I did not expect that proposals from the Services for weapons better related to Australia’s strategic environment, along with the necessary policy decisions, would be achieved quickly. Changes in organisation do not of themselves change policies or underlying attitudes. They are intended to work towards the right policies. But in the public discussion in Parliament, and by the so-called defence correspondents in the media, the purpose of change was largely neglected. Instead, attention was paid to the more emotion-stirring and newsworthy aspects: whether one of the Services was to have a favoured weapons system denied, whether civilians had come out winners in some debate and so forth.

A central requirement remained—to ensure that each Service was preparing for the same wars at the same time and in the same place, as Malcolm Fraser had put it back in 1970. Embedded attitudes, old rivalries and aspirations might take another decade or more to change.

Would the electorate, upon which Ministers depended for survival, also adjust? Unlike most areas of Commonwealth Government activity, defence and foreign policy have a constituency which is founded not so much on material and definable interests as on memories, inherited convictions about friends and likely enemies, along with associated fears and attachments, and some historical myths. Some memories and old faiths lose relevance because of radical change in weapons and surveillance technology; or because Australia’s geopolitical environment has changed in directions not shared by the countries who have been our familiar friends and allies. But, on my observation of politics at work, it becomes difficult—particularly on the conservative side of politics—to change defence priorities rooted in the past. Old and respected images, like that of the underpaid self-sacrificing volunteer digger of the First World War, stand in the way of new priorities that make less call today on service to the nation of this kind. But there are public institutions that preserve the past in order to honour it. The leadership of the Services themselves, with proud memories of battle achievements, sometimes find lessons in them which have dubious application to contemporary threats that governments would be likely to accept as justifying a military response. Our Services excel in their mastery of ever-advancing technologies. It will always be more difficult to ensure their relevance to credible threat contingencies. That involves judgement about the unprovable, and the assembly of intellectual resources going outside the Services for verdicts that are well informed and objective—and not always popular.