He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises Over More than a Century, and reported the following:
My edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises over more than a Century, draws on contributions to an Army History Unit conference held in Canberra a couple of years back. Page 99 of the book sees Carol Fort explain commercial sector munitions production for the Australian Army during the Second World War. But the book spans a much wider scope of Australia's martial history ranging from Federation through to the early 2020s. The Second World War features prominently, to be sure, noting that it stands out as the greatest mobilisation of the Army in the nation's history.Learn more about Mobilising the Australian Army at the Cambridge University Press website.
Fort's chapter is the fourth and final chapter of 'Part 2, entitled 'Mobilsing Resources for War: Early Twentieth Century'. Part 2 spans work by Meighen McCrae on resource decision making to win in the First World War, Douglas E. Delaney's comparative study of inter-war Canadian and Australian army mobilisation planning, and Andrew T. Ross's chapter on industry, industrial mobilisation and the Australian army in the Second World War. This is a rich part full of useful historical pointers on how to overcome challenges of rapid industrial and force expansion.
Part 3 covers women and force expansion during the Second World War and beyond. It includes a chapter by Clare Birgin discussing the employment of women in signals intelligence in the lead-up to and opening phases of the Second World War, acknowledging their excellent work went largely unheralded because of the secretive nature of the organisations they work for. It also includes a chapter by Karen D. David and Philip McCristall, once again comparing the Canadian and Australian experience, but this time focusing on women in the military, reflecting on the past and shaping the future.
Part 4 'Alliance and Concurrency Pressures', discusses Cold War and post-Cold War challenges in four chapters. In the first one, Amanda Johnston describes some of the constraining effects of concurrency pressures faced by the Australian Army today. Sue Thompson examines alliance security planning in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, reflecting a surprisingly longstanding interest in and engagement with Southeast Asian partners. I have chapter in this part which reviews the Australian Army's growing concurrency pressures in the years from 2003-2010, demonstrating how it was a near run thing. Then Dan Marston reviews the difficulties of resourcing coalition operations with UK and US forces in the war in Iraq. All four chapters present complementary perspectives from different operational settings but with enduring pointers for the contemporary Australian Army.
Part 5 covers force preparation and utilisation of the Reserves. This includes a chapter by James Morrison on the home reserve and the militia in Australia during the Second World War, exploring some of the political and administrative challenges experienced. James Kell's chapter reviewing the post 1945 national service schemes points out the different rationale and purposes for the two schemes introduced successively in the early 1950s and mid 1960s. Part 5 concludes with Renée Kidson's chapter on reserve mobilisation for domestic contingencies, notably Operation Bushfire Assist and Operation Covid Assist. This is rich in fascinating observations on challenges and innovative responses.
Part 6 explores deployment challenges from the 1990s onwards. It starts with an illuminating chapter by Bob Breen on rehearsing mobilisation and force projection during the Kangaroo Exercise Series from 1989 to 1995. Bob has a second chapter auditing the Australian Army's performance in a number of operational deployments from 1987 to 2003 - including off the coast of Fiji, Somalia, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Timor L'este. The third and final chapter in this part is by Rhys Crawley who examines the case studies drawn from Australia's Afghanistan commitments from 2005-2006, drawing important pointers for future reference. Once again, a range of operational settings provide some fascinating insights into the challenges of raising, deploying and sustaining forces - many of which are of enduring significance.
In the concluding part, I offer some reflections on mobilisation in the past and offer some pointers for the future - including a proposed voluntary but incentivised scheme for national and community service intended to help the nation face a spectrum of security challenges ranging from great power competition, looming environmental catastrophe and a spectrum of governance challenges in the region. This complements the introductory overview of the book provided by Iain Langford, which acts, in effect, as an excellent synopsis of the book. It also caps off the insights offered in the first part of the book, written by Jean Bou, who provides the contemporary and historical environment to the concept of mobilisation and its intellectual history.
All this to say that Carol Fort's observations on page 99 stand on their own, to be sure, but they make more sense in the context of the broader span of issues covered by the other chapters in the book. In the end, Mobilising the Australian Army is a timely and worthwhile reflection on the Australian Army's experience with mobilisation and what it means for today. This applies not only for contemporary military planners, policy makers, and strategists but also for politicians and the informed Australian voter contemplating what it might take to make a significant and rapid expansion of military capability in the event of an existential crisis.
--Marshal Zeringue
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