Volume 1, Number 1

Liddell Hart once wrote that ‘the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old idea out’. In the new age of globalised security that we are now entering, the Army, more than ever before, needs to engage in vigorous debate about the past, present and future of military conflict. In less than four years, our land forces have been deployed on operations in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. It goes without saying that each of these deployments will yield a treasure trove of experience, and ideas about war and conflict, for years to come.

We need to capture both our experience and our ideas in print. We need to debate, analyse and test both against the record of military history, present realities and future trends. In order to do this effectively, the Army requires a credible professional journal that will allow its members to discuss military issues openly and to exchange different views on the character of tactics, operations and strategy. Writing and fighting are, after all, not opposites but two sides of the same coin, and ultimately both activities define the profession of arms. With all of the above issues in mind, in October 2002, I directed the Land Warfare Studies Centre to assume responsibility for the professionalisation of the Australian Army Journal, with the support of an Editorial Advisory Board comprising both local and overseas members.

My aim, over the course of the next few years, is to move to a position where the Army possesses a professional military journal whose intellectual content reflects our status as one of the world’s leading armies. The strength of the new Australian Army Journal will, however, be defined by the support it receives from within the Army. I want to appeal to all members of the ‘Army family’—serving members, reservists, retired members, civilian writers and all academics with an interest in military affairs—to throw their support behind the new journal. I look forward to reading its content. It is my hope that the journal will become a regular feature of our Army’s life in the years ahead.

Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, AO
Chief of Army

The Land Warfare Studies Centre (LWSC) is proud to present the inaugural edition of the new Australian Army Journal (AAJ). The LWSC’s aim is to provide the Australian Army with a world-class journal of the profession of arms—a journal in which Australian uniformed professionals can debate the latest trends in land and joint warfare, and reflect on issues of tactics, strategy, operations, and defence policy. Over the past four years the profile and reputation of the Australian Army as one of the world’s finest land forces has grown through operations in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. The lessons from these diverse operations will shape the future of military strategy for the next two decades. It is therefore vitally important that the Army possess a professional journal in which its officers can record their views, ideas and experiences, and take issue with one another on the subjects of land warfare and joint operations.

Long-serving members of the Army and many in the retired community may remember that the original AAJ was published from April 1948 to October 1976. It was the initiative of the then Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir Vernon Sturdee, and there were five editors over the next twenty-eight years: Colonel E. G. Keogh, A. L. Sweeting, Clem Coady, Major Charles Winter and K. I. Taylor. In 1999 an initiative to revive the AAJ was launched by Training Command, largely due to the energy of Brigadier Vincent Williams, Commander of the Combined Arms Training and Development Centre (now the Land Warfare Development Centre). Eventually, in 2002, that initiative resulted in the Chief of Army’s directing that the journal become the responsibility of the LWSC. The original aims of the AAJ, outlined in 1948, were fourfold: to be a medium for the latest trends in military thought, to assist in the education and training of officers, to stimulate the study of military art and to provide a basis for an Australian military literature. Over half a century later, all of these aims continue to remain relevant.

Readers will note that the LWSC has created an Editorial Advisory Board to oversee the content of the new AAJ. The Board comprises eminent Australian, British and American scholars, as well as several of Australia’s most distinguished defence specialists and retired senior military professionals. The appointment of an Editorial Advisory Board represents a commitment to publishing excellence.

All contributions to the journal will be refereed by the Editorial Advisory Board in order to ensure that the AAJ meets accepted international standards in content and presentation.

Furthermore, the LWSC has assumed the management of the AAJ according to a five-year development plan. Under the plan, we hope to institutionalise the AAJ as a fully-fledged quarterly journal by 2008. Two editions of the AAJ (June and December) will be produced in each of the years of 2003-04. In 2005-06, the LWSC intends to increase the AAJ to three issues annually, and in 2007-08, we hope to move to the status of a quarterly journal. For the AAJ to achieve its full potential, it must have quality material to publish on a regular basis. To this end, the AAJ welcomes articles, review essays and letters from all serving officers within the Army, from the retired military community, from academia and from within the Australian Department of Defence.

Readers of this inaugural edition will also find details of a new essay competition that is closely linked to the AAJ: the Chauvel Prize, named in memory of Lieutenant General Sir Harry Chauvel. The Chief of Army has introduced the Chauvel Prize as an annual short-essay competition of 3000 words, with the deliberate intent of encouraging writing on land warfare and joint operations from within the Army community. The Chauvel Prize consists of a Light Horse Medallion and a cash award, and will be administered by the LWSC and judged by the AAJ Editorial Advisory Board. The winning Chauvel essay in each year will be published in the AAJ and the Chief of Army will present the Light Horse Medallion.

