The Boer armies turned to guerrilla warfare in the second half of 1900 because they could not hold ground in the face of British military power, but were unwilling to give up their fight for independence. An emerging generation of Boer leaders – prominent among them Christiaan De Wet, Kroos de la Rey and Jan Smuts – recognised the tactical strengths of their commandos and the potential they had for continuing resistance. Using their superior mobility, knowledge of the countryside, and intelligence networks, commandos could identify when and where to strike before rapidly evading the British response. De Wet’s operations in mid-1900 demonstrated that such operations could rise above being mere irritations and seriously disrupt British operations. Gradually, a new path to victory emerged in Boer minds: by continuing to resist within the now annexed Republics and spreading the war to the Cape and Natal, the commandos could exhaust British willingness to continue and give the Republics an upper hand during any peace negotiations.

Charles Frederick Cox returned home from South Africa on 3 October 1902. That this was months after his own regiment, 3NSWMR was because Cox had been sent to London to participate in Coronation duties for King Edward VII. While there he was both permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Just as he had done upon arrival in South Africa, on his return to Sydney Cox delivered some remarks to reporters waiting dockside. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Cox does not think there will be any more trouble in the Transvaal or Cape Colony’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, ‘but if more fighting takes place he is ready for more either there or elsewhere.’

At the heart of the bushman-soldier myth was combat. The skills of the bush – riding, shooting, living off the land, the innate intelligence of ‘the colonial’ – were valuable because they could deliver success on the battlefield. The bushmen would ‘be able to meet stratagem by stratagem’, as civilian advocate H. S. Stockdale crowed, and be ‘just as likely to stalk “the Boer” as the Boers to stalk them.’ Like many civilian enthusiasts Stockdale conceived of the Australians as auxiliaries to a British regular force, serving as scouts and skirmishers on the fringes of the battle. Military men were under no such illusions: the Australian contingents would do everything mounted rifles were expected to, from ersatz cavalry work to seizing and holding ground. Both groups, however, shared a confidence in their ideas. ‘As Australians have shown themselves in the fields of sport,’ Stockdale declared, ‘so I feel will they prove themselves on the field of battle.’

The war that began in October 1899 was not the first time Britain and the Boer Republics had clashed. The Free State and the Transvaal Republic were the fruit of the great trek (Voortrek), the mass exodus of Boers from southern Africa’s coastal regions in the 1830s that was prompted by British conquest of the region 20 years earlier. In 1877 the British annexed the two states; in 1880 the burghers rebelled. Their victory in 1881 led to a negotiated treaty that restored Boer independence while giving Britain a degree of control over their external affairs. What followed was what Bill Nasson has characterised as a ‘nervous stability’, as both sides regarded each other with suspicion but worked to avoid a renewal of hostilities while balancing their own interests.

When Australians woke on the morning of 13 October 1899 to headlines announcing war had broken out in South Africa, it must have come as little surprise. Since the collapse of talks between the Transvaal and Britain in June, war had seemed increasingly likely. The failure of these talks had prompted discussion, both in London and Australia, of the possibility of Australian contingents being raised and sent to South Africa in the event of war. A meeting between the six colonial commandants in late September to mastermind the raising of a united Australian contingent force collapsed in intercolonial bickering, but this proved only a minor speed bump. By the time the Boer ultimatum that made war inevitable was delivered on October 9 four of the six colonies had already received requests from London for troops, and the proposition was being openly debated in colonial parliaments. While there was vocal opposition from a minority, all six colonies ultimately agreed to send contingents to South Africa. It would be a small commitment for what was expected to be a short war.

On the evening of 12 June 1901, Private C.A. Salmon of the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles was making himself comfortable at the end of a long day’s trek. The left wing of 5VMR, part of a detachment under the command of Major Morris, had camped near a farm called Wilmansrust in the eastern Transvaal. Mail had arrived from home, fuel was readily available, and the rum ration had been dispensed. Spirits within the bivouac of the column were high. Yet, as Salmon lay down to read the newspapers sent from home, a shot rang out, followed closely by a series of volleys. Around 100 men from the Middelburg Commando had succeeded in moving past the camp’s outlying pickets undetected and were attacking. Salmon emerged into the darkness and was immediately wounded in the face; when he recovered he found himself face-to-face with one of the attackers, who called him a British cow and demanded he put his hands up. Salmon complied; so too did the survivors. Fourteen Victorians had been killed and 46 wounded, of whom a further four would eventually succumb. The entire engagement had lasted around 15 minutes.

Over 15,000 individual Australians served in contingents in South Africa and at least 600 died. While it was quickly overshadowed by the First World War, it was nonetheless an important part of Australia’s military history. Australian soldiers were sent in the belief that they possessed certain qualities that would make them valuable on the battlefield. It was an idea that, in various forms, would continue to surface throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What follows is an analysis that not just dispels this myth but shows what it can tell us about war more generally.

In early December 1900, the New South Wales Imperial Bushmen finished a day of marching in the western Transvaal and made camp. A storm was brewing, and just before midnight it broke. Troopers woke to a downpour that quickly soaked through their blankets, their uniforms and their food. The ground turned to mud and horses began to break their lines and escape. Exhausted from trekking and now unable to sleep, the New South Welshmen began to try and restore order in the camp. Amidst the confusion and misery, one helpful soldier began a sarcastic rendition of the song “Soldiers of the Queen.”’

Trying to destroy the commandos in the field was one half of Kitchener’s strategy. The other was the destruction of farms and the removal of civilian populations from rural areas to camps close to the British-controlled central railroad. This was designed to deny the commandos access to food and intelligence, but also to act as a threat: continued resistance meant denial of access to family and destruction of virtually everything a burgher owned.

