Search

The phrases niche force or niche capability are currently being bandied about as a way to describe current Australian contributions to coalition operations. In a military, if not political, sense this concept may lead to the stagnation of the Army’s ability to conduct military operations. The concept of a ‘niche force’ is founded on the notion that it is appropriate to make force contributions whose specific capabilities are disproportionate to the actual investment of resources and personnel. This …

By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions    Written by: Richard Cohen, The Modern Library, New York, 2002, ISBN: 9780812969665, 519pp.   Review Essay by: Michael Evans It is well known that sword fighting is an excellent training ground for developing the reflexes of military professionals. In 1954, the International Council for Military Sports placed fencing at the top of recommended sports for military elites, particularly modern air-combat pilots. …

To The Editors, I have just commenced reading the new Australian Army Journal . I note that the Introduction states that the AAJ is to be ‘a professional Journal in which officers can record their ideas, views and experiences’. The Introduction goes on to state that ‘the AAJ welcomes articles, review essays and letters from all serving officers’. Are these phrases meant to suggest that the Army’s enlisted soldiers will never have anything to offer the revived journal? Warrant Officer M. Levine Regimental …

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 …