Apparently it is only 250 at a time, as a "training" center. ?? ("Death from the Air Robot Wars" ?)
And there are other articles saying the the US has had an active Air Force and Naval presence in Australia for a very long time, and a large military "exchange" program.
I found out this week that the US has some kind of Naval Base in Qatar, besides the big one in Bahrain.
(Oh, and the US and France have been selling, on credit, a whole bunch of military goodies to Greece this year.)
Australia is a military ally of the US, and has been for many, many years, and even happily jumped down the Iraq shithole when you asked.
2: and the Vietnam and Afghan ones too, of course.
Disparaging the Boot is a Bootable offense.
I'm pretty sure Stanley also objects to the large U.S. military presence in the U.S.
5: I think nostalgia for the Cold War has lots of people jonesin' for a sequel with China, and that's annoying and wasteful. I'd happily support paying the same Marines to do nice, not-blowy-uppy things overseas (and here at home! CCC!) on behalf of the taxpayers, but handing out food in Bangkok and building schools in Sheboygan doesn't tend to rank high among the sabre-rattling crowd in the Pentagon.
For someone who is as ardent a critic of the US empire as McManus, he sure is ignorant of the extents.
handing out food in Bangkok and building schools in Sheboygan doesn't tend to rank high among the sabre-rattling crowd in the Pentagon.
The seond part is definitely true, but the Marine Corps and Navy make a great deal of their efforts in disaster relief (and rightly so: whom do you think we got to rapidly respond to the 2006 tsunami?).
1.last is horrible. Unless the debt is senior to Greek bonds.
This now gives the boys and girls a chance to die in order to keep shipping lanes in the South China Sea under US control. Yippie.
I'd be okay with China as SEAn hegemon if it brought about a Kra Canal.
Unless the debt is senior to Greek bonds.
This would make it less horrible how? Because our arms merchants would be less likely to get ripped off?
I knew someone who was stationed at the base in Qatar, which is the only reason I know how to pronounce "Qatar".
I participated in a three-week USAF/RAAF flying exercise at Darwin in 1992. At the time Australia was actively encouraging the US military to set up a year-round training detachment there, and the people of Darwin and surrounding areas were quite pro-American. The potential advantages to us were many (not least of which was ample land, sea, and air space for training). I always wondered why we didn't jump on it at the time; all I could think of was that we worried what our other allies in the area would think of such an arrangement.
Our defence brass has been keen on an expanded US presence in the Northern Territory since forever (we were still offering the Poms bases in the Northwest at the height of East of Suez) but it was politically impossible in the Bush years.
However, if American global hegemony extended to giving client states votes in presidential elections Obama would have received about 80% of the Australian allotment, which goes some way to explaining the relative lack of debate over this deployment (which will be closer to 2,500, plus vehicles), despite it increasing tensions with both our biggest trading partner and our immediate neighbour to the north (seriously, the press hasn't discussed how Jakarta sees this).
The hope appears to be that this isn't going to get us heavily involved in a future South China Sea incident because our and the US's economic relationships with Beijing are too valuable to risk - a trade-based theory of demilitarization that has been mooted before with less than perfect predicative effect.
*performs quaint local dance*
(Garrett, of course, is now a minister in the government which just signed off on this (and uranium exports to India)
He who fucks nuns...)
I'm a real live Australian too, and I say US soldiers can fuck right off. But I don't know that Indonesians* would be particularly suspicious about US troops in the NT as opposed to say, Australian ones.
* I'm in Indonesia now, so I could ask some. But they're probably not representative.
Less disturbed now than a decade ago, but in a lot of people's eyes (policymakers and public) it was only recently that we hacked off a chunk of their country with US logistical support.
The central challenge of Indonesian security policy is maintaining sovereignty over the archipelago and the East Timor example and the risk of similar interventions in the future, potentially brought on by Islamist insurgency, communal warfare and/or Western Archipelago separatism is a serious threat as far as their policymakers are concerned and one this base makes a little more possible.
Whereabouts in Indonesia, btw?
D'oh, Eastern archipelago separatism (Papua, the Malukus).
I'm in Sulawesi. My point was that some Indonesians are already plenty suspicious of us, and we are (intermittently) seen as more an imperialist menace than the US. So not really disagreeing.
When we were down in Darwin a while back, we were pretty impressed with the place. Even by Australian standards, it's kind of isolated, but it is on the Indian Ocean and not all that far from Indonesia, a nearby colonial power. The museum in Darwin had, along with a gigantic dead crocodile, a good exhibit on cultural continuity across the Torres Straits what with the X-ray style of painting and tube burials.
Back then Australia was fighting "rascals" in PNG and managing the refugee flow from the north. Given the long history of US and Australian military cooperation, I'm not surprised by the idea of joint exercises. If nothing else, maybe a few Americans will figure out Australian rules football.