IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID VINE
The final part of a ‘Declassified Australia Conversation’ between Jorgen Doyle, community researcher on US and Australian military plans across northern Australia, and David Vine, author of two books on the modern empire of the United States, Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, and United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts.
Part 2: The public is awakening to how the United States is involving Australia in its empire plans.
DA: Mparntwe/ Alice Springs is the site of the Pine Gap joint defence facility, the most important US intelligence facility outside of the US. Opposition to the base has waxed and waned over five decades and been motivated variously by the base’s occupation of Arrernte country, the base’s role in nuclear war and status as a target in the event of a nuclear war, and, over the last decade or more, the base’s role in US drone strikes across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen etc, and most recently the base’s intelligence-sharing with the Israeli genocidal forces.
You’ve studied many anti-bases movements. Most of those movements have been opposing army or naval bases, where the concerns on the part of those opposed have been the occupation of local territory, the environmental risks, noise pollution, and social impacts such as sexual assaults committed by US military personnel against the local population. Have you looked at other intelligence facilities and what some of the characteristic social impacts of an intelligence facility are?
VINE: As you pointed out, Pine Gap is not just an intelligence facility. It is a critical hub in the global US warfighting machine, and as you also pointed out, it has participated in the genocide in Gaza. The presence of Pine Gap on the Australian continent means that Australia is implicated in any US warfighting activity, almost without exception.
Australia has followed the United States into more wars than any other country on earth has since World War II. Great Britain is the only other country I can think of which gives Australia a run for its money. Both countries are members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, which is an alliance of the white, settler-colonial nations (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand).
Pine Gap is quite distinct globally, so there aren’t many bases to compare it to. While it doesn’t have the same impacts as a base that houses large amounts of weaponry and toxic materials associated with that weaponry, some of the same environmental impacts are still present, just on a smaller scale.
The way in which most bases worldwide are implicating the host nation in US war-making, and violence against local populations, still applies. For instance, I have studied resistance to the Dal Molin air base in northern Italy and the way opposition to that base was motivated by the fact that the base made local populations and local soil complicit in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The movement against Pine Gap is a longstanding one. It has always seemed to me that the biggest factor working against the movement is Pine Gap’s relative isolation, which is of course precisely why the site was chosen by US military planners. It makes it harder to draw attention to the base and to build opposition, although the resistance to the base over many decades has been impressive.
about the spread of the US empire of bases.
Photo: Courtesy of Guam Post
DA: It certainly looms really large in the Australian national imagination in spite of its isolation. The base is linked to the deposition of Australia’s most left-wing prime minister. Partly for that reason, but also due to the significance of the base in the US’ global war machine and its status as a prime target in the event of a nuclear war, the base functions as something of a symbol representing the entirety of US military presence on this continent. Pine Gap is often identified as a powerful place to contest the US-Australia alliance and register public opposition to it.
VINE: It’s important to recognise that the US military presence in Australia has grown to be so much more than just Pine Gap, and it continues to grow. The Trump administration wants to expand it. It’s part of an at least decade-long build-up of US military forces and weaponry in Australia.
It’s important for us to see the way in which Pine Gap is a nerve center for a much larger military infrastructure on the Australian continent, as well as the way in which the Pine Gap base supports US military operations all around the world, along with a few other locations, for example in Hawaii, as well as on the North American continent.
I personally hope that the anti-bases movement and related movements in Australia will continue to use Pine Gap as a symbol of the larger alliance and its dangers, while also pointing to the way in which the US military presence has been growing dangerously in recent years.
DA: I think that is the case. Australia’s population is very concentrated around the eastern seaboard. That’s where a lot of the weapons factories are, which have been a focus for the anti-war movement on this continent in recent years. These factories have been a focal point of opposition for anti-militarist activists attempting to disrupt the genocide in Palestine and contest the US-Australia alliance – the factories that provide components for the F-35 fighter jet, for instance, as well as factories producing other weapons. Pine Gap is also on the map with relation to Australia’s participation in the genocide in Gaza.
Activists in Northern Australia are beginning the work of bringing attention to the outsized importance Northern Australia has for military planners in servicing the alliance with the US and ensuring Australia retains the so-called US security umbrella. It’s also where a lot of critical minerals mines will soon begin producing minerals, some of which will enter the US military industrial complex.
