Retrospective - The True Principles of Australia’s Defence

Introduction

Once again, the Retrospect article for this issue of the AAJ is drawn from the pages of The Commonwealth Military Journal. The article is based on an address delivered to the United Services Institution of Victoria in 1911 by Colonel, the Honourable, James Whiteside McCay, Director of Intelligence, Commonwealth Military Forces. McCay’s subject was ‘The True Principles of Australia’s Defence’. The principles governing the defence of Australia was a topic much in vogue in 1911. The Commonwealth’s Labor Government had just launched its first universal conscription scheme, which enlisted all males from the age of twelve upwards for compulsory military training.

McCay was a rare phenomenon in Australia—a serving soldier with political experience. Between 18 August 1904 and 5 July 1905 he served as Defence Minister. While his tenure in office was brief, the period was notable for a number of key defence reforms, including the establishment of the Military Board and continued debate over a report on the Military Forces of the Commonwealth handed down by the General Officer Commanding, Major-General Sir Edward Hutton. McCay was forced out of Parliament when his electorate was abolished in 1906. Although he subsequently ran for the seat of Corio and for a Victorian Senate seat in 1910, he never regained political office. However, his military career prospered, and on 6 December 1907 he was appointed to command the new Australian Intelligence Corps with the rank of full colonel. In this capacity, he was able to advance the career of his old school friend John Monash. For most of his military career, McCay was a controversial figure. He frequently quarrelled with both superiors and subordinates, perhaps because he possessed a fiery Irish temperament. In 1913, a dispute with the Military Board had led to his dismissal from the post of Director of Intelligence. Nevertheless, as this article demonstrates, McCay was an intelligent and deeply thoughtful man.

At the heart of this article is perhaps the earliest elucidation of an issue still debated today: ‘What is the purpose of the Army in the defence of Australia?’ Now, as in McCay’s day, some Australians argue, as the article puts it, the ‘... Army’s duty is ... to sit in trenches and await attack. The picture in the mind’s eye of the public is one huge ditch round the Australian coast with soldiers in khaki at regular intervals peering over its edge, and gripping rifles with tense hands.’ In terms that are echoed in the current debate, McCay believed that ‘nothing could be more grotesquely far from the real needs of the situation’. He went on to state: [Australia’s] ‘.vital commercial and strategic points must be protected . but apart from this, our field army must be in the highest degree mobile, ready to concentrate anywhere, march anywhere, and fight anywhere—not everywhere.’ ‘Anywhere’ refers to the ability of the army to defend the national interest, as part of a coalition, at any point on the globe, because, as McCay pointed out, it was not possible for the Commonwealth’s small land forces to defend everywhere on the vast Australian continent.

The strategic dichotomy expressed in this article remains contentious. Moreover, the inability to resolve this policy dilemma during the course of the past century has at times seriously threatened the Army’s ability to play its proper role in national defence. As McCay recognised, soldiers ‘...are thankful to have nothing to do directly with this part of the work, but their plain duty nevertheless is to insist..., when advising those who are responsible, that Defence is a strategic question,...and that strategic considerations are paramount over all others,...most of all over those of political expediency’.

The True Principles of Australia's Defence

Those of you who have taken part in a Staff Ride have experienced the refined torture called ‘appreciating the situation’, and have probably also apostrophised it in unmeasured language before you were finished. But you also realised very quickly that it was impossible to carry out the campaign without an appreciation of it beforehand, or to carry it out successfully without a correct appreciation. Your individual experience is only a personal confirmation of the teachings of military history about ‘the real thing’, of which it has been said by high authority that no skill during the operations can retrieve the situation created by an initial strategic misapprehension.

In considering the problem of Australian defence, we must approach the matter in precisely the same way as the general planning his campaign. The situation is a larger one, with greater and more permanent, and yet at the same time in some ways vaguer factors, but it is a situation to be appreciated, and correctly appreciated beforehand, for no subsequent exertion or expenditure in preparing for war will atone for initial error. We may spend money like water on defence, but unless it is spent in the right way, it may as well not be spent at all. Robert Browning may be speaking the truth about the formation of character when he says that ‘All instincts immature, All purposes unsure’ have their value, but this does not apply in preparation for war, where the plan must first be absolutely definite, and the performance afterwards absolutely exact.

