On 23 May 2017, known Islamic terrorist Isnilon Hapilon was reported to be in western Mindanao to meet with Omar and Abdullah Maute, leaders of the Islamic State–affiliated Maute group. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Philippine National Police operation to arrest them set in motion a chain of events that thrust the previously little known Philippine city of Marawi into the global spotlight. This raid rapidly escalated into an urban battle that lasted for five months, involving more than 6500 Philippine military personnel. The fighting resulted in the devastation of a major city and the deaths of over 900 insurgents, at the cost of 168 AFP and security services personnel killed and over 1400 wounded.

If I ever had the idea that as a defence attaché I would spend my time attending parades and playing golf during the day and going to cocktail parties at night, it didn’t last for very long.

‘Buy some shoes that you can run in.’ That was the first piece of advice I received from the guy I was taking over from in Jakarta towards the end of 1998. Having been Australia’s Army Attaché at the Australian Embassy for the previous two years, and now as a veteran of the Jakarta riots, he knew what he was talking about.

Cambodia is a small country in South-East Asia between Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.1 It won independence from France in 1954 and was governed by a popular autocratic monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, until his overthrow in a military coup, in 1970. General Lon Nol established the Khmer Republic and took Cambodia into the Vietnam War as an ally of the United States. Sihanouk, from exile in Beijing, placed his support behind an obscure peasant revolutionary movement in the countryside, his popularity drawing many Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge. They also rebelled against Lon Nol’s government in Phnom Penh because of the extensive bombing by the United States of rural areas across Cambodia.

On 1 March 1848, Lord Palmerston, British statesman and future Prime Minister, told the House of Commons: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ It was sentiment of the ages, one repeated, for example, by Henry Kissinger in 1979, who told the world: ‘America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.’ In a similar vein, on 14 September 1999, Prime Minister John Howard stated: ‘You have ongoing interests and you have special interests but this idea that you have a special relationship … is a mistake.’ Twelve days later, the Prime Minister reflected upon ‘the foolishness of building a foreign policy on the notion of special relationships, and on the compatibility of temperaments and personalities of the leaders of a nation at any given period’. Considered against such sentiments, the Army’s concept of accelerated warfare, with particular reference to implicit themes of persistence – that is, the organisation’s ambition to achieve persistent presence in the region and beyond through access, endurance and people-to-people links – seems problematic.

After Australian military forces withdrew from Vietnam in 1972, it seemed that Australian forces would never again serve overseas on warlike operations unless the nation was under direct threat. Yet just nineteen years later the Australian Government committed forces across the globe to the Gulf War. Why did the Australian Government decide to make this commitment, and what impact did it have on future Australian military operations? The issue of strategy and command continued to be paramount.

The great nineteenth-century Prussian general Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, ‘The Elder’, once declared that no operations plan survives contact with the enemy. But no one has suggested – least of all Moltke – that an army or a commander contemplating a military operation should have no plan. The same can be said about previous experience of war. A new war is likely to have such a different shape and character from the previous one that previous experience might be found to be of no value or, indeed, even misleading. Army commanders are often accused of preparing for the past war rather than the future one. But no one has suggested that previous wartime experience is not valuable in an army about to embark on a new war.

Late in the morning of Sunday 2 August 1914, following the receipt of various warnings from London that war was imminent, the Australian Prime Minister, Joseph Cook, met senior army officers in Melbourne to discuss ‘arrangements for putting the precautionary stage into operation’. The officers explained the plans, and immediately orders were issued for the first stage of mobilisation. The orders went out to the permanent gunners of the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery, as well as the permanent engineers, to man the defended ports at Thursday Island, Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Albany and Fremantle.