There’s the so-called ‘rotation’ of 2,500 US Marines stationed in Darwin. In the few months, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that deployment will be increasing. The US military recently built enormous jet fuel tanks in Darwin Harbor. It’s called Project Caymus – eleven massive jet fuel tanks, built with no building permits whatsoever. Then there’s an Airforce base called Tindal, 320 kilometers south of Darwin, that will soon station six nuclear-capable US B -52 bombers. In addition to all this, there’s a network of four large military training fields built on former pastoral stations – the North Australian Range Complex, some of the biggest war rehearsal grounds in the world.
This context explains why I began this interview with a question about US westward expansion and the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’. Northern Australia is a bit like the west coast of the US – it was the last place in Australia to be settled by the colonisers, and it’s also been a site of psychic insecurity about the Australian settler colonial project – the area on this continent where white settlement is considered to be least ‘secure’.
It’s clear that Australian policymakers think of those military training fields as one of the key ways that Australia can service its military alliance with the US and with other allied nations. Those policy makers very much talk in the language of terra nullius that was used to justify colonisation of this continent. They advertise these enormous areas across Northern Australia, which they characterise as ‘empty’ or ‘sparsely inhabited’, as places where the US military and other militaries can simulate vast wartime activities that they couldn’t simulate anywhere else on the planet. The four war rehearsal fields I mentioned are electronically integrated to enable war rehearsals to be conducted as though over one contiguous territory. During 2023’s Talisman Sabre war rehearsals, for example, featuring 20,000 US troops, 10,000 Australian troops, a missile was fired from one of those ranges to another.
of the US empire.
One of the military training fields which I’ve been researching is called the Bradshaw Field Training Area, named after frontier pastoralist and land speculator Joe Bardshaw. He was a pastoralist who is documented to have engaged in massacres of Aboriginal people. He also stole lots of Indigenous artefacts, which to this day are in the British Museum. The Bradshaw Field is a really clear archetype linking 19th century settler colonial expansion on this continent with contemporary military activities. The Australian Ministry for Defence has had control of that former pastoral station for the last 30 years. It’s the biggest of these four training fields. The US military just spent $747 million USD upgrading that field.
It looks very much like what is known in the literature on US global basing presence as a lily pad base – small, austere, and often dispersed sites rather than a few large, permanent megabases. They have expanded the runway so that they can accommodate Boeing C-17 Globemaster planes, and made the facility capable of hosting 12 of those planes. They’ve constructed a camp for 250 military personnel and they have also built something they describe as an urban operations training facility. To me it looks like a military training facility that may allow for significant prepositioning of weapons, and become a fully-fledged base in the event of war.
VINE: You’re pointing to several really important long-term patterns, beginning with, of course, the occupation of Indigenous lands, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. You’re pointing to the continued exploitation of these lands, both in Australia and in North America.
We need to challenge this idea of the security umbrella. I think you’re exactly right that leaders in Australia are desperately offering things to the US military and US government to try to maintain this myth of a security umbrella when in fact this is really an insecurity umbrella in many very real ways. It makes Australia a target and endangers the people of Australia, both in a direct military sense, but of course also because of the billions of Australian taxpayer dollars that are being squandered by doubling down on this military strategy that, of course, is linked to other economic interests.
I think that’s partly why Australian leaders are embracing this desperate effort to keep the US military involved in Australia – because it is linked to deals for weapons producers and other economic opportunities for elites and corporations they’re linked with. This is what needs to be opposed.
DA: Have you got any final thoughts before I let you go?
VINE: The last thing I would say is, given your interest in lily pads, and in the obfuscatory language that the US military and the Australian militaries are using to describe the US presence, people need to be critical of all the ways in which the US military presence is being portrayed – for example, that these are Australian bases, not US bases.
It is clear that the Australian military has been turned into something of an auxiliary of the US military for quite a long time. There are efforts to make that even more systematised and even more de jure than the current state of affairs. This is an incredibly dangerous strategy that I desperately hope Australia can free itself from.
I’m working in the United States to free our country from the grasp of the warmongers and the war profiteers who are taking us down a path toward what should be an unthinkable war between the United States and China and their respective allies. This is what we desperately need to do.
We, meaning the United States, China, Australia, countries throughout the Asia-Pacific, and globally, need to be taking on the real problems facing us and building the world that we know is possible, a world where we improve people’s daily lives and build peaceful relations rather than securing political relations between countries that are dedicated to enriching the most powerful, the billionaires, the war profiteers. That’s my little soapbox.
Part One of ‘In Conversation with David Vine’ appeared in February in Declassified Australia.
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