Disarm Australia

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. 

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. 

MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER

Hello! 

Welcome to the long-delayed third 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. 

Defence lobby groups pushed for Tanami Highway sealing 

The Tanami Highway, which is currently being sealed between the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu and Halls Creek, where it meets the already sealed Great Northern Highway, is being upgraded under the Australian Government’s Roads of Strategic Importance (ROSI) program. The highway is already sealed between Alice Springs and Yuemdumu. The highway would create a much more direct sealed route between Central Australia, where the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility and the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar are located, and the North-West Coast, where multiple US and Australian defence installations, including the Harold E Holt naval communications and space surveillance station, are located. 

The Tanami highway sealing will also benefit the Browns Range dysprosium mine in the northern Tanami Desert, hyped as the “first significant dysprosium producer outside of China”. Dysprosium is a rare earth element essential for producing high-performance magnets used in military guidance systems, power motors and actuators in fighter jets (F-35), drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, propulsion systems and sensors in Virginia-class submarines, radar systems, and precision munitions. 

The Tanami Highway upgrades, costing $1.1 billion in total, were announced in 2018, and construction commenced in 2022. Sealing the entire highway to Halls Creek is projected to take until the mid-2030s. Former WA Liberal senator Alan Eggleston lobbied for the highway to be sealed on military grounds. “We’ve been going on for some time now in the Coalition of the need to increase defence presence along the North West coast especially around the North West shelf”, he said in 2013. “A fishing boat came and tied up under a rig just last week, which is everyone’s worst nightmare … so the defence element of [the Tanami Highway upgrades] is pretty important.” 

A group called the Tanami Action Group, fronted by an automotive influencer, was formed to lobby for the road upgrades. In a 2014 submission to the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia, the Tanami Action Group claimed the upgrades were essential to “safeguard and advance” strategic interests in north-west Australia. The lobby group argued that sealing the Tanami would enable “defence bases in the north-west to be more easily supplied by road from the population centres of the south-east”; reduce “reliance on more difficult to defend and vulnerable coastal routes”; and enable “substantial ground forces to be concentrated in the region much more quickly than is currently possible”. 

Following Labor’s federal election victory in 2022, another lobby group – the North West Defence Alliance – advocated for the swift completion of the Tanami Highway upgrades. The North West Defence Alliance is composed of seven local governments across the Kimberley and Pilbara. The Alliance’s funding sources are not publicly declared. The shire presidents of the seven councils comprising the Alliance have been enthusiastic cheerleaders for an intensified military presence in the region, consistently berating national authorities for their alleged “defence” failings in North West Australia. 

The Alliance’s slick website describes the North West region’s predicament thus: 

The vast north-west of the Australian continent covers one million square kilometres over the Kimberley, Pilbara and Gascoyne. It contains the world’s greatest mineral province with enormous reserves of iron ore, natural gas, oil, lithium, copper, gold, cobalt, manganese, zinc, lead, rare earths and other minerals vital for today’s technological society. Here, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in mines, ports, offshore facilities and huge gas plants. But the area is sparsely populated, with approximately 100,000 people and only a few dozen Defence personnel.

Since 2022, the Alliance has featured in a flurry of ABC News articles claiming that the region – “the powerhouse of the country” – is being left entirely undefended. In the tradition of the former Liberal senator representing the region, the Alliance alleges that asylum seekers arriving by boat pose a threat to the region’s offshore oil and gas facilities, as well as being a “biosecurity risk”.  It insists that populations across North West Australia “feel vulnerable to foreign attack” and advocates for more “defence installations such as missiles and large-scale bases” to be built across north west Australia to “protect the region’s export industries”. 

The North West region is already subject to a significant military expansion. Like the Tindal air base in the NT, the RAAF base Curtin, just outside the town of Derby, is undergoing upgrades and extensions to enable the servicing of Australian and US fighter jets and bombers, allowing it to support joint bombing operations. The Harold E Holt naval communications station has recently been expanded to include a space surveillance telescope, assisting the US war machine’s efforts in “fight[ing] to protect and defend the U.S. and Allies from attack in, through and from space”. Joint US – Australian war games, called Exercise Talisman Sabre, have previously included military exercises in the region, and are likely to do so again in the future. 

