The 50th anniversary of Long Tan reminds most Australians that despite winning that iconic high intensity battle, the Australians and New Zealanders lost the Vietnam War. In fact, the First Australian Task Force (1ATF) fought at least 16 big battles, and through superior firepower from artillery, armor and airpower, won them all, sometimes by a narrow margin.

But most of the struggle in Phuoc Tuy province and South Vietnam was a prolonged low intensity guerrilla war. The big battles only mattered if the US and her allies had lost them, as big battle success allowed the allies to stay in the War. Enemy defeats just forced the enemy to revert to low intensity guerrilla war, which the allies had to control if they were to win.

Long Tan was significant in that it demonstrated, for the first time in South Vietnam, how quickly 1ATF units could reconfigure themselves from low intensity war into the combined arms team needed for high intensity battle. Although denied close air support by a tropical thunderstorm, D Company of 6RAR received supporting artillery fire that at times was directed accurately to within 30 metres of the Australians. The enemy could gain no relief by ‘hugging’ their foes’, and consequently suffered very heavy casualties from artillery fire, as well as from small arms.

1ATF units were to continue to demonstrate this ability throughout the war, with close coordination with air power, armor, and artillery fire support. So 1ATF could defeat the enemy when he escalated the intensity of the war through using his main force battalions.

But the enemy’s low intensity guerrilla war saw him disbanding many of his battalions down to small units of five to 10 men, to harass allied forces and wear them down over time. The US forces failed to adapt to the enemy’s change in strategy after the Tet Offensive in 1968. The enemy no longer presented large targets that could be attacked so effectively by American firepower.

1ATF units had no difficulty in reconfiguring themselves for this type of warfare, for which they had been specifically trained. The training allowed small parties of 12 to 24 men to move silently and clandestinely through the jungle in order to see enemy parties before they saw the Australians or New Zealanders. This gave them the first burst of fire, during which most casualties were inflicted. 1ATF units established early superiority over the enemy in this contest inflicting 10 times the casualties they suffered whenever they gained the first burst of fire, which they achieved in approximately 80% of contacts.

This loss ratio meant that the enemy couldn’t stop 1ATF patrols from ranging across the Province of Phuoc Tuy. Unlike the American strategy of attrition, which defined no strategic objectives beyond killing large numbers of enemy, 1ATF strategy was to disrupt the enemy system of food supply. 1ATF sent its patrols against the enemy lines of communication, and the numerous enemy bunker systems and base camps, where most of the enemy’s large food reserves were to be found. 1ATF units captured over 1800 bunker systems and base camps. The average amount of food captured per bunker system/base camp declined each year, to almost nothing by 1970.

By mid-1969, the collapse in food supplies stopped the movement of enemy main force units into Phuoc Tuy and the local guerrilla food organizations could no longer preposition food stocks along the intended route of advance for the main force units. No other operations would penetrate to the main populated areas of Phuoc Tuy until after the units of 1ATF left Vietnam in late 1971.

The collapse in food supplies forced local guerrillas to visit the local villages every few days to collect supplies. This predictable movement allowed 1ATF to set hundreds of ambushes. Local guerrillas, including the D445 Battalion, soon found that supply parties could not be infiltrated into sympathetic villages without suffering devastating losses.

Not surprisingly, the number of enemy initiated contacts throughout Phuoc Tuy collapsed, as well as the enemy’s effective mining effort. The enemy now only had a token military presence in the Province.

But the Viet Cong probably still commanded the political loyalty of thousands of villagers in Phuoc Tuy. This was a similar situation to the last years of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1958), and Confrontation in Borneo (1963–66). In Malaya, thousands of Chinese villagers still supported the Chinese Communist Party of Malaya, while 25,000 supporters of the clandestine Communist Party existed in Borneo. But British Commonwealth forces had made the enemy militarily ineffective. That increased state of security gave the Malayan and Malaysian governments the opportunity to enact social and political reforms to undermine the political appeal of the communists.

The units of 1ATF had produced the same military result in Phuoc Tuy as in Malaya and Borneo. But this was nothing when measured against the mishandling of the war by the US Army, and the antipathy of the South Vietnamese Government towards social and political reform. The struggle for control of Phuoc Tuy remains an interesting footnote to a very large war, as does the Battle of Long Tan. Winning it allowed 1ATF to stay in the war in Phuoc Tuy and it made the enemy very cautious over 1ATF’s support fire in future battles.

