Overseas Deployments After Vietnam: East Timor and Iraq

Abstract

The Vietnam War brought about a reassessment of Australian strategic doctrine away from forward defence. The transition away from this approach to defence, which dominated strategic thinking during the 1950s and 1960s, was in part triggered by the failure and deep unpopularity of the conflict in Vietnam and later reinforced by the end of the Cold War in 1989. The result was that the role of the armed forces in defence and strategic planning began to change in both elite and public consciousness. The end of the Vietnam War thus represented a key fault-line in Australia’s postwar strategic thinking and provoked a fundamental reassessment of defence policy. In this chapter, we turn our attention to public discourse, debate and opinion polling around the question of the armed forces’ engagement in overseas combat and peacekeeping missions from 1975 onwards. The focus of attention is on the East Timor operation and the war in Iraq, both events about which the public had clear views. Attitudes towards the other major operation in this period in which the military played an important role, the war in Afghanistan, is examined in Chapter 7.