Both Canada and Australia have similarly sized armed forces and spend virtually the same amount of their gross domestic product (1.9 per cent) on defence.1 Both countries also possess military cultures that have been shaped by the experience of the British Empire and by the experience of Anglo-American coalition warfare. Yet Australia and Canada are rarely compared in contemporary military literature. The differences between Canada (with its North American location and its membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)) and Australia (with its Asia-Pacific position and its membership of ANZUS) seem to suggest that strategic differences far outweigh strategic similarities.
Despite these perceptions, this article argues that, in military terms, Australia and Canada continue to be ‘strategic cousins’. There are persistent similarities in military heritage, force development programs and operational methods between the Australian and Canadian militaries. When these similarities are combined, they provide a lasting basis for increased cooperation in the 21st century.
Australia and Canada: The Military Legacy of Empire
The first half of the 20th century saw a remarkable similarity between the Australian and Canadian military experience in serving the British Empire. Both Canada and the Australian colonies contributed contingents of volunteers to Britain’s conflicts, such as the Boer War of 1899–1902. During the Boer War in South Africa, Australian and Canadian mounted units fought alongside each other as part of General E. T. H. Hutton’s 1st Mounted Rifles Brigade.2 In World War I, Australia and Canada again underwent similar military experiences fighting in France. On the Western Front in 1917–18, Australians and Canadians earned formidable reputations as the shock troops of the British Empire, notably at the battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918. At Amiens, on the famed ‘black day of the German Army’, both the Australian Corps (under General Sir John Monash) and the Canadian Corps (under General Sir Arthur Currie) played major roles in defeating the German Army in the field.3
In World War II, although Australian and Canadian forces fought in different theatres for most of the conflict—Australia in the Pacific and the Canadians in Europe—both countries were in the position of being junior partners in the Grand Alliance led by the United States. The armed forces of both countries saw fierce fighting: Australia at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Track, and Canada at Dieppe and Normandy. During the Korean War, Canadians and Australians were part of an American-led United Nations (UN) force. As in World War I, Australian and Canadian units were deployed alongside each other, this time as part of the 27th Commonwealth Brigade. When the latter fought against the Chinese at the Battle of Kapyong in April 1951, both the Canadian 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), earned United States Presidential Unit Citations for their actions.
After Kapyong, Australia and Canada both contributed forces to the 1st Commonwealth Division in Korea. An Australian-born World War II commander, Brigadier John M. Rockingham, led Canada’s main contribution, the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade.4 The Commonwealth Division consisted of three brigades: one British, another Canadian and the third predominantly Australian (with British and New Zealand troops included). These brigades were deployed in defensive positions along the Imjin and Sami-ch’on rivers near the Korean 38th Parallel—a region that included the notorious ‘Hook’ combat zone. Canadian troops also supported Australians in the Battle of Maryang Sang, one of the most important actions in the history of the Australian Regular Army.5
After Korea: Diverging Australian and Canadian Strategic Interests
After the Korean War, the common military experience of Australia and Canada began to dissipate. In the wake of Britain’s decline as a world power and the shedding of imperial responsibilities, Canada turned its defence policy towards the United States and Europe, as symbolised by its membership of NATO. The ‘long peace’ of the Cold War in Europe also encouraged Canada to experiment with its military organisation. In the 1960s, Canada integrated its separate military services into a single, unified structure. Moreover, during the Cold War era, Canadian forces began to develop a strong national peacekeeping profile.