US Funds Continue to Flow into the NT for Military Build Up: the Bradshaw Field Training Area

The Bradshaw Field Training Area in the NT has recently been upgraded to support military training activities that “rival the size” of the biannual Exercise Talisman Sabre, involving 35,000 military personnel from nineteen countries. 

The upgrades to the Bradshaw field were undertaken “as part of the US$747 million United States Force Posture Initiatives Northern Territory Training Areas and Ranges Project”, a joint US – Australia funded project which aims to expand training and “interoperability” between US and Australian land forces. While it’s acknowledged that the project involves “significant US investment”, the exact breakdown of funds is not publicly available. The upgrades were overseen by NT construction giant Sitzler and included upgrades to the Nackeroo airfield to make it capable of accommodating Boeing C-17 Globemaster and MV-22 Osprey aircraft, including space to park 12 such aircraft, construction of a new medical facility and accommodation camp for 250 military personnel, and the creation of an “urban operations training facility”. 

The training area, a former cattle station purchased by the Australian government in 1996, occupies 871,000ha of rainforest, woodlands and grass plains on the lands of the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples. The 1998 NT Environmental Impact Assessment for the Bradshaw field acknowledges that the area is culturally significant to the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples, and contains ancient paintings within the rock shelters along the Yambarran and Pinkerton Ranges. 160 Aboriginal sacred sites within the area are registered with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. 

The Environmental Impact Assessment also notes the biodiversity significance of the field, with 39 rare or threatened species and four ecologically sensitive habitats listed as present. A 2015 public environmental report for Exercise Talisman Sabre, which utilised the Bradshaw field, described the area as “part of a regional environmental corridor linking with [Judburra] Gregory National Park”. Mt Thymanan, within the Bradshaw field training area, is listed as a significant breeding ground for the endangered Gouldian finch, and is estimated to contain 5% of the total population of the species. 

The field is named after pastoralist, land speculator and genocidaire Joe Bradshaw, who carried out at least 3 massacres of Aboriginal people on the lands now comprising the military training area, killing an estimated 60 people. He is also implicated in the deaths of an estimated 200 Yolngu people during his time managing the Arafura Cattle Station. To this day, the British Museum holds 112 Aboriginal artefacts from the Victoria River and Arnhem Land regions “donated” by Bradshaw. 

The Bradshaw field is one of the largest military training areas in the world. A twenty-one year old article in The Age newspaper describes some of the appeal of the training area to US Forces: 

Australia has one thing the United States lacks when it comes to training its forces in the Asia-Pacific region – lots of wide open space. US forces based on heavily populated Okinawa and Japan simply lack the space for large scale maneuvers. Political sensitivities limit the extent of realistic training on the Korean Peninsula. In contrast, the three Australian training areas slated for upgrade for joint Australia-US training are simply vast.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has been a consistent proponent of proffering the “wide open space” of Australian military training fields, including Bradshaw, as a key means of servicing Australia’s military alliance with the US and other so-called regional allies. “[T]here’s plenty of opportunity”, wrote John Coyne, head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Institute at ASPI in a 2019 article, “to increase our defence diplomacy efforts by offering regional partners space to train”.  

The success of this strategy hasn’t stopped Coyne from angsting in a recent article that despite recent upgrades, the Australian military was not “maximising the utility” of training areas such as the Bradshaw field. While acknowledging the heavy use of the Bradshaw field by US marines based in Darwin, Coyne bemoaned “a noticeable reduction in the scale and frequency of ADF exercises in the NT”. 

The Bradshaw field is electronically wired into the North Australia Range Complex, a network of major military training areas and ranges intended for large-scale multinational military exercises. Other key training areas networked into the North Australia Range Complex include the Mount Bundey training area 60 kilometres south of Darwin, and the Delamere air weapons range, 120 kilometres south of Katherine. 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. For example, the US Army Tactical Missile System was used for the first time in Australia during the 2023 Talisman Sabre exercises, where it was fired from the Delaware Range at a target on the Bradshaw field 260 kilometres away. The Bradshaw field and Delaware range are likely to be used this July and August when US Forces intend to test Lockheed Martin’s mid-range Typhon weapons system for the first time outside the US. 

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. 

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. 

MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER

Hello! 

Welcome to the first 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. 

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. 

