NAVAL INTEREST:

AUSTRALIA REJECTS INDEPENDENT THINK TANK's PROPOSAL TO BASE A U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIER TASK FORCE NEAR PERTH.

                                                                 

                                                                 Photo: Public Domain, origin unknown

Australia has rejected a proposal by the Washington based think tank the CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES proposing to base a presently US East Coast based carrier task force near Perth. This would be  part of the Administration's "shift towards the pacific" naval policy. The Administration plans to move a considerable portion of the US Navy's East Coast based ships to the Pacific Fleet. The Pentagon commissioned the report and that is all it is , a report, not an actual proposal from the United States.Yet the rejection of this sort of idea "run up the flag pole" was definitive, and predictive.The study proposed basing a U.S. carrier task force to an Australian base south of the city of Perth. However, Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith said last Thursday that while negotiations were underway to increase U.S. Navy access to Australia's Indian Ocean Base  HMAS Stirling, it would never become a U.S. military base.

"We have made it crystal clear from the first moment --we don't have United States military bases in Australia. We don't see the need for that ". Smith told the the Australian Broadcasting Company that the proposal "was not endorsed by the U.S. Government."

 Australia is a close military ally of the United States. But China is Australia's most important trade partner. The attitude of Australia is predictive of the attitudes we will encounter with our best friends in the region as base leases expire. The day of  the U.S. owned and operated overseas military base is drawing to a close. Its a big imposition on sovereignty. If our best friends don't want to allow it, you can imagine how our base proposals will fare with our fair weather friends. 

Of course this is not to say that Australia doesn't give to the United States generous military support. Washington and Canberra announced late last year that they had reached a military agreement in which up to 2,500 U.S. Marines would rotate through a joint military training hub near the city of Darwin. But notice the concept is to rotate through. Nobody wants a U.S. military foot print as large as our bases of the past imposed. No one wants the U.S. virtually sovereign on their own soil behind a gate enclosing hundreds or thousands of acres.

OPINION: We think that the time has come, while we still have a few traditional bases around the world, to reexamine how we will logistically support distant prolonged deployments in the future. We think that future won't include much in the way of what we have come to think of as traditional U.S. Bases.   We think we see in our own and British naval history a model that can work. We need to start training and organizing a system of "naval agents". Both Great Britain and the United States and the Confederate States of America made extensive use of naval agents for logistic support of foreign deployed naval units. (See our posting of January 12, 2012 :"SECRET AGENT OF THE CONFEDERATE NAVY " by guest blogger Vic Socota, A brief biography of Confederate "naval agent" James D. Bulloch. Bulloch operating from Europe procured commerce raiders for the Confederacy and got them crewed and equipped and out to sea while the Union Navy kept the South's ports blockaded. His raiders nearly destroyed the Union whaling fleet, and if they had been able to continue might have brought Great Britain into the war on the side of the Confederacy.  

 "Naval Agents" in this sense are purchasing and contract agents who are usually attached to an embassy, or consulate in nations near anticipated theaters of prolonged operation. Their job is to master the locations and services available, costs, and terms for all manner of ship service needed by war ships. Most commercial ports can offer, at a price, most of the services that war ships need except rearmament. There, a little imagination and skill is needed of the naval agent. Generally if the conflict we are engaged in is not too dis satisfactory to the host nation a rearmament is no more difficult to arrange than a commercial explosive loading permit. With a close friend like Australia military support may be available to us, we need not have sovereignty or near sovereignty over the base, just learn to be good guests. In between such needs it probably would do our local welcome some good to purchase some of our naval logistic needs from local vendors.This is a lost naval skill set whose time is about to come again. Too bad all the old Confederate agents have died out.

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