Poor Military Posture

"Our state of preparedness is inadequate, our defense expenditure unworthy of a wealthy people that has accepted onerous treaty obligations, and the administration of defense at the top levels of government is weak and too loosely coordinated." So said a group of Australian experts in a recent military study. In a modest way, Australia is try ing to do something about it.

A detachment of army engineers last week embarked for Borneo to build landing strips as part of a plan to help Malaysia in its "confrontation" with hostile Indonesia. Australia also agreed to a U.S. request for more aid to South Viet Nam, and the government plans to increase its mission in Saigon, which now consists of only 30 army instructors. But Australia, a SEATO member and often hopefully regarded as the West's anchor in the South Pacific, is still woefully unable to back up its brave intentions.

New Mirages. Australia's air force is obsolete, its navy a memory, its 23,000-man army smaller than Cambodia's. The country has no draft, spends less than 3% of its gross national product on defense v. nearly 7% in Britain and more than 9% in the U.S. There is so much dissatisfaction in the services about low pay* that the government last year had to forbid further resignations by officers. Only 1,765 recruits were obtained in the last nine months, which, after wastage, resulted in a net gain of only 816 men.

Since Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies and his Liberal Party were re-elected last November, he has raised the defense budget by $124.5 million to a total of nearly $586 million. Australia's seven squadrons of obsolete Canberra bombers and F-86 fighters will be replaced with French Mirage 111-0 fighters. Menzies has also placed orders for three U.S. guided-missile destroyers and four British Oberon-class submarines to bolster Australia's tiny fleet, consisting of a single aircraft carrier (damaged in a collision last Feb. 10), three destroyers and a handful of frigates and mine sweepers.

Uneasy Possession. What especially stymies recruiting is the flourishing state of Australia's economy, and the labor-hungry industries are certain to oppose any attempt to bring back the draft, which was abandoned in 1959 as "wasteful." Yet Menzies hopes to boost the army by 5,000 men at year's end, and has asked Parliament for an extra $35 million to win new recruits. Even so, this would leave it vastly inferior in numbers and even in equipment to the 350,000-man force kept by the Indonesians, with whom Australia shares uneasy possession of New Guinea.

Said External Affairs Minister Hasluck last week: "One encounters some times the rather simple belief that we can be a neighbor of Southern Asia by picking out the nicely behaved nations whom we can ask to tea Sunday afternoons. We cannot work out relation ships with neighbors our own size and our own outlook, and forget that at the end of the road lives China."

* Even though Aussie soldiers are among the highest-paid in the world. An Australian private earns $4.27 per day compared with $2.86 per day for a U.S. private.

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