Sir William Butler once wrote, ‘the nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards’. With this adage in mind, regular armies throughout the world have always sought to maintain professional journals. An army’s professional journal is the primary means by which recent operational experience is captured forever and handed down to coming military generations. It is the LWSC’s hope that, in the years ahead, young soldiers will learn that it is in the pages of the AAJ that they will find an enduring record of what went before them. We are confident that in the articles of the AAJ they will discover how their peers thought about the conduct of operations and how they served in the field and, above all, what it was that made them proud to wear the uniform of an Australian soldier.

Dr Michael Evans
Head
Land Warfare Studies Centre

In Cold Print

There are three great myths about Australia: Lasseter’s Reef exists, Phar Lap was poisoned and Australian Army officers do not write. Yet a roll call of Army officers that have written on military affairs with both elegance and influence is too long to list here. Suffice it to say that the modern tradition of writing by Australian military officers began with Federation in the pages of the Commonwealth Military Journal. In 1912, the then Lieutenant Colonel John Monash won the inaugural Gold Medal in the Commonwealth Military Journal for an essay on the American Civil War described as ‘an illuminating original article, expounded with utter clarity in a moderate scholarly manner but drawing firm conclusions’. Moreover, it must be remembered that it has been the Army that has given Australia some of its finest war studies scholars. Again, the list of names is too long to reproduce here. Any list, however, would include such Army alumni as T. B. Millar, Robert O’Neill, John Coates and David Horner. While in the world of legend, Australian Army officers care only for cold steel, in reality they have often embraced what Liddell Hart called the realm of cold print.

In this inaugural edition of the revived Australian Army Journal (AAJ), five serving officers, three retired officers and a former non-commissioned officer have put pen to paper and entered into cold print. The staff of the AAJ trust that these contributors are merely the point of a very long spear and that many more will follow their example in the future, thus giving us a rich vein of material with which to fill our journal. Our articles in the June 2003 AAJ cover a wide range of subjects including operational ideas, tactics, training, the military and the media, terrorism, and military history. In addition we provide obituaries for three distinguished soldiers, a review essay, a retrospect and several book reviews.

In Point Blank—our section for short, sharp and critical material—Brigadier John Essex-Clark (Retd) develops a critique of niche forces, arguing that the Army needs to be able to deploy larger and more self-contained forces. We also include in Point Blank a copy of Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins’s inspirational speech to the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In our main articles, the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Peter Leahy sets the scene by presenting his vision of how the Army will operate in a world of increasing failed states and non-state actors. He provides a candid assessment of our strengths and weaknesses in the early 21st century and outlines the Army’s commitment to manoeuvre operations in a littoral environment and to a philosophy of combined arms warfare.

The case for revising tactics of close combat and the need to maintain a combined arms capability are both well examined in two timely articles by Lieutenant Colonels David Kilcullen and Michael Krause. Colonel Andrew Smith then examines planning methodologies in responding to the new threat of mass-casualty terrorism, while Prakash Mirchandani brings his expertise as a journalist to bear in considering the role of the Army and the media. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Tulley then looks at the lessons that the Australian Army might derive from the US experience of using combat training centres. Two interesting military history pieces by Dr Albert Palazzo and Dr Eric Villard follow, dealing with civil-military relations in the inter-war period and with US-Australian military operations in the Vietnam War, respectively.

In the AAJ’s Insights section, we present two contrasting articles. The first is by Jim Truscott and analyses the impact of early-effect forces in East Timor in 1999. The second article is a chilling eyewitness account of the 1995 Kibeho massacre as seen through the eyes of Paul Jordan, then a paramedic in the Special Air Service Regiment. In Retrospect—a section in the AAJ dedicated to reproducing interesting and notable articles from earlier Australian military journals—we present an article on military leadership by one of the 20th century’s great captains, Field Marshal Sir William Slim. This article was written while The was Governor-General of Australia. Moving on to the AAJ’s Milestones section, we publish obituaries for three of the Army’s most eminent soldiers, Major Generals Ronald Hughes and Ross Buchan, and Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Roden. Our inaugural edition also includes a review essay on the Middle East by Michael Evans, and concludes with book reviews by Major Russell Parkin, Alan Ryan, Martin Sheehan and Alexandra Siddall, and with information on the Chauvel Essay Prize, a diary section and notes for contributors.

The staff of the AAJ trust that our primary constituency, the Australian Army, will find the contents of the June 2003 edition to be of important professional value. We also hope, however, to attract interest from our retired community, from our many colleagues and well-wishers in academia and in the world of joint warfare within the Department of Defence. We are confident that the AAJ will inspire a positive intellectual reaction and a spirit of debate and reflection, leading to a rich flow of contributions for consideration by the Editorial Advisory Board. Finally, on a philosophical note, we should all remember that, while there are three things that do not come back in life—the spent arrow, the spoken word and opportunity missed—the written word lives forever.