian government acquire Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles with a range of 4000 kilometres capable of striking Chinese naval ships and bases in the South China Sea, as well as drones to “be used for strike missions”.
Enter Luke Gosling
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments stresses the importance of the Australian government engaging “the Australian public about the need to increase defense spending to support the types of measures” described in the report. Enter Luke Gosling, federal Labor MP for the seat of Solomon, covering the metropolitan areas of Darwin and Palmerston. Gosling is ecstatic about the ideas contained in the report, embracing the terminology of an “Indo-Pacific stronghold” in a recent opinion piece in the NT News. For the retired army officer and (not retired) war enthusiast, the military bases and training grounds already being upgraded with billions in federal money are “more than military assets, they’re economic engines powering the Top End”. Those billions in federal dollars mean “more tradies on the tools”.
Notice the symmetry between the report’s recommendations and Gosling’s opinion piece (only Gosling is sly enough to substitute “maintenance, repair and operations” for the more honest “warfare”):
The report: “Transforming northern Australia into an Indo-Pacific stronghold will require Australia to invest in creating an expanded and resilient defense infrastructure suited to the demands of 21st century warfare, acquiring a tailored long-range strike portfolio, and enhancing Australia’s ability to sustain operations in a protracted conflict.”
Gosling: “We need to do a lot more and quicker to transform northern Australia into an Indo-Pacific stronghold with resilient infrastructure suited to the demands of 21st century maintenance, repair and operations, but commitment to the biggest defence spend since WWII is a good start”.
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.