But Long Tan contributed little else to the struggle that continued in Phuoc Tuy. The security success achieved by 1ATF was secured by the counter insurgency campaign it conducted relentlessly between 1966 and 1971.

Southeast Asia is feeling the pressure from Asia’s big beasts.

ASEAN, as a middle-power grouping, might be glad of a bit of extra middle-power heft from the likes of Australia and New Zealand.

The strategic case for ASEAN taking its partnership with Australia and New Zealand to higher levels was one element of my discussion with the former ASEAN Secretary-General, Ong Keng Yong.

The previous post reported Ong’s thoughts on my argument for Australia and New Zealand to become members of ASEAN.

A new ASEAN status for Australia and New Zealand, he says, would offer geopolitical benefits for ASEAN that might outweigh the standing geographic veto over ASEAN membership for anyone outside Southeast Asia.

Ong: Right now the ASEAN countries as a group, increasingly we can feel we are being squeezed between China, Japan and India. One thing good about the Americans is that they are so benign as a big power, vis-a-vis Southeast Asia. We never really got serious pressure from them. Once in a blue moon we got a hammering by them on human rights issues and lately, people smuggling. But overall, they come across as a very benign strategic power which we in Southeast Asia—even our friends on mainland Southeast Asia would admit it—we like having the Americans around. They bring in business, investment, a new way of looking at the world. We leave the big, big politics to them, working with the Chinese and the Indians and the Japanese.

Lately because of the South China Sea issue, it’s starkly displayed what it would be like if we, ASEAN, have to deal with this by ourselves. It is not easy. Continental Southeast Asia is very much sensitive to what the big brother [China] wants. But maritime Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Brunei—go, ‘Oh, dear!’ That’s why the stress now is on always on multilateralism and inclusive, open-ended development.

So, conceivably as our ASEAN business and trade and other relations grow with Australia and New Zealand in the next ten or 15 years, there will be more of a balance. The geography of Southeast Asia will not be just the ten, eleven Southeast Asians nations, not just ASEAN as an organisation. But with Australia and New Zealand as part of the equation. Part of, in Chinese terms, part of the equation.

Dobell: Bulking up ASEAN as the middle power grouping by bringing in a couple of more middle powers?

Ong: Yes, we are also geographically somewhere in the middle. I assume the Indian Ocean will be very much India and South Asia; northern Pacific will be China, Japan and Korea. And until now, the southern part of the Western Pacific is Australia and New Zealand. No issue. So if it goes on in this current trajectory with everybody trying to grab what they can, establish their sphere of influence. We in ASEAN will go back to our [1967] Bangkok Declaration and say, ‘Hey, we are not interested in your sphere of influence or your reshaping of the regional order.’ We just want to be ASEAN and whoever works with us. And in this respect, Australia and New Zealand will be a major factor; because we grow our trade—China, yes, we grow our trade; Japan, we grow our trade—

but in terms of the people exchange, the development of the next generation of professionals, it’s quite different. Because more Southeast Asians come to study in Australia, they spend years in Australia.

As the previous post outlined, Ong’s thinking on integrating Australia and New Zealand with ASEAN centres on the term ‘partnership’ not ‘membership.’

The former ASEAN Secretary-General dismisses my idea that Australia and New Zealand get half-in status in ASEAN by becoming Observers. Ong sees this as too compliant with ASEAN forms, while simultaneously not delivering real substance or conferring much membership status.

Instead, sidestep the opposition to anyone beyond Southeast Asia being an ASEAN member by creating a new form of quasi-membership for Australia and New Zealand. A bigger and better and more intimate Oz–Kiwi relationship with ASEAN—but what to call it?

Ong: I don’t think we ought to use the term ‘associate’—we don’t like the word ‘associate.’ We don’t like the word ‘membership’ per se, because we say it’s only ASEAN 10—and now the big debate is about Timor Leste. So I think it will be more driven by the concept of partnership, moving from Dialogue partnership to what? You’re the wordsmith—you can invent something!

Dobell: That’s why I chickened out and just took the Observer model—but supercharge it so it describes a different ASEAN relationship with Australia and New Zealand, different to what you have with Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste. Because at least Observer is an existing basis.