Canada’s modern peacekeeping reputation began in Egypt in 1956 during the Anglo-French intervention at Suez. Canada helped resolve the Suez crisis by providing troops under a UN mandate, and the Canadian External Affairs Minister, Lester B. Pearson, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomatic efforts. Among others, John English has argued that failure to preserve the institutional basis of Canadian military professionalism in terms of maintaining the integrity of the single services and ‘ceaseless involvement’ in peacekeeping led to the Canadian military’s becoming a tool of the External Affairs Department. For critics such as English, the path trodden by the Canadian military after Korea reached its logical conclusion in 1993 in Somalia, when soldiers from the elite Canadian Airborne Regiment, in defiance of all the tenets of military professionalism, tortured a prisoner to death.6
Australia’s military path after Korea was quite different from that of Canada’s. In the 1950s, Australia transferred its strategic attention to Asia, negotiated the ANZUS Treaty and engaged in a series of anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns. The Australian military also retained a much more traditional military outlook emphasising warfighting skills. As a result, during the Cold War, while Canada focused on its role in NATO and on peacekeeping, Australia was involved in protracted military conflict in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam. By the time the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, it seemed as though Australia and Canada had developed very different strategic outlooks. By the time of the Somalia crisis in 1993, it appeared that, in comparison with the Australian Defence Force (ADF), the Canadian Forces (CF) were overly concerned with peace operations and were insufficiently ‘muscular’ in their military outlook. In the post–Cold War era, it seemed to observers such as Graeme Cheeseman that Australia and Canada had little in common militarily.7
Yet, despite differing strategic outlooks and policy agendas, there remained areas of useful cooperation between the Australian and Canadian armed forces. For instance, in East Timor in 1999, the International Force in East Timor’s (INTERFET) ‘Westforce’ (based on the Australian 3rd Brigade), embraced a reinforced company of Canadian ‘Van Doos’, New Zealander troops, British Gurkhas and some Irish Rangers. In some respects, Westforce is reminiscent of the multinational 27th Commonwealth Brigade during the Korean War. In 2001–02, Canadian and Australian troops also served together in the campaign against the Taliban regime and the al-Qa’ida movement in Afghanistan. Moreover, in the 1990s, Canada’s approach to interoperability also tended to parallel that of Australia’s and was, and remains, facilitated by membership of the quadripartite America–Britain–Canada–Australia (ABCA) armies working group.8 For both Australia and Canada, ABCA encourages doctrinal and materiel–technical standardisation and provides opportunities to participate in field exercises at formation level and above.9 Australian and Canadian military force structures and equipment inventories also reveal remarkable resemblances.
An examination of the force structures of the current ADF and CF reveals that there is a degree of similarity. Such similarity suggests that, if Australia and Canada were to be involved in a Korean-style campaign again, there would be good grounds for cooperation at every level. In terms of land forces, Australia and Canada both possess German-built Leopard 1 tanks, light armoured vehicles, and modified American M113 armoured personnel carrier variants. The regular land force of each country also embraces a three-brigade regular force structure supported by Special Forces and regionally based volunteer reserve (or militia) forces. Moreover, both the Australian Army and the Canadian Land Forces have maintained up to a battalion of airborne troops. Australia maintains a three-rifle company airborne battalion. Canada’s three-rifle company battalion was disbanded in 1995 but has maintained the capability in dispersed company-level units. Australian Army and Canadian Land Force tactical command-and-control systems also bear a high degree of commonality and interoperability, due in part to the membership of both nations in the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP).10
In terms of air power assets, both the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force use the FA/CF-18 (Hornet) fighter, the C130 (Hercules) and P3 (Orion/Aurora) aircraft.11 More recently, both nations have joined the US Joint Strike Fighter Program as third-tier international partners, with a view to purchasing the joint-strike fighter as a ‘next-generation’ combat aircraft. Both Australia and Canada have also explored the prospect of acquiring larger transport aircraft in order to enable greater strategic lift of troops and equipment.
In terms of naval force structure, both the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) are remarkably similar organisations. For example, both the Australian and Canadian fleets have parallel two-ocean fleet configurations. Both navies possess almost an equal number of helicopter-equipped frigates, replenishment ships, conventionally powered submarines, and coastal defence vessels. Both the RAN and the RCN have also achieved virtually the same degree of interoperability levels with the United States Navy (USN). Indeed, the Australian and Canadian fleets have become, in the words of one writer, ‘as close to being fleet units of the USN as the [British] Admiralty [at the beginning of the 20th century] wished the new Dominion navies to be’.12 Unlike Australia, however, Canada has a smaller fleet of patrol boats and no significant amphibious vessels.
In military terms, then, both Australia and Canada are middle powers with compatible medium-weight armed force structure and types of equipment. In one sense, the various similarities between the forces’ equipment and organisations might be described as coincidental. From an historical perspective, however, the military parallels between Australia and Canada suggest that they are ‘strategic cousins’ due to the presence of many enduring geo-strategic fundamentals. It is these fundamentals of heritage, geographic size and population that have driven Canadians and Australians to develop force structures and acquire weapons and equipment with comparable capabilities.
