Anzac's Dirty Dozen (34 page)

Nor has the situation changed for the better in the past quarter century. In 2008, the GAO reviewed the Pentagon's major procurement programs and concluded that ‘95 major systems had exceeded their original budgets by a total of US$295 billion … were delivered almost two years late on average [and] none had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages'.
¹⁸
Moreover, auditors stated that the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began. In 2011, the GAO audit found that one-third of US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 had cost overruns by as much as 50 per cent over their original projections.
¹⁹
Yet, because of what is known as the ‘termination liability cost' for cancelling a contract, vested interests argue that it should be maintained because the actual payout to the company
in question would be so high that it makes economic sense to continue.
²⁰

In Australia, there is a partial, concealed and an accommodating understanding of these phenomena. Andrew Davies and Peter Layton provide what is probably the typical response from mainstream defence and strategic studies analysts:

Defence projects the world over have a history of running over budget, behind schedule, or both. And the more research and development required, the longer the schedule delays and the greater the cost overruns. Accurately estimating the capability, cost and delivery timetable of a new piece of equipment is as much art as science, especially if novel technologies or manufacturing techniques are involved.
²¹

The problem here is compounded by various further factors: confidential settlements which hide dangerous corporate behaviour; bureaucratic infighting; the pretense, as opposed to the reality, of oversight; the ‘revolving door' syndrome whereby some former government officials and retired military officers move into highly paid consultancies for the Pentagon even while they are also working for companies seeking Defense Department contracts; the pervasive and corrosive influence of money in the decision-making process and the consequent division between careerists and ethical professionals in the senior military and civilian ranks; the US government's refusal to make a legislatively mandated database of the personnel involved in the revolving door arrangements; the drastic reduction in the oversight of contracts by the Defense Contract Audit Agency; and the resort to ‘budget games, lies, halftruths and misrepresentations' in testimony to Congress during hearings on the Defense Authorization and Appropriation Bills. Added to these must be the same patterns of corporate behaviour
seen in the Project for Government Oversight's 2009 Federal Contractor Misconduct Database: the top five corporations with the highest misconduct rate – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – were all leading defence contractors.
²²

It is fundamentally important to note that none of this finds a place in the alliance debate in Australia, or even in the specialist analyses of the government-funded, policy-oriented think-tanks. Moreover, given the Lockheed bribery scandals of the 1970s, the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, and the endemic criminal behaviour which led to the current Global Financial Crisis, it is surely reasonable to wonder whether the defence industries of the United States share the excesses of Wall Street.

Alarmingly, using only examples since 2006, there is a body of evidence which suggests that the United States is acting as a role model for Australia in this regard. In that year, the extremely important $400 million electronic warfare self-protection system for the RAAF's F/A 18 fleet, being built by BAE Systems at the Royal Australian Air Force Base, Edinburgh, was scrapped after being shown to be an expensive failure. Significantly, the decision to proceed with it in the first place in a politically sensitive state for the government of the day had been taken against expert advice.
²³
Three years later, the Australian National Audit Office tabled its report on the Super Seasprite helicopters for the RAN, which established not only that defence planners had wasted at least $1.4 billion on the project to buy eleven of the aircraft, but had ‘failed to properly inform their minister about concerns the project should be scrapped'.
²⁴
Then, in 2010 it came to light that private firms which had been allocated thousands of dollars by the Defence Department for ‘hotel accommodation, horseback trail rides, and use of an executive jet' reported they had no knowledge
of such contracts. This was followed by a report that a crucial Defence Department information system upgrade for keeping track of billions of dollars worth of assets was not only late and $30 million over budget, but that a company that the government had excluded from it on the grounds of conflict of interest in 2005 – KPMG – was now involved to the extent of at least 41 contracts.
²⁵
Three months later it was revealed that Australian government aviation contracts had been awarded to ‘companies that secured their bids with inside information about tenders provided by senior public servants'.
²⁶
It would be easy, of course, to continue citing more examples to the extent that they would almost become an end in themselves. While there is little to be gained from this there is doubt, however, that there is a proliferation of such cases in the United States, and a growing incidence of them in Australia.