Ong: It’s an interesting concept. People can understand it. But I don’t know. I think it may not work that way. It may not be useful to have that existing vocabulary. Because it doesn’t project the new century relationship between Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.

A little un-ASEAN, this. Ditch the existing vocabulary. Do something new. Express the 21st Century relationship with a fresh relationship category.

Australia and New Zealand need to reach for a partnership that goes well beyond dialogue to become part of ASEAN’s creation of Community.

It’s a classic ASEAN fix: give Australia and New Zealand membership rights but call it some form of super partnership.

Exercising my Ong-conferred status as wordsmith, the label I came up with would emphasise an embrace of Community equal to the embrace of ASEAN.

How do you like the sound of Australia and New Zealand as ASEAN Community Partners?

The Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change Action,  which emerged from the Pacific Islands Forum in Port Moresby on 10 September, doesn’t provide the basis for a cohesive diplomatic strategy for Pacific Island states as they move toward the crucial UN Climate Change conference in Paris this November.

Far from presenting a clear position, the Declaration is rather an exercise in creative ambiguity aimed at papering over the fundamental differences between Australia and New Zealand on the one hand, and the Pacific Island states on the other.

This creative ambiguity allows very different claims to be made about the Declaration. The Secretary-General of the Forum Secretariat, Dame Meg Taylor, has argued that it represents a Pacific consensus, and even a position of ‘solidarity’. This assessment doesn’t sit well with Kiribati President Anote Tong’s reported view at the post-Forum press conference that the leaders had ‘agreed to disagree’ or New Zealand Prime Minister Key’s comments that ‘we’re all going to Paris; we’re all going to argue different things’.

Creative ambiguity is most in evidence on the key question of the warming threshold to be tabled as the Pacific position at the global treaty negotiations in Paris. The declared position of Pacific Island states is that global warming has to be kept under 1.5 degrees to avoid the severe impacts of sea-level rise and extreme weather events on vulnerable states.

On the surface, the Declaration’s acknowledgement ‘that an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius would severely exacerbate the particular challenges facing the most vulnerable smaller island states of the Pacific’ looks like a commitment to press for global warming of less than 1.5 degrees, and therefore a ‘win’ for the Pacific Island states. The Forum Secretary-General, for example, argues that the Declaration ‘captures’ the Pacific leaders’ concern to support a 1.5 degree threshold.

However, this isn’t the case. While there’s acknowledgement that warming of more than 1.5 degrees would have serious implications for smaller island states, the opaque language of the subsequent clause urges that ‘all effort be made to stay within the global temperature goal, as noted by the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in its decision of 1/CP20’  (the 2014 UN Climate Change Conference in Lima). This ‘global temperature goal’ is actually ‘1.5 or 2’; it therefore encompasses Australia and New Zealand’s commitment to a 2 degree threshold.

The ambiguity contained in this commitment has allowed several different interpretations of the Declaration’s commitment on this crucial mitigation issue. Some commentators have interpreted the Declaration as endorsing 2 degrees, presumably based on Prime Minister Abbott’s misrepresentation of the agreed global temperature goal at Lima as 2 degrees and on the knowledge that Australia and New Zealand would only sign on to 2 degrees; others have seen it as endorsing 1.5 degrees only, presumably because the simultaneous commitment to 2 degrees is hidden by the opaque textual reference to ‘decision 1/CP20’. The leaders, however, were well aware that they had signed on to a declaration, which supported 1.5 or 2, or in President Tong’s words, ‘a range of numbers’. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Key is reported as admitting that ‘the Leaders did not agree to a single and unified position’.

At the end of the day, this represents an Australian and New Zealand veto of the effort of Pacific Island states to have the Pacific Islands Forum endorse a strong climate statement for Paris.

It’s not just that Australia and New Zealand weren’t willing to shift their own emissions policies to support the Pacific Island states’ position; it’s that they have denied the Pacific Island leaders the opportunity to make an unambiguous call for a warming target of less than 1.5 degrees through the pre-eminent regional political body.

