The Prime Minister announced on the weekend that Australia will be increasing its surface fleet by one third and doubling its submarine fleet. In addition we are to get 100 new fighter jets in a move widely seen as being about moving to counter the rise of China. Several problems arise with this idea; firstly under no circumstances could Australia take on and defeat the People's Republic of China on the battlefield. This is a country that can field an army of 5 million if it really needed to, and it has the bomb.

Secondly the notion is not so much about defending Australia, but defending its interests which sounds a lot like code for following the Americans around to the next war, that is, imperialist adventurism.

Thirdly, with an expanded military, you get a true military industrial complex and that has severe repercussions for democracy as President Eisenhower warned in 1961:

…yet we must not fail to comprehend its (the military industrial complex’s) grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

America failed to heed this warning, these days war is big business and that in part drives its foreign policy. We would do well to give that kind of society a miss.

Fouthly, the fact is we can only put half our submarine fleet to sea on any given day as it is, where are we going to get the extra men and women to man these ships and planes from? Conscription? I dare say not. Most likely it will come from ramping up nationalist sentiment and viewing the military as something noble. In his speech making the announcement, Kevin Rudd called military service “our nation’s highest calling”. Expect more of this sort of thing if he gets his way.

Finally and most importantly, there are certain consequences for getting the nation into uniform, which Germaine Greer has spoken about.

In relation to the training that forms the building block of military life she says:

Armies are built on the premise that rage can be induced and manipulated, be careful what you wish for if you wish for the return of national service, I should know because I live near an English garrison town and there the squaddies regularly terrorise the civilian population using their training to inflict better and graver injuries on civilian boys and it’s quite interesting that when the police are called they almost never prosecute the squaddies, so there is a vein of poisonous rage that is exploited by civil society.

She points out that once the soldier has been high on rage chemicals, they can be triggered at will, but once triggered, they can’t be controlled, you can turn rage on but you can’t turn it off. She also notes the role alcohol and other stimulants play in warfare.

More generally an expansion of this kind cannot be done without militarism (or conscription) as Germaine says:

Militarism takes the vulnerability of human beings to both terror and rage and incorporates it into a system. Each year we encounter instances of the vileness of the procedures by which this transformation is effected. They include systematic humiliation and abuse of junior personnel, initiation ceremonies, bullying at all levels. At Deap Cut barracks in Surrey, four recruits have died of gunshot wounds, one of them who died in 1995 had been continually abused verbally and physically attacked by a gang wearing gas masks as he slept and thrown through a window after answering an officer back. His body exhibited five bullet wounds, only one from close range, yet the verdict remains suicide. The one woman among the four, who was shot through the forehead six months latter, was said to have been forced to have sex with an officer, the bullet that was in her head has since gone missing... The suicides or murders are all dots on the trajectory of rage as it is exploited by the military establishment.

And as to the well known effects of seeing service:

I don’t have to remind you I hope, of the psychological devastation that has driven Australian servicemen returning from Afghanistan it do away with themselves. In the United States, sixteen army recruiters have killed themselves since 2000; the usual explanation is post traumatic stress disorder, the soldiers were all being treated with anti depressants.

Depression is by far the commonest mental illness; very few of the vast number of depressed people in our societies will shoot or hang themselves. What is being overlooked in dealing with these cases is the pathology of rage itself. Rage is addictive, people dependant on rage body chemicals cannot settle down, they cannot just get over being poisoned for months on end by rage-cum-terror. Suicide has always been more common amongst soldiers than amongst the civilian population. As rage is engendered in them by a culture of systematic humiliation and then deployed in acts of extreme violence and cruelty in the field, we really can’t be surprised if they shoot or hang or drown themselves or cut their own throats. Though most of the recent army suicides had been on medication, none I think took the comfortable route of a drugs overdose. The level of violence involved in soldier self-destruction should treated as an important clue as to its aetiology, and the four letter word I use for that, is rage…if you treat people in a certain way rage is what you get and if you are tyrannical you can deploy it, you can use it, you can abuse it.

Closely allied to militarism is nationalism. Nationalism on the battlefield takes the form of the dehumanisation of the enemy. How else would any normal human being be persuaded to kill another than by seeing them as less than human? At home the philosophical idealism of nationalism fosters class collaboration which favours the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of us – after all, we’ve all got to do our bit haven’t we? More dangerously on the home front nationalism takes a xenophobic turn to newcomers and usually a racist attitude to ethnic minorities, particularly ones from the countries we might be fighting. As these bellicose postures depend on hyper masculine aggression, misogyny and homophobia are never far behind in such a culture. Do we really want this in our society? Do we really want this aggression and the broken men it produces? Is this in our 'national interest'?

The notion of the Defence Department’s hawks of an Australia armed to the teeth and ready to send people to their deaths to further nationalist vanity and imperialist expansion is repellent in the extreme and completely unnecessary. All this says nothing of the financial cost, not just of the planes and boats, but of the social consequences this policy will produce. Taking a razor to the Defence Department itself will only fund so much, surely there are far more pressing expenditures to fund in these difficult times.