Compulsory basic military training never did me any harm. Looking back, the discipline was beneficial as was the reinforcing of the notion of community strength through collaboration and trust.
How would society today 'cope' with compulsory military training? That is a question I find challenging to contemplate!
You know there has to be a bit of ‘mandatory’ associated with this. If governments are too afraid of political backlash and only contemplate what the Australian voting public will tolerate, perhaps the choice should be given: sign up to do your duty, or allow other countries to occupy us. Any such foreign entity on our land will not be so forgiving and easy-going.
I served as a Reservist before becoming a civilian scholar in the military field. Doesn’t seem to have hurt me either. It is up to the government to provide communitarian structures for our ‘national’ polity to thrive and survive in difficult times. National Service is one of the best such structures.
I'd really like to see an analysis, free of primeval fear, of the threats facing us. I'd like to see costed models, not the repetition of "we must spend 3%", but a bottom up analysis. We have a small population and a massive land. Maybe our need is 10% or 1%. Broad-brush numbers without a basis in analysis, and an "analysis" which appears to be based on an automatic fear of a "yellow horde" that has - border skirmishes aside - never invaded any country in hundreds of years seems to be nonsensical, irrational and wasteful.
There is no yellow horde Joe. That in itself has many assumptions placed on things. Importantly, we are an island continent.. we should be running an independent foreign policy, but we don’t. Culturally, we’ve long outsourced our strategic thinking to the Americans. We think that this is the cheap way toward defence. It isn’t. It just makes America’s problems our problems. It also makes us vulnerable to dependence on a U.S., a country that is not longer a reliable partner. What do we need to defend ourselves against? What’s the threat? We don’t have any traditional threats. But there are vulnerabilities to Australian national security. China has used influence operations against us. They’ve used cyber against us. And more recently, they’ve used naval intimidation against us. Should we have the ability to challenge these threats independent of what the U.S. may or may not consider important to their position in the Indo-Pacific? Absolutely. The Iran War has changed our strategic situation. We don’t have ready access to Middle Eastern oil and gas. This is a national security problem. New forms of weapons are proliferating, giving nations more vectors of attack should they choose to exercise them. So what, we do nothing? We keep the system as is? I have always advocated for a reformed defence force that allows us to act independently from our ANZUS/AUKUS commitments. Those sort of minutiae of detail you seek cannot come from a simple OpEd, it would require a level of support from government that neither of our mundane parties would advocate for.
Compulsory basic military training never did me any harm. Looking back, the discipline was beneficial as was the reinforcing of the notion of community strength through collaboration and trust.
How would society today 'cope' with compulsory military training? That is a question I find challenging to contemplate!
You know there has to be a bit of ‘mandatory’ associated with this. If governments are too afraid of political backlash and only contemplate what the Australian voting public will tolerate, perhaps the choice should be given: sign up to do your duty, or allow other countries to occupy us. Any such foreign entity on our land will not be so forgiving and easy-going.
I served as a Reservist before becoming a civilian scholar in the military field. Doesn’t seem to have hurt me either. It is up to the government to provide communitarian structures for our ‘national’ polity to thrive and survive in difficult times. National Service is one of the best such structures.
I'd really like to see an analysis, free of primeval fear, of the threats facing us. I'd like to see costed models, not the repetition of "we must spend 3%", but a bottom up analysis. We have a small population and a massive land. Maybe our need is 10% or 1%. Broad-brush numbers without a basis in analysis, and an "analysis" which appears to be based on an automatic fear of a "yellow horde" that has - border skirmishes aside - never invaded any country in hundreds of years seems to be nonsensical, irrational and wasteful.
There is no yellow horde Joe. That in itself has many assumptions placed on things. Importantly, we are an island continent.. we should be running an independent foreign policy, but we don’t. Culturally, we’ve long outsourced our strategic thinking to the Americans. We think that this is the cheap way toward defence. It isn’t. It just makes America’s problems our problems. It also makes us vulnerable to dependence on a U.S., a country that is not longer a reliable partner. What do we need to defend ourselves against? What’s the threat? We don’t have any traditional threats. But there are vulnerabilities to Australian national security. China has used influence operations against us. They’ve used cyber against us. And more recently, they’ve used naval intimidation against us. Should we have the ability to challenge these threats independent of what the U.S. may or may not consider important to their position in the Indo-Pacific? Absolutely. The Iran War has changed our strategic situation. We don’t have ready access to Middle Eastern oil and gas. This is a national security problem. New forms of weapons are proliferating, giving nations more vectors of attack should they choose to exercise them. So what, we do nothing? We keep the system as is? I have always advocated for a reformed defence force that allows us to act independently from our ANZUS/AUKUS commitments. Those sort of minutiae of detail you seek cannot come from a simple OpEd, it would require a level of support from government that neither of our mundane parties would advocate for.