Australia's Long-Term Strategic Situation

Australia has just brought her commitment of troops in Vietnam up to 1,500. Together with her forces in Malaysia, these deployments may begin to tell upon the regular Army's capacity to train the new selective service draft. All three Services are more or less run down in numbers and equipment as a result of a reduction in defence expenditure from 3.9 per cent of gross national product in 1953-4 to 2.7 per cent in 1962-3. Though it was back to 3 per cent in 1963-4 and is rising, the Services cannot quickly re-build, however much is added to the defence budget in the next few years. The United Kingdom's Minister of Defence has served notice that looking ahead into the 1970s, it is not easy to see how Britain should be in Southern Asia at all unless she is co-operating very closely at any rate with Australia and New Zealand. It should be possible to make savings by the better co-operation between Britain and Commonwealth countries or whatever other ally or friend we have in the area concerned, leading the chauvinist press to fear that we may have to meet alone, without either Britain or the United States, an Indonesian attempt to infiltrate and subvert East New Guinea despite Djakarta's preoccupation with Malaysia. Radical opinion in Australia holds that by the Vietnamese commitment we are involved in a war that cannot be won and through which there will fall upon us some of Asia's growing hatred of the United States. Commentators tell us that the area has not been so threatened since Pearl Harbor

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