The Forum Declaration therefore doesn’t provide the basis for a solid strategy going forward to Paris. Because it holds the Pacific’s High Level Political Declaration hostage to Australian and New Zealand interests, it in fact means the Pacific Island states have been forced to bargain away an unambiguous 1.5 degree position at the regional level even before they enter the global coalition-building phase in the lead-up to the Paris conference.

Far from an early negotiation—with two OECD states being an advantage—(as argued by the Secretary-General) this decision dilutes the Pacific Island states’ positions before it leaves its home region. The Port Moresby Agreement missed the opportunity to make a clear statement on the 1.5 degree strategic objective as a basis for building coalitions with like-minded states such as the 54 African states (which have already made a clear commitment to the 1.5 threshold in the March 2015 Cairo Declaration) and the 30 fellow members of the Alliance of Small Islands States (which made a clear call for a 1.5 threshold in Bonn in August).

The absence of a clear, shared objective in the Forum Declaration doesn’t lay the foundation for a clear strategy to prepare for Paris—it’s created a repeat of the circumstances in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

At the Cairns Forum, on the eve of Copenhagen, the Pacific Islands states’ strong position was watered down to suit the interests of Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Island states had no choice but to work outside the Pacific Islands Forum to pursue their position.

The task of developing and prosecuting the Pacific position in the lead-up to Paris will therefore more likely fall to the alternate diplomatic system, which has grown up outside the Pacific Islands Forum since 2009, precisely to deal with this problem.

This new diplomatic system includes the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group at the United Nations which has all but replaced the Pacific Islands Forum group as the most effective representative of Pacific Island interests on key global issues including climate change. Unlike the Forum, PSIDS allows the group of Pacific Island state ambassadors to work collectively without Australian and New Zealand.

There’s also the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF), established by Fiji three years ago. The PIDF has recently found its strength on the climate change issue. At its September 2015 PIDF meeting, which focused on climate change, leaders worked effectively on determining shared strategic objectives and agreed on the outline of key steps for pursuing them on the road to Paris. The resulting Suva Declaration on Climate Change captured the shared interests of most Pacific Island states and civil society, and will be championed by the Fiji Government in the lead-up to Paris.

For the 20 years since the Kyoto Conference, the Pacific Island states have had the development and implementation of their joint climate strategy frustrated by the totally divergent interests of Australia and New Zealand.

The commitment to a unanimous consensus in Forum declarations has effectively worked as a veto power for the two larger neighbours. Forum consensus has therefore come at the cost of sacrificing the core diplomatic objectives of the Pacific Island states, which in turn has constrained effective strategic implementation.

One thing New Zealand is never accused of internationally is throwing too much money around on defence. Those impressions aren’t about to be challenged any time soon, but Defence Minister Jonathan’s Coleman’s recent speech to an annual industry conference indicates that a bit more spending may be on the way.

Since the publication of the government’s 2010 Defence White Paper (PDF), the New Zealand Defence Force has been embarked on a quest to release up to NZ$400mn (A$350mn) in annual efficiencies by 2014/15, which can then be redirected to ‘front office’ activities. Most of these savings had been identified in a piece of creative writing known as the Value for Money Review (PDF). A big part of the aim was to allow financial room for upgrade (and ultimately replacement) of the three big ticket items—the two Anzac frigates, the Hercules strategic lift aircraft and the long-range maritime patrol Orion aircraft—without the government having to dig deeper into its pockets.

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Neither Australia nor New Zealand wants to have to choose between the United States and China in the possible option that Hugh White has envisaged so starkly. But if push comes to shove, it can’t be taken for granted that the two countries will come to precisely the same conclusion at precisely the same time.

Hugh recently spoke in Wellington outlining the arguments of his book The China Choice. The room was packed, a tribute to both his ability to stimulate and of course the subject, which is the preoccupation of this era. Moreover, Hugh is an Australian strategic scholar whose thinking has been known to embrace New Zealand—not a concern shared widely in Australia’s strategic community.

A couple of passages from studies over the last couple of years show differences between New Zealand and Australian perspectives. One is in a 2011 CSCAP-New Zealand report. ‘Projecting Our Voice: Major power relationships in Asia. The responses of regional organizations and the implications for New Zealand‘. This study was undertaken by a National Forum made up of CSCAP–NZ members. I was a participant, though not a direct contributor to the following passages, which are best quoted in full as they offer a clear explanation of the dilemma that New Zealand could face: Read more