While new books offer topicality, occasionally it pays to revisit the classics for a reality check on the essentials of continuity and change. Published 60 years ago, TB Millar’s Australia’s Defence is one such seminal classic of Australian strategic thinking. As well as being of interest to historians, defence policymakers more used to strategic forecasting can also benefit from ‘back-casting’.
Australia’s Defence was published in 1965, immediately before the Australian government announced, in April, that it was sending combat troops to South Vietnam. Realising the gravity of this decision, Millar hastily penned a postscript. Such timing on the cusp of one of Australia’s longest and most divisive wars gives his book added poignancy.
Even as Australia’s combat involvement in Vietnam was unfolding, elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Australian forces were battling an insurgency in the jungles of Borneo and the surrounding seas during the Confrontation with Sukarno’s Indonesia. Millar bemoaned how thinly stretched Australia’s military resources were and how it was ‘paying the penalty for years of neglect’.
Millar’s damning reflections that Australia couldn’t handle more than one situation at a time and that its political class neglected defence during peacetime have remained evergreen. So has his withering observation that Australia was better at memorialising its wars than preparing for them. But he was no fatalist, believing that ‘with prudence and resolution’ the requirements of national defence lay within Australia’s grasp.
Those military interventions in Southeast Asia, against the backdrop of feared communist expansion and subversion, may seem disconnected from Australia’s current strategic circumstances, particularly for younger readers. While the Vietnam War lives on in popular culture, confrontation has receded from the national memory. Yet it remains strategically relevant as an example of a calibrated and successful intervention, in which small units and special forces played a leading role. Confrontation yielded enduring lessons about how to deter an adversary during a limited armed conflict. Too often these days deterrence is considered as an exclusively pre-war construct.
In significant respects, Australia’s strategic environment has transformed for the better since 1965. A unified, communist Vietnam is now counted as a close defence partner. Indonesia is too, despite being an adversary during Millar’s time. The absence of enemy states in Southeast Asia is a huge boon to Australia’s security, though strategic alignment in the sub-region remains elusive, with the current exception of the Philippines. Millar noted it’s ‘often claimed that our defence cooperation with Britain and the United States is a liability in the process of winning friends and influencing people in Southeast Asia’ and that we ‘thereby give the appearance of being reactionary and colonial’. AUKUS’s unveiling in 2021, to a decidedly mixed reception in Australia and Southeast Asia, showed that some things haven’t changed.
Millar’s assessment that China posed the gravest strategic threat to Australia has also come full circle—only now it’s worse. The major difference is Beijing possesses military capabilities in 2025 that would’ve boggled Australian imaginations in 1965, when China had only just crossed the nuclear threshold and was about to begin its Cultural Revolution. Millar’s depiction of China’s navy as a ‘coastal defence force’ bears no comparison with the formidable oceangoing force of today, including surface action groups that sail around Australia.
While the threat of hostile power projection was less acute in Millar’s day, he understood the ‘first point to remember about the Australian island-continent is not that it is a continent but that it is an island.’ Far more likely than the threat of invasion, ‘our external lines of communication and trade are vulnerable to sea-borne attack’. That remains on point.
Australia’s vulnerability has grown since 1965, and not only because of China’s expanding military capabilities. Our dependence on imports has also increased, while the domestic manufacturing base has contracted. Millar’s observation that more than two-thirds of automobiles sold in Australia were made here and that local oil refineries ‘meet almost all requirements of refined petroleum products’ today appears unrecognisable. Australia’s economy was also comparatively far stronger back then. In Millar’s assessment, it was approximately equal to that of all of continental Southeast Asia, and several times that of Indonesia.
Millar’s angst about a common border with Indonesia in New Guinea, still under Australian administration in 1965, seems like an obvious discontinuity at first blush. And yet, while Papua New Guinea has notched up half a century of independence, Canberra’s newly minted defence treaty with Port Moresby has revived the concept that PNG’s security is indivisible from Australia’s. Millar recommended that Manus Island ‘should come under the total jurisdiction of Australia’, as a site for a naval and air base north of Australia. No contemporary Australian strategist would dare to question PNG’s sovereignty over Manus, but Canberra’s interest in developing joint defence facilities there remains relevant today, in the context of competition with China and the immutable logic of strategic geography.
Millar was an Anglophile, dying in London. But his book’s emphasis on Australia’s continuing reliance on Britain’s military presence in Southeast Asia for strategic protection should serve as a reminder that the US was by no means universally considered to be Canberra’s sole security guarantor even two decades after World War II. Millar saw Washington’s security commitment to Australia as equivocal: ‘We have long relied on Britain to defend us regardless of our contribution. There are Australians today who expect as much of the United States. This is both selfish and unrealistic. There is no complete guarantee of American protection.’
At the same time, he averred that if Washington breached its ANZUS commitments the US ‘would do extensive harm to its moral stature throughout the world, a matter in which American administrations of whatever persuasion have great interest.’ Millar couldn’t have predicted the coming of Donald Trump and accompanying doubts around US reliability.
From our current vantage point, Australia’s alliance with the US is widely assumed to be global in scope. But Millar perceived a clear geographical division of labour between ANZUS, which ‘relates to the Pacific’, and the now defunct Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, servicing Southeast Asia. Millar predicted that ‘as far ahead as we can see, it’s extremely unlikely that any Australian forces will serve outside Australia in any areas but Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific’. No doubt, he would have been surprised by Australia’s extended military campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and its peacekeeping commitments elsewhere.
As Australia prepares to release an updated national defence strategy next year, re-reading TB Millar underlines that contemporary policymakers and observers (note to self) should use such words as ‘unprecedented’ sparingly, and with great care.