Applying the suggested method to the determination of the true principles of Australian defence, the very first thing to be settled is ‘What is the object to be achieved?’ That decided, the most vigorous watchfulness is needed to ensure constant striving after that object, and after no other. Secondary objects are continually presenting themselves close to the mind’s eye, and assuming great proportions because of their mere proximity, so as to hide, for a time at least, the main—the only—object, and to lead the actor quite astray. In war none but leaders of the very first rank have been able always to avoid ‘sidetracking’ themselves. In the stress of war, only the finest intellect and the most determined character can protect men from this error. In the day of preparation, we may make shift with intellects not of the first ranks, but only if they deliberately stop at intervals, and ask themselves: ‘Are we still pursuing the object, or have we gone aside to follow after strange gods?’

What, then, is the object to be achieved? The man in the street would probably have his answer pat: ‘To protect Australia against an enemy’. One needs to consider this answer only briefly in order to realise that, although it is quite correct, it is unfortunately ambiguous. The recruit who was directed to select a point to march upon, and chose a wandering cow, was in no worse plight. Protecting Australia against an enemy has, at any rate, two main interpretations, leading in many respects to utterly diverse provisions to effect the desired result. It may mean guarding against temporary local reverses and losses (the ‘raiding’ danger), or it may mean securing us against that permanent occupation of the whole or part of our territory by an alien power that would end or seriously interfere with the development of our national desires. It is just because these two interpretations have not been kept separate that our defence policy has wobbled, now this way and now that, and is even today rather nebulous and hesitant in some important respects. So far as raids are concerned, the worst of raids would do infinitely less harm to our continent than the mildest of droughts, and the worst of droughts is not more than an annoying episode in our national career. If, then, the two interpretations are set side by side, the second so enormously overshadows the first that we might well suppose that no patriotic Australian would hesitate to declare that raids might come and raids might go, but permanent occupations must be prevented forever. Yet there is a definite school of thought in Australia that urges purely local protection by local effort, and leaves to Britain the assuring of the permanent inviolability of our shores. If self-interest dictated this course (which it does not), it would still be a horribly ignoble course, not to be endured by Australians once they realised its meanness.

It may then be taken that the essential object of all Australian defence is to prevent permanent alien occupation of any part of our soil. The object being determined, and not till then, we proceed to the next stage of the problem, and ask the question, ‘How is the object to be achieved?’ A general planning his campaign is wise if he follows the ordered consideration of the matter which long experience has proved good. This order is briefly:

1. the situation of the enemy
    
2. the situation and position of our own forces  
    
3. morale and efficiency  
    
4. political and geographical considerations  
    
5. courses open to the enemy  
    
6. courses open to ourselves  
    
7. our decision as to what to do  

It will not be necessary, nor would it be interesting, to take these headings in detail, the one after the other, and all that is required for our present purposes can be summarised in these five statements:

1. Australia is part of the British Empire.  
    
2. Half of Australia is not effectively occupied.  
    
3. Australia is an island.  
    
4. There are possible enemies within striking distance of any part of our coasts, either for raiding or for occupation, if the sea is open to them.  
    
5. Our morale (we hope) is, and our efficiency must be, at least equal to any enemy’s.

As to the first and vital part—that Australia is part of the Empire—it is not so long since men said, and were not derided for saying, that Australia might thereby be dragged into a war with some great Power of the Old World, from which she would otherwise be free. She would also be free from the protection of the Imperial Navy; but that, it seemed, was immaterial, for ‘so long as we interfered with nobody, nobody would interfere with us’. This particular kind of mush is no longer a favourite breakfast food, but traces of it still linger on some unwiped lips, and there is still to some extent a vague feeling that civility will be as effective as it would be a cheap way of making ourselves safe. However, ‘Half of Australia is not effectively occupied’. Apart from the century of undisputed claim to the whole of Australia by the Union Jack—for which our British nationality and the British Navy alone are to be thanked—international jurists could easily be found to say that our great North West has never been so effectively occupied as to justify alien settlements there, even today, being regarded as a true casus belli. Moreover, with the sea unsafe for us, but safe for the enemy, half of Australia is, in a military sense, nearer to any of the Great Powers than to the Australian people. Even transcontinental railways will only bring us as near as the enemy to our unused millions of acres.