It was not a radical departure from British practice but an evolution and consolidation of what had occurred over the previous 12 months. From the outset of the invasion of the two Republics, the British had considered forms of collective punishment valid for what they saw as illegitimate military actions. This policy had always been chaotically implemented, clashing as it did with a recognition that the conquered populations would have to be governed and so needed to be courted. Perhaps more importantly the shambolic state of British logistics meant during the invasion units lived off the land and rarely fulfilled their obligations to pay for what they took. By the end of 1900, the precedent for large-scale destruction as a tool of war had been well and truly set.

Dominion generals truly believed that they might need a corps-sized army formation, or something close to it, in the not-too-distant future. They had just assembled big armies to fight a big war, so the possibility of having to do it again sometime soon was not so remote to them as it appears to us 100 years later. Their first instincts were to preserve as much army as possible. Senior officers in Canada proposed a permanent force of 20 000–30 000 and a compulsory service militia of 300 000 soldiers. Australia’s generals wanted a permanent force of 3500 professionals to train a militia of 130 000 troops, which could expand to 182 000 in wartime. And they suggested that the Commonwealth Government implement ‘measures for the utilization for a definite period of the trained personnel of the A.I.F’ to put things on the right path.

Australia has been regarded for the last 80 years as a member of the elite club of truly industrialised and modern nations. The fact of Australia’s industrialisation is regarded by most people, particularly scholars, as an inevitable consequence of being part of the industrial and technological culture of north-western Europe. But there was never anything inevitable about the industrialisation of Australia. Australia was a battle ground for competing major economic powers including Britain, the United States, France, Germany and later Japan. In 1900, Australia was a valuable market for manufactured goods. While the struggle for this market was at times intense, there was de facto agreement among the major powers that the emergence of local secondary industry was not to be encouraged.

This compendium of essential works clarifies that the Australian Army’s force structure is organic and constantly changing. It provides a starting point for quickly acquiring new capabilities at short notice when required to meet emerging threats and challenges. The Army’s response to realising government direction and investment in new capabilities is being examined via a series of options under the Army Objective Force. It involves a careful and deliberate program of analysis that will provide a framework to develop the Army of the future. Readers can be assured that the Australian Army’s future is informed through understanding of its past – understanding that is provided to the Army’s planners today through contributions such as this.

This chapter describes and analyses national force projection rehearsals called the Kangaroo series of joint exercises, conducted in 1989, 1992 and 1995. These exercises measured Australia’s military proficiency in defending the homeland. The chapter finds that the major challenge during these early post–Cold War years involved synchronising Australian maritime, land and air power under joint command and control arrangements. Despite not stress testing other force projection functions, the ADF struggled for military self-reliance on home soil.

The current strategic environment can be characterised as a return to great power competition, centred on the Indo-Pacific region, within an environment of post-pandemic climate change. The ’region is in the midst of the most consequential strategic realignment since the Second World War’, and the confluence of these characteristics has resulted in a major step-change for Australia’s strategic policy and has significantly increased expectations of the Australian Defence Force. For the ADF, the force generation and force employment requirements to effectively shape, deter and respond within a ’competitive and contested’ region increase the demand signal on the force. For the Australian Army, accelerated warfare requires land forces ’to be ready to do more tasks, fight at all ranges, and enable the joint force in every domain’.

In the last few years, the issue of mobilisation for war has, in Australia at any rate, shifted from the arcane to the highly pertinent. Concerns publicly manifested in the government’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which asserted that the long-held notion of up to 10 years’ warning for a possible conventional attack on Australia had – as 10-year rules tend to eventually do – evaporated. Moreover, it alluded to what was thought to be a remote, but nevertheless alarming, possibility of a ‘high-intensity conflict’ in Australia’s region. Suddenly, generating combat power, perhaps more than what was readily to hand, has taken on some urgency.

The 2019–21 period required unprecedented mobilisation of the Australian Defence Force in response to domestic contingencies, including the National Bushfire Emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic and high-risk weather season events. The extensive employment of the ADF Reserves during this mobilisation provides a valuable opportunity to consider the ADF’s scalability and the emerging role of the part-time force. This chapter explores the Reserve’s contribution to recent domestic contingencies and how historical compromises which have limited the Reserve’s past employment now warrant revision.

In the years since the deployment to Afghanistan, Australia’s predicament has become increasingly challenging closer to home, and further abroad, as complex environmental and geopolitical security challenges overlap and become more acute. Australian policymakers should look to create an incentivised but voluntary scheme for national and community service to bolster national resilience. This chapter makes the case for such a scheme: an Australian universal scheme for national and community service. It argues that given the current threat environment and the frequency and scale of natural disasters, it would be imprudent for the Australian Defence Force to continue on a course that was appropriate in past decades.

This chapter highlights one strategically significant complexity in Australia’s Second World War: concurrency’s impact on labour distribution. In the absence of centralised planning, concurrency forced employing stakeholders to win their workforces through frank competition – a competition made all the more damaging, the Minister for War Organisation of Industry pointed out on the very eve of the Pacific War, by employers operating ‘in numerous watertight compartments’ in which each ignored their likely effect ‘on the man power resources of the Nation as a whole’.

This chapter considers the concurrency pressures faced by the Australian Army, particularly in the middle years of this century’s first decade. As the 2020s portend not just localised regional crises or disasters but also a greater range of environmental challenges coupled with a surge in governance challenges and great power contestation, the Army needs to reflect on concurrency pressures of the recent past to prepare for what the future holds. In contemplating contingencies the Army can expect to face in coming years in Australia’s region, reflecting on the experience from 2003 to 2010 is a good place to start.