To state the case most baldly, and to borrow from the title of Geoffrey Perret's work, the United States is ‘a country made by war'.
²⁷
Notwithstanding the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the US Civil War on its own soil, the United States had by 1942 already shown its war-proneness by its role in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and World War I. By 1980, the United States had managed to participate in eight international wars at a cost of nearly 700 000 dead. On average, each of these wars lasted longer (33 months versus 22 months) and cost more lives (83 000 versus 68 000) than those of Imperial Britain.
²⁸
It also must be remembered that, once committed to a war, states tend to forget the past and need to learn anew the costs to be borne. Wars tend to be long and expensive in human terms, and wars fought by major powers are particularly long and particularly expensive. And minor powers aligned with major powers share the risks and eventually the significant costs of such conflicts. US military interventions, whereby a US force was deployed on
foreign soil, are therefore relevant to the central argument of this chapter. Since 1900, 71 such initiatives have taken place, 15 in the period from 1945 to 1991. And this count leaves to one side the 215 occasions in the period from 1946 to 1975 when the United States used its armed forces as a political instrument without actually committing any violence.
²⁹

War-proneness and a habit for coercion and intervention do not of themselves disqualify the United States as an appropriate ally if the country were acting out of necessity, or perhaps, even legally. But the evidence is not favourable here either. As Melvin Small has argued, of the six major wars which the United States has fought (including both World Wars and Korea), ‘necessity' as a justification was found wanting in virtually every case.
³⁰
Nor were those conflicts in the post-1945 period either (domestically) constitutional or, more recently at least, in accordance with international law. As regards the former, two leading US constitutional lawyers, Michael J. Glennon and Louis Henkin (acknowledged by Theodore Draper as ‘the doyen of constitutional scholars'), have in separate accounts concluded that wars since 1945 have not been constitutionally sanctioned but presidentially arranged without congressional authorisation.
³¹
The Reagan administration had difficulty even in maintaining international legal norms in the exercise of US foreign policy. In Stuart Malawer's study of 32 major US foreign policy decisions taken by that administration, he identified only five as broadly complying with the standards of international law. The remaining 27 represented deviations from these norms which varied from moderate to significant, but in any case suggested a careless and certainly patterned disregard for them.
³²

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the record is unchanged: the invasions of and subsequent wars in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq were all either illegal in their initiation, in how they were
fought, or in the manner in which prisoners and non-combatants were treated – or all three. Indeed, the record includes ‘the violation of international agreements, the use of prohibited weapons, crimes of aggression, military attacks on civilian populations, support for war crimes by proxy [and] support for death squads and torture'.
³³
Of greater significance is the fact that, even where the perpetrators are known to the US government and the crimes in question are
prima facie
covered by US law, the decision has been taken not to press charges and prosecute, even when there is an admission of responsibility for the crime. Instead, successive administrations have declared that the president may order the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens living overseas.
³⁴

For the student of US politics and society, one of its most striking features is its openness. This is not to say that there is no deceit, secrecy, or hidden government – on the contrary, these most assuredly abound – but the openness of the United States at least allows political analysts to examine them in approximate terms. Indeed, US writers are exhibitionists in terms of the pathologies embedded in their national ideology. There is a consensus that the ideology of the United States emphasises patriarchy, individualism and the country's Anglo-Saxon heritage to the point of racism. Inseparable from this are both the consequences of the historical origins of the European settlement of America and its abundance of natural resources, and of the dominant political economy – the need for territory and markets, and a belief in what is known as ‘American exceptionalism'. Together they have induced a sense not just of nationalism, but of national mission, a tendency to universalise the American experience and either export it, impose it, or both. This tendency makes the United States impatient with those states slow to grasp the ‘truth' and even hostile to other forms of social and political revolution and development.