There is more than this in the fact of our vacant spaces. Wars in the past have been waged for dynastic reasons, to gratify insane ambitions, to salve wounds to individual vanity. However, for a generation and more, whatever the surface causes may have been, and whatever the spark that actually set fire to the gunpowder, the root of every war in the world has been the desire for more territory. When a great, growing and prosperous people finds its country too small for its population, national earth-hunger—the giant child of individual earth-hunger—overwhelms and submerges every consideration of ‘brotherhood’, every courtesy of diplomacy, every moral influence for peace. Nothing but naked fear of consequences, and an opposing front of physical force will prevent this hunger from insisting on being fed. Our fertile acres, lying vacant beneath a temperate sky, are a call and a lure that many a nation hears and feels. If we remember also the standing challenge that we have issued to almost half the world by our White Australia policy, we must realise that there is ‘ample room and verge enough’ for danger to Australia’s national integrity.

Australia is an island, and so her first line of defence is on the ocean. The high seas must be kept safe for all vessels flying the British Flag, and kept unsafe for others. While that condition of things continues, for we believe it to exist today, Australia is secure from permanent injury, even as is the United Kingdom. The great tradition of our race is that our fleets go forth to find the foe and crush him. So must it be hereafter. Australian vessels of war must fight in line with the rest of the imperial Navy, in whatever sea the contest may be. Our cruisers must guard commerce on the high seas, even though their special sphere be the great trade routes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Someone here may say ‘That is all very fine, but what if our Imperial dominion of the seas be lost?’ Well, in that case, our Australian dominion of half our continent is lost also if someone choose to challenge it. ‘But what of temporary loss of sea command? Must we not have local naval protection then, to save our cities and our coasting trade? Does not Britain herself always keep a fleet in Home waters?’ First of all, Australia is infinitely better off in such a case than Britain. Britain starves if her overseas food supplies are cut off. Australia could, at a pinch, sustain herself for an indefinite period. She is, again at a pinch, self-sufficing to an almost incredible degree. The desirability of protecting coastal trade and coastal towns is obvious, but the confusion of thought as to what protecting Australia really means is strikingly exemplified by the critic’s questions—and still more striking is the obscuration of the main object, the permanent integrity of our soil, by the secondary and infinitely smaller, though more alluring, object of preventing local losses. Besides, though it may not so appear at first sight, our land defences, if properly conceived and wisely prepared, will secure us against the worst of these misfortunes. We may not unnaturally want to stay at home, and protect against the swift and solitary burglar our silver teapot, and each of our six silver spoons, while our kinsmen are fighting the massed hosts of brigandage, but if our kinsmen fall, our spoons¹ will soon be in the melting pot, despite all our housewifely care.

A recent cablegram informed us that the deliberations of the Imperial Conference had not affected Australia’s intentions in relation to her control of her own fleet. It is not very easy to understand what this means, as official utterances on the matter in Australia have always been cryptic, and sometimes conflicting. The general impression to be gathered from what has been said by persons entitled to speak authoritatively is that, for constitutional reasons, our ships of war are to be exclusively Australian and exclusively under Australian control in peace time; that in war time they are not to pass automatically under Admiralty control, but that (to paraphrase) ‘undoubtedly the Commonwealth will hand control over to the Admiralty’. This article has neither justification for, nor intention of, entering the constitutional or the political arena, and on this point all that may be said is that, if war comes and we are not properly prepared, nothing can be hoped for from sending a messenger to the enemy under flag of truce, to explain that for constitutional reasons we are not quite as fit as we would otherwise have been, and would he kindly make allowance for it and equalize matters by fighting with one arm tied behind his back. It is indeed an optimistic view to take of weak erring human nature to suppose that, while we will not agree to automatic transfer of control, now that we rejoice in the piping times of peace, with no danger imminent, we will voluntarily part with control of our ships of war and risk their disappearing over the horizon to Madagascar or Formosa, at a moment when every primitive instinct has leapt to the surface in us, and self with a capital ‘S’ is dominant.

