I don’t know why Australia is always playing catch-up on matters of national security?
It does us no credit and potentially a heck of a lot of harm.
Successive governments dithered about the submarines we desperately need.
The Labor Gillard government did nothing. The Abbott government got spooked into dumping Japanese subs for some frankensub out of France.
The best subs decision over the last two decades was Morrison’s to dump the frankensubs and get nukes off the shelf.
But nuclear submarines aren’t the be all and end all.
They have superior range and abilities, in many circumstances, but we still need some diesel electrics for the shallow water stealth missions in places like the South China Sea.
Still, at least we are making some progress.
Now we also need to fully embrace the nuclear revolution by allowing nuclear energy - and more importantly, a nuclear industry in this country.
Both sides of politics have been pathetic on this.
Labor doesn’t want to touch it for fear of offending their comrades and the marxist greens. This is despite nuclear being much better for the climate than the toxic solar panels they keep pushing.
The Liberals have their own toxic greens who inhabit their party and who are too darned scared of even having the debate. The time to do it was when they were in government and reviewing the EPBC act that prohibits nuclear power.
Sufficit to say, they didn’t.
But going further than nuclear power, why don’t we have nuclear weapons too?
Realistically, we are never going to be able to repel any invasion from China alone. Or from a number of other countries.
Our major ally, the United States' military is cooking in a stew of democrat juices arguing over pronouns and gender rights.
They’re also using an awful lot of money, munitions and other military equipment supplying the Ukrainians…with an unhealthy leakage of that cash and arms to other corrupt nations across the world.
That leaves America relatively weak.
Sure, they'd likely spring to our defence but I’m not actually sure that would do too much for us in terms of actually winning.
More than half of the US’s 469 military interventions since 1798 have happened in the last 30 years and the track record isn’t that great.
Afghanistan - that was a win for the Taliban
Iraq - Saddam is gone but nothing much else has changed. Same with Libya. The Syrian regime is still standing. Vietnam was another notable loss.
It’s not all bad news though.
They did repel the barbarians from ISIS and, after a seven year battle, managed to beat the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, driving its leader Joseph Kony into hiding.
The US even managed victory over the Somali Pirates.
Most of the recent engagements have been more about control of resources, or financially motivated, rather than for nationalistic defensive purposes.
In truth, the greatest military moment for the United States was when it helped put a stop to WW2. It managed to do so using the destructive use of nuclear weapons.
That’s a good lesson for us.
The best defensive shot we have is being able to guarantee the destruction of any country that tries to take us down.
That’s the blunt force deterrent that nuclear weapons provide. They aren’t the answer to all our defence problems, but they’d go a long way to making sure our enemies think twice before trying to come ashore.