Since the contradiction between being ‘exceptional' and asserting the universal relevance of the US ideas and ideologies is never (nor can it be) resolved, the United States continually collides with a world of adversaries and enemies, almost all of them of its own making. Believing it is ‘exceptional', it believes it is also invincible. Believing it is ‘exceptional' and the instrument of a universal mission, it tends neither to compromise nor to trust diplomacy. It tends, therefore, to decide in solitude, and to act unilaterally.
³⁵
The Global War on Terror – with its declaration of a war against an abstract noun and an unknown enemy, effectively a declaration of perpetual war – only confirms this tendency. All of this has real and significant consequences for the United States' allies like Australia, for this is an intrinsic part of the nature of the power we chose to attach ourselves to.

It remains then to ask two questions: why is the Australia– US alliance so privileged and unchallenged in Australian security and strategic discourse? Now as much as ever, as Australia agrees to host US troops in Darwin from 2012. And what do we make of the claims made on the alliance's behalf? The first admits no easy answer because, ultimately, defenders of the alliance possess a temperament of conviction in things that can only be believed with their eyes and ears closed. Faith, in other words, is the currency here, not rationality. The second is definitely easier: the claims are at best the repetition of myth, at worst they are fiction. They have become, in the poetic turn of Dylan Thomas, ‘the hissing of the spent lie'. Both reign nevertheless, standing reminders of a myth that is killed again and again, and again and again comes back to life.

Further reading

Commonwealth of Australia,
Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific
Century: Force 2030
, Defence White Paper 2009, Australian Government, Canberra, 2009.

R. Drinnon,
Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building
, Schocken Books, New York, 1990.

M. McKinley, ‘Discovering the “idiot centre” of ourselves: Footnotes to the academic and intellectual culture of the Australian security policy discourse',
AntePodium: An Antipodean Journal of World Affairs
, 4, 1996.

—— , ‘The co-option of the university and the privileging of annihilation',
International Relations
, 18(2), 2004.

—— ,
Economic Globalisation as Religious War: Tragic Convergence
, Routledge, London, 2008.

M. McKinley (ed.),
The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives
, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995.

B. Toohey & M. Wilkinson,
The Book of Leaks: Exposes in Defence of the Public's Right to Know
, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1987.

J. Vasquez,
The Power of Power Politics
, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1983.

[12]

MONUMENTAL MISTAKE: IS WAR THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN AUSTRALIAN
HISTORY?

Peter Stanley

Although much of the thrust of writing about Australia in the twentieth century would lead you to think otherwise, war is not the only or the worst affliction that Australians suffered in this period. One small and personal case in point is the family of George Henderson Smith, killed on Gallipoli on 26 April 1915 with the 11th Battalion. The Australian War Memorial preserves the letters of condolence that his family received and the obituaries they collected. They make heart-breaking reading, and suggest the depth of the family's loss. But George's death seems not to have been the greatest trial that the Henderson Smiths suffered. George was the son of Perth businessman Robert Henderson Smith, who kept a detailed diary-cum-commonplace book. This diary, only available in the State Library of Western Australia in Perth, reveals that George's death was only one of the tribulations that his family and especially Robert faced during the war years. Robert's wife Eleanor had been mentally ill with ‘delusions and nervous twitchings' from before the war. Their daughter Nell refused to accept her mother's condition, and indeed, Robert felt,
was ‘quite incapable of understanding'. Managing what seemed to be Nell's growing mental illness added to Robert's woes. Then early in 1917 another daughter, Barbara, suddenly sickened and died. Suffering himself from severe headaches and insomnia, Robert wrote in January 1918 that ‘my life appears to be one long anxiety'. Later that year he wrote to the Claremont Hospital acknowledging that his wife's condition – what the doctor called ‘deep-seated delusions' – had been ‘a matter of great grief '. The strain made his surviving son Max ‘nervy and irritable'. Nor did the Armistice bring peace. Nell's mental illness, Robert conceded in 1919, was also hopeless.
¹
What was worse for the Henderson Smiths: the loss of George or the intractable, incurable mental illnesses of Eleanor and Nell? Whose loss hurt more: George's or Barbara's? Of course, there is no way to measure the suffering that Robert and his family bore. All we can say is that war was only a part of it.