Undoubtedly, in military terms, there remain numerous and significant differences between Australia and Canada. Three obvious differences that condition Canada’s military outlook are proximity to the United States, the country’s Anglo-French political tradition and its membership of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Unlike Australia’s, Canada’s strategic outlook is not affected by the ‘tyranny of distance’ since the guardian of Western civilisation and world order, the United States, is on the doorstep. On the other hand, Quebec’s predominantly French culture and language, along with a history of secessionist referenda, have made one of Canada’s main concerns that of national unity. In this respect, Canada more closely resembles old South Africa rather than modern Australia. Between 1910 and 1961 differences between English South Africans and Afrikaners affected national unity and consensus on defence issues in ways not dissimilar to those between English and French Canadians. Membership of NAFTA also shapes Canada’s strategic outlook by creating an American regional bloc based on the United States, Canada and Mexico.
One might argue that a combination of geography, politics and economics has made Canada comfortable with its region and therefore able to adopt a postmodern view of defence. Australia, on the other hand, does not enjoy such a benign region. The Asian economic crisis of the 1990s, the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the crises in East Timor and the Solomons, unrest in the South Pacific and the rise of political Islam in South-East Asia have no parallels in Canada’s North American region. For this reason, Australia’s defence policy and armed forces remain traditionally focused on military power and warfighting. In addition, the ANZUS alliance remains vital to Australia and the United States in a way that NATO does not since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, one might argue that it is not so much the ADF and the CF that are different as the policy processes at work that have shaped the destiny of the two armed forces over the past fifty years.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the armed forces of Canada and Australia have similar predispositions, force structures and common historical roots that provide a useful and ongoing basis for 21st-century cooperation. Although these similarities appear to be greatly outweighed by the strong geopolitical, political and economic policies of Australia and Canada, focused on the Asia-Pacific and the Americas respectively, they may yet prove useful in the early 21st century because of the unpredictability of events in the global ‘war on terror’. The common ties and interests that led Australian and Canadian forces to work together in the first half of the 20th century from the Boer War to Korea—and to cooperate more recently in East Timor and Afghanistan—may increase in the future, given unforeseen operational requirements. In this sense, Australia and Canada are ‘strategic cousins’, albeit distant ones.
Endnotes
1 Canada and Australia spent US$7.6 billion on defence in 2002. See The Military Balance 2002–2003, IISS, London, 2002.
2 See A. J. Hill, Chauvel of the Light Horse: A Biography of General Sir Harry Chauvel, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 22–3 and 28–9; and Carman Miller, Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War 1899–1902, Canadian War Museum and McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 1993, pp. 224–30.
3 Gregory Blaxland, Amiens: 1918, Frederick Muller, London, 1968, pp. 159, 163 and 191.
4 David Bercuson, Blood on the Hills: The Canadian Army in the Korean War, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999, pp. 37–40.
5 Gregory Blaxland, The Regiments Depart: A History of the British Army, 1945–1970, William Kimber, London, 1971, p. 190.
6 John A. English, Lament for an Army: the Decline of Canadian Military Professionalism, Contemporary Affairs number 3, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Toronto, 1998.
7 Graeme Cheeseman, Canada’s Post–Cold War Military Blues and its Lessons for Australia, Working Paper no. 60, Australian Defence Studies Centre, Canberra, August 2000.
8 Grant A. Johansen, The ABCA Program: Rhetoric to Reality, The Occasional number 44, Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, Wiltshire, January 2002.
9 Major-General Bill Leach, ‘ABCA and the Future Battlefield: A Canadian Perspective’, in J. Mohan Malik (ed.), The Future Battlefield, Deakin University Press & Directorate of Army Research and Analysis, Geelong, 1997, pp. 263–70.
10 Personal communication from Lieutenant Colonel Mick Brennan, Australian Liaison officer to US Communications Electronics Command, 1 May 2003.
11 Alan Hinge, Australian Defence Preparedness: Principles, Problems and Prospects, Australian Defence Studies Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy, 2000, p. 286.
12 Rear Admiral Fred W. Crickard, ‘A Tale of Two Navies: United States Security and Canadian and Australian Naval Policy During the Cold War’, unpublished Master of Arts thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, September 1993, p. 262.
