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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 …

Twenty-five centuries ago, in his History of the Peloponnesian War , the Athenian soldier-historian, Thucydides, wrote that the three strongest motives for states to engage in war were ‘fear, honour and interest’. 1 Athens went to war with Sparta because the growth of the latter’s power threatened the status and interests of the former. In later centuries, Thucydides’ formula influenced both the work of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, and by the 20th century had become the philosophical basis of the realist …

The Australian Government’s decision to go to the assistance of the beleaguered government of the Solomon Islands represents an interesting case of a ‘permissive intervention’. Such an intervention may be defined as a situation in which a government requests assistance in restoring order in circumstances where normal governance and the ability to maintain law and order has broken down. Missions of this nature pose particular challenges to civil–military organisation and liaison support. In this respect, we …

In January 2001, Australia responded to a British request for advisers to assist the International Military Advisory Training Team mission in Sierra Leone (IMATT–SL) in its task of rebuilding the newly raised Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) in West Africa. Codenamed Operation Husky , the Australian commitment lasted for two years and consisted of an infantry captain and an infantry major deployed to act as a battalion and brigade adviser respectively. Each contingent deployed for a six-month …

One of the most important challenges facing the Australian Army at the beginning of the 21st century is to ensure that its leaders of the future are appropriately trained and educated to face a military environment that will be uncertain, complex and multidimensional. This article argues that a key leadership and command challenge facing the Army at the beginning of the new century is the integration into the land force of recruits born after 1977—known as the ‘Net Generation’. It is the members of the Net …