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Ted Serong    Written by: Anne Blair, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, ISBN: 9780195515923, 238pp.   Reviewed by: Major General Adrian Clunies-Ross (Retd) Brigadier Ted Serong was a unique Australian soldier, and the essence of any biography of him would be to capture this uniqueness. This Anne Blair does to a considerable degree. Serong is most widely identified with the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV); this is not surprising since he led the first team to South Vietnam in 1962 and …

Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for Bin Laden    Written by: Robin Moore, Random House, New York, 2003, ISBN: 9780375508615, 372pp.   Reviewed by: Captain Brett Chaloner, Royal Military College, Duntroon Robin Moore will never be renowned as one of the world’s great military historians; however, as the author of Task Force Dagger , he does what only an American author can do. He tells a story with great passion and fervour, sprinkled with good old ‘Uncle Sam’ ideology. This is a story of which the World War II …

Sir James Whiteside McCay: A Turbulent Life     Written by: Christopher Wray, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, ISBN: 9780195515732, 280pp.   Reviewed by: Brigadier John Essex-Clark (Retd) ‘One of the greatest soldiers ever to have served Australia ... greater even than Monash’ So wrote General Brudenell White. This is an honest book that should be read by those who aspire to understand leadership and the pitfalls of egocentricity. It highlights the weaknesses of a strict, dogmatic, non-empathetic …

Spirit of the Digger    Written by: Patrick Lindsay, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2003, ISBN: 9780732292751, 293pp.   Reviewed by: Brigadier John Essex-Clark (Retd) Patrick Lindsay, who also wrote The Spirit of Kokoda , now gives us this 293-page exposition of the quality and character of Australian servicemen by a carefully selected use of lucid anecdotal cameos from the Boer War to Iraq in order to illustrate the qualities of the Digger which, as he describes, are no more than the essence of Australianism. …

The Third Force: ANGAU’s New Guinea War 1942–46    Written by: Alan Powell, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2003, ISBN: 9780195516395, 292pp.   Reviewed by: Michael O’Connor Arguably, the most ubiquitous and perhaps the most neglected unit of the Australian Army in World War II’s New Guinea campaigns was the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU). The Army History Unit deserves commendation for sponsoring this excellent history of ANGAU just at a time when the need for a civil affairs …

Introduction The Retrospect section of the Australian Army Journal: For the Profession of Arms ( AAJ ) is designed to reproduce interesting articles from the Australian Army’s earlier journals, notably the Commonwealth Military Journal and the Australian Army Journal from the 1940s to the mid 1970s. In this edition of the journal, we are reprinting an edited excerpt from Lieutenant Colonel S. C. Graham’s study on the use of tanks in tropical conditions. The study first appeared in the June 1955 edition of …

* The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Mr Les Graw of the Foreign Military Studies Office, Center for Army Lessons Learnt, US Army, in developing the ideas in this article. Recent conflicts in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia have demonstrated the difficulty of dealing with insurgent forces that are well equipped with small arms, especially the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in urban operations. This article seeks to show how the Russian military has dealt with the …

In the future, the use of reconnaissance is likely to be an important feature in the Australian Army’s approach to conducting urban operations. Yet reconnaissance for the urban military environment is underdeveloped in current land-force doctrine. This is a paradox in an army with a heritage of strong patrolling and intelligence gathering stemming from the time of World War I. The aim of this article is to discuss the significance of the art of reconnaissance in modern urban operations and to examine what …

* This article is based on the author’s winning entry in the Chief of Army’s Essay Competition 2003. It probably never made sense to conceptualise our security interests as a series of diminishing concentric circles around our coastline, but it certainly does not do so now. - Senator Robert Hill 1 The White Paper, Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force , affirms the ‘defence of Australia’ (DOA) paradigm as the strategic foundation and primary forcestructure determinant for the Australian Defence Force …

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 …