To defend our homeland, our forces must be equipped to operate overseas

We are not being led by the nose by America in adding our weight to international counter-terrorism efforts. Plainly our national interest is in reducing the terrorist threat, not in sitting irresponsibly by waiting for the threat to Australia to be made manifest in Australia - or to be removed by others for us.

Neither are we harming ourselves in Asia, nearly every country in which supported in word or deed the coalition against Iraq. Furthermore, Asia is not the only region of the world important to Australia; to believe otherwise is to succumb to the Tyranny of Proximity, which foolishly puts mileage above consequence.

Nor is the Australian Government misguided in modestly rebalancing the ADF’s capability the better to fight alongside US forces in the far abroad when that is in Australia’s interests. The Government needs to be able to choose from a variety of options, and not be constricted by a clanking machine designed for only one purpose - the close territorial defence of Australia.

Finally, “no more Iraqs” is much too premature a judgment. True, America is most unlikely to try to remove by force the regimes in Iran and North Korea. But that was so, each for its own reasons, even before the Iraq war.

And nobody can rule out a future need to deal by the use of force with an emergent situation. So the rebalancing of the ADF is far from unnecessary.

One frequent defence commentator (principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper) claims that that rebalancing has gone the wrong way, in favour of “fewer and bigger” capabilities designed for higher-intensity conventional conflicts rather than lower-intensity unconventional operations.

But the true issue is the combat power available in conflict wherever occurring and for whatever reason, not whether the conflict is of low or high intensity.

For example, tanks are not an encumbrance to our light forces - the lightest in the First World - but a necessary addition to their combat and protective strength.

Likewise, the new but fewer patrol boats will have greater capabilities, able to operate 300 days a year instead of the current 200. And the new bigger troopships will provide greater capabilities wherever deployed.

In the air too, it is wrong to play down the capabilities of the cruise missile-armed F/A-18 compared to the F-111, and to decry, as this critic does, improved helicopter capability as useful only for landing troops “against stiff opposition”. In fact, helicopters are essential to any littoral operations wherever occurring - but heliborne movement would never be undertaken against stiff opposition.

One can only wonder when some self-concerned old stagers will catch up.