Has ANZUS turned Australia into a target

The ANZUS alliance has underpinned Australian defence thinking since it was created back in 1951. For generations ANZUS had been presented as the ultimate security guarantee, a far-back platform that would keep the continent safe while the United States projected power across the Pacific.

That assumption no longer holds with any certainty, as US politics has now drastically changed. With an expanding American military footprint across Australian facilities, Australia has become a potential forward operating base and, consequently, a more attractive military target, very much as certain Gulf states discovered when they hosted US assets during recent conflict in the Middle East.

Recent reporting has made the scale of that footprint clearer. According to data compiled by the Nautilus Institute and highlighted in The Guardian, US forces and defence contractors now control or have access to roughly two-thirds of surveyed Australian defence facilities, being around 110 out of 168 facilities.

The United States directly controls 17 sites, including the critical Pine Gap intelligence complex, a naval communications station in Western Australia that supports submerged US submarines, and expanding infrastructure at RAAF Base Tindal to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. American defence contractors operate at additional locations. Preparations for permanent war-ready weapons stockpiles and the Submarine Rotational Force-West at HMAS Stirling further embed US operational capacity on Australian soil.

From a Chinese strategic perspective, as one analyst put it, Australia is less a host of US bases than a US base in its own right, a significant piece of real estate in America’s Pacific warfighting architecture.

AUKUS has accelerated this transformation. What was sold as a technology-sharing and submarine-acquisition arrangement has evolved into a deeper integration of Australian territory into US force posture planning. Rotational forces, prepositioned equipment, enhanced air cooperation, and logistics nodes are no longer peripheral. These are central to the US presence in the region.

In an era of long-range precision missiles, hypersonic weapons, and massed drones, the old geographic buffer that once made Australia a relatively secure rear area has largely evaporated. Any adversary seeking to degrade US power projection in the Indo-Pacific would logically prioritise the nodes that enable that projection.

Thus, Australian facilities hosting American aircraft, submarines, intelligence assets, and stockpiles would rank high on any target list, quite possibly higher than continental US territory itself in the opening phase of a crisis.

The comparison with Gulf states is instructive. Hosting US military infrastructure and forces conferred certain security benefits in peacetime but also created vulnerability once conflict erupted. Installations in the UAE, Bahrain and elsewhere became legitimate military targets because of their association with American operations. Australia risks a similar dynamic. In any accidental or deliberate escalation involving the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, the presence of US assets on Australian soil could draw fire earlier and more intensely than if the continent remained a more neutral or independent actor.

Modern strike systems do not require the attacker to close geographically in the way earlier generations of conflict demanded, as military range and precision improvements have compressed the strategic map.

Two further shifts compound the problem. First, the qualitative and quantitative improvement in Chinese military technology, particularly with their long-range missiles, drones, and power-projection systems, has altered the correlation of forces in the region.

What once seemed a distant theoretical threat is now a more plausible operational one.