ALICE SPRINGS MAYOR WORKS FULL TIME FOR US MILITARY CONTRACTOR

Alice Springs mayor Matt Patterson works full-time for the US military contractor Amentum. Matt works as a housing maintenance officer for Amentum – making sure the homes of the ~ 1000 Americans and Australians working at Pine Gap are kept in pristine order. He works from 7am – 2pm daily in the Amentum office, then skips across the road after 2pm to take up his mayoral duties (Amentum offices are conveniently located right across the road from the council chamber). 

Amentum is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Pine Gap spy base just outside Mparntwe/ Alice Springs, providing facility management and logistics services, among other things. At the 2024 NT Defence Week event in Alice Springs, an Amentum spokesperson said the company employs 400 people in Alice Springs and 44,000 worldwide.  

THAT SAME US MILITARY CONTRACTOR IS WORKING TO PROGRESS A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA

US military contractor Amentum is working with a company called Tellus Holdings on the Chandler nuclear waste dump, 15 kms from the Aboriginal community of Titjikala and 120 kms south of Alice Springs. Tellus describes its vision as to build “the world’s first multi-national deep geological repository for hazardous chemical and low-level nuclear waste”. Amentum is conducting a strategic review of the project to assess timelines and feasibility. 

While the Chandler dump is billed by Tellus Holdings as “supporting Australia’s green energy transition” by providing a place to hold hazardous byproducts associated with critical minerals mining, the dump could also become a repository for hydrocarbon wastes and byproducts from oil and gas commissioning, as well as radioactive materials derived from oil and gas extraction processes. 

With the US and Australia having signed a critical minerals compact in 2023 to “friendshore” critical minerals production and reduce US dependence on China for raw materials such as lithium, Amentum’s involvement in the Chandler waste dump underscores the keen eye the US military industrial complex is keeping on the future of extractivism in the NT, and looking at how they can benefit from it. 

TEXAN FRACKING COMPANY WANTS TO USE BEETALOO GAS TO POWER A MILITARY DATA CENTRE AT PINE GAP

The chief executive of Texan fracking company Tamboran, Joel Riddle, flew to Washington last week to pitch a $5 billion USD data centre to Donald Trump. The data centre, in Riddle’s estimation, is to be located at Pine Gap, powered by fracked gas from the company’s Beetaloo operations ~800 kms north of Alice Springs, and used by the US and Australian militaries. 

Riddle told the Australian Financial Review that “we think the Northern Territory is well positioned for a substantial data centre investment. There is an abundant energy resource, abundant land, existing infrastructure, and a customer that is the Department of Defence…Pine Gap is crucial and there is the Tindal Air Force Base, where there are now nine B52s on the tarmac. This is a highly strategic part of the world for US interest.”

Riddle’s data centre pitch seems to be a bit of a stunt to put Tamboran’s Beetaloo operations in the spotlight and drum up more financing for the company’s exploratory drilling there. Tamboran is burning through cash in the Beetaloo Basin – each of its exploratory wells costs ~ $39 million AUD to drill. Only one of six wells Tamboran has drilled so far has demonstrated commercially viable quantities of gas, and the prospect of returns is still looking extremely fickle.  

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t rest easy. Tamboran Resources is in strategic partnership with fellow US fracking company Liberty Energy, the CEO of which, Chris Wright, was recently appointed US energy secretary under Donald Trump. This presumably gives Joel Riddle a fair bit of access to the new Trump administration. 

Riddle’s visit to Washington, however, seems to have been badly timed. During the week Riddle landed in Washington, US tech stocks were crumbling because a one year old Chinese start-up called Deep Seek had apparently built a Chat GPT- like AI model with a tiny fraction of the financing and a tiny fraction of the computing power US companies are relying on. This not only had huge ramifications for the US tech industry (US chipmaker Nvidia lost ~ $600 billion in market value in a day). It also had consequences for US energy companies, which have experienced increases in valuation (and received government support and subsidies) on the back of the massive amounts of energy projected to be required to power AI data centres. As CNN reports: 

Energy companies had been traded up significantly higher in recent years because of the massive amounts of electricity needed to power AI data centers. But they all plummeted Monday. Constellation Energy (CEG), the company behind the planned revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant for powering AI, fell 21% Monday. Competitors like Vistra (VST) fell 28% and GE Vernova (GEV) was down 21%.

Futures for natural gas, used to power electricity generators, tumbled 5.9%. Oil fell more than 2%.

Since the Australian Financial Review broke the story about Riddle’s Washington visit on January 24, Tamboran’s share price has fallen 12.91% on the New York Stock Exchange.