Settling questions for ‘constitutional’ reasons cannot in any case be justified in a proper consideration of defence problems, for these are strategic matters first, last, and all the time. The man who wishes to deal rightly with defence must possess imagination; he must travel forward on a mental time-machine (to use Mr H. G. Wells’s term) to the day when war is declared; he must then review his preparations as they appear at that moment, see whether they are sufficient to meet the danger actually existing— and previously foreseen, and he will find defects. Some of these defects will be due to defective instruments used to carry out his plan and will in part be unavoidable. The worst of them he will find to be owing to his having in time of peace permitted peace considerations to outweigh war ones; if such be not the case, he will have been a man in many millions. Then back he must come with Mr Wells to today, and frame his policy and avoid its defects; in other words, civil, popular and constitutional considerations must never prevail against war considerations in times of peace if they would have to yield to them in times of war.

War is a conflict of brains backed by physical force, and the framer of the fighting policy must work in an atmosphere of imagined war, or the men who do the fighting, and the country for which they fight, will pay dearly. Imagination, intellect, and invincible determination all are needed. Moreover, because the electorate in the long run controls the policy, the electorate has to be taught the right thing, and led in the doing of it. As the electorate is as much an emotional as an intellectual entity, the statesman requires still further qualifications for his task. The sailor and the soldier are thankful to have nothing to do directly with this part of the work, but their plain duty is to insist in season and out of season, when advising those who are responsible, that defence is a strategic question, and that strategic considerations are paramount over all others, most especially over those of political expediency.

Our possible enemies, with a safe ocean, may strike anywhere they please, in any fashion they please. For our sea forces and our land forces alike, the moral is obvious: they must be mobile. With Australia’s ten thousand miles of coastline, her scattered population, her vast distances and her numerous landing places, it will be just sheer good luck that will find our forces at the spot where the enemy is striking our shores. The best that we can normally hope for is that we may reach him soon enough to make him sorry he came. Our fleet must be a unit, and a sea-going unit at that, to move with speed and in strength to the point of danger, when it has been ascertained. Given a safe sea, the enemy may strike when, where and how he chooses, and can get in the first blow. Given an unsafe sea, he cannot strike effectively anywhere.

Now that the enemy has reached or is threatening to reach Australian shores, it is necessary to refer to our land forces. Soldiers have much reason to deplore the name of ‘Defence Force’ in lieu of the name ‘Army’. The public mind is in the mass highly emotional as has already been observed, and with it words have weight far beyond their true value. It is consequently not too much to say that the laudably intentioned words ‘Defence Forces’ have created a most injurious and widely spread feeling that our Army’s duty is, so to speak, to sit in trenches and await attack. The picture in the mind’s eye of the public is one huge ditch round the Australian coast, with soldiers in khaki at regular intervals peering over its edge and gripping rifles with tense hands. Nothing could be more grotesquely far from the real needs of the situation. To attempt to be prepared for the enemy at every point is to result in being able to meet him at none. A classic instance is that of the Austrian army behind the Mincio waiting for Napoleon in his first years of command in Italy. Every bridge, and every ford, was guarded by a detachment of Austrians. Napoleon lay west of the river, screened his front, made his plans at his own convenience, chose his own point for crossing the stream, moved to it with his whole army, scattered the weak Austrian detachments before him, and was over the river marching away before any other Austrian troops could come near him.

