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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 …

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 …