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History, Politics and International Relations   London, Routledge, 2023, pp 234 ISBN: 9781032117171 Editors : Bridget Brooklyn, Benjamin T. Jones, and Rebecca Strating Reviewed By : Pearl Nunn   Comprehensive yet accessible, challenging and probing; Australia on the World Stage is the ideal introduction to Australian foreign relations from before colonisation to the twenty-first century. The three co-editors include: Bridget Brooklyn, lecturer in Australian history at Western Sydney University and …

  Oxford University Press , 2023, 467pp Paperback ISBN: 9780192884084 Editor : Richard Overy Reviewed By : Martin Crotty   The publishing market is already saturated with books covering World War II. Library shelves, both public and private, groan under the weight of bulky and learned works from the likes of Basil Liddell Hart, Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, as well as Victor Davis Hansen, and in a more popular vein, authors such as Max Hastings and Anthony Beevor. Throw in the thousands of more …

American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict   by Elbridge A. Colby Yale University Press , 2021. pp 384 Hardcover ISBN: 0300256434 Paperback ISBN: 0300268025 Reviewed By : Courtney Stewart   Since its 2021 release, Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial remains a critical contribution to defence strategists grappling with the evolving complexities of China’s growing assertiveness, great power competition in the Indo-Pacific and the role of allies within these dynamics. The Strategy of Denial argues …

The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine   by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts Harper Collins, London, 2023, 444 pp ISBN 9780008567972 Reviewed By:  Adriaan van Staden   Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine is an expansive analysis of the evolution of global warfare since the end of World War Two. It delves into how conflicts, both large and small, have been transformed due to political, technological, and societal shifts, moving from state-on-state battles to asymmetric and hybrid …

2(AS) Division PME Program 'The Defence Strategic Review and National Defence Strategy: Implications and Outcomes for the Australian Army'   Magic weapons, political influence and resistance The  National Defence Strategy (NDS) and Integrated Investment Program (IIP) recognises strategic urgency and Australia’s challenging strategic circumstances. [i] Those circumstances, described in the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) [ii] and the NDS itself explicitly call out Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as …

Lessons Learnt from the War in Ukraine Introduction Many may not realise that the origin of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, dates back almost a century, while modern UAV technology has been rapidly developing in civilian and military contexts over the past four decades. Drones represent the intersection of two important trends in military technology – the precise nature of weapons and the rise of robotics which, when combined, are flown remotely at no risk to a pilot and capable …

2(AS) Division PME Program   What the Australian Army can learn from the 7 October 2023 HAMAS attack and the Israeli response On 7 October 2023, HAMAS terrorists launched a surprise attack on Israel. By its very nature this was a terrorist attack by the militia, intended to invoke fear by murdering and mutilating civilians, delivering – as Bruce Hoffman has argued – a statement of intent comparable to those of ISIS and the Einsatzgruppen. [1] Over the course of hours and days, militants abducted an …

Australia has experienced major power competition in the Indo-Pacific before. When we last experienced this environment, we deployed forces into south-western China under the little-known Mission 204 in 1941. This mission was expressly intended to deter Japan from aggression; a purpose that still resonates today in the context of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review which establishes a need for ‘asymmetry’ against a more powerful competitor, to affect ‘a strategy of denial.’ [i] Mission 204 thus highlights …

The use of Special Operations Forces (SOF) in recent conflicts has entrenched the perception of these elements as a direct-action tool capable of providing decisive effects. Concomitantly, there has been an increasing reliance on technological solutions to generate asymmetry against existing threats. This Occasional Paper suggests that as the war-peace paradigm is replaced by a more fluid competition-conflict spectrum, SOF must adjust to a campaign approach that seeks to leverage the poles of low and high …

Tactical Observations on the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine This Spotlight Brief examines Russia’s combined-arms approach during its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. To provide context, it discusses the primary Russian tactical unit of action, the Battalion Tactical Group. It subsequently explores a range of observations on the application of combined-arms at the tactical level during the initial phases of the invasion. It concludes by offering a number of deductions pertinent to the Australian Army’s own …