Strategically the situation is identical in Australia, once we lose the ocean. The enemy may land when, where and how he pleases. If we try to be prepared for him at every point we shall be strong enough at none. Our vital commercial and strategic points must be protected by forts and garrisons, but apart from this, our field army must be in the highest degree mobile, ready to concentrate anywhere, march anywhere and fight anywhere—not everywhere. It is as likely to have to fight at Cambridge Gulf as at Geelong; it has little chance of opposing the hostile landing; but if it be truly mobile and efficient, it has every chance of destroying the landed enemy. It must be big enough to compel the enemy who wishes to occupy our soil to bring a force of such a size that the transports conveying it, and the war-ships convoying it are a mark large enough to be easily found and easily hit by the Navy. Larger than that it need not be, and should not be.

There is no potency in mere numbers. This is an age that prizes numbers unduly and craves for numerical records, to the exclusion of a true appreciation of things. Pianos should be played for the pleasure of player and listener, not for seventeen and a half hours as a proof of endurance. Clubs should be swung for healthy exercise, not that someone should boast that he swung them for 82 ½ hours, and beat the previous record of 76 ¼ hours. Everyone ought to be as bored to read it as to see it, but they are not. The popular test of everything is quantity; it should be efficiency. There is a definite danger of this arithmetical obsession blinding us to the real test of our army. To have 100 000 men trained to arms is of no use unless they form a real mobile army of 100 000-strong, a living organism, properly coordinated and capable of fulfilling with a single impulse the will of a mastermind.

Last rule of all, our efficiency must at least equal the enemy’s. For our Navy is a small navy and, other things being equal, will not be as efficient as a large one. Moreover, allied fleets never do as well as a single fleet, if only because of the differences of training and thought. To be a true unit, delivering its single blow with crushing effect in war, a navy must have been trained as a unit in time of peace. The ideal for the Australian Navy, therefore, is that it should be in training and work an integral portion of the Imperial Navy. There is no insuperable difficulty to overcome in order to secure this result, and still maintain a just Australian pride in seeing a definite portion of the Imperial Navy, and not merely individual men or even individual ships characterised as Australian.

To develop this fully would require another lecture, but the ideal to aim at is that ‘the Australian Squadron’ shall no longer mean British ships on the Australian station, nor even Australian ships, manned from truck to keelson by Australians, serving in Australian waters. It shall, instead, mean an integral and definite portion of the Imperial Navy, paid for by Australia, manned by Australians, and serving wherever the Empire’s enemies (who are also Australia’s enemies) are to be found, fought and beaten. The Army’s mobile field force should be trained as nearly as possible to the Imperial standard, taught beyond doubt in the same school of military thought, and capable of moving overseas to the enemy before he moves oversea [sic] to us. It is better to invade than to be invaded; better to carry the war into the enemy’s country than to wait for war to come to you; better to attack than to defend; and better to go to the firing line than to be a reserve that waits for the enemy’s firing line to come to it.

To discuss how far the ideal is being carried into effect today is to tread on delicate ground without proper warrant. The object of this lecture is to emphasise the fact, too easily forgotten, that Australian defence is a strategic question and not a political one. In times of peace, strategy may be subordinated to politics, and while peace lasts no harm is done. But peace lasts only because the rival fears war, and this fear ceases when strategy is scorned by us. In times of war, politics are only a part (and often a small part) of strategy—which being the case, all true preparation for war implies that politics must be subordinated to strategy, even though every other public question is but a part of politics.

While this lecture avowedly deals with the question purely from the Australian point of view, it so happens (as reflection would show it must happen) that the building up of our Navy and our Army in the fashion best suited to save Australia permanently produces a Navy and an Army of the kind best suited to protect us against raids and, what is more, best suited in the protection of the Empire as a whole. In this matter, at least, Australian interests and Imperial interests not merely march together, but they are one. He who wants better reasons for treating Australian defence in a truly scientific way—and war is the most difficult of the sciences—must seek them elsewhere, for here none better are known.

Endnote

1    The six Australian States.