Re: [OT]Contingency Plan UNCLE : Oz vs USA Stoush

Warbeads@aol.com wrote:

> Actually it's logistically a nightmare unless your subs  (unclassified

> reports can neither be confirmed or denied) are completely  accounted
for -- as in 
> sunk.  And that assumes that your Air Force was  completely
neutralized by 
> Naval Air plus long range USAF assets.  And that  the amount of troops
needed to 
> subdue the military (although hunting  down your snake-eaters would be
a 
> nightmare) was available for the  duration.
>  
> Mostly though it would make no sense for the USA to attack  Australia.

Funny you should mention this... about a decade ago, I was involved in 
an entirely unofficial high-level discussion with some people in the US 
military about this very subject.

Positing an armed conflict between the US and Australia as an exercise 
in determining our mutual vulnerabilities. It originally was triggered 
by the events described in

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/13.66.html#subj1.1

The Australian Govt sent a polite, even friendly note to the US saying 
quite categorically that such a shootdown would be treated as an act of 
war, and we weren't joking. Our PM (Hawke) said as much, in public.

I won't and can't go into the details though the discussion was UNCLASS,

it was completely unofficial as I said. But I can discuss some of the 
conclusions from this end:

1 US CVN group could get local air superiority anywhere it wanted to, 
simply due to its mobility. We have the equivalent of no more than 3 
CVNs worth of air assets ( 2 is closer ), and a continent the size of 
the USA to defend. The US view would probably be far more pessimistic, 
and they'd probably assume they needed at least 3. They have 12. Nuff
said.

The US would have severe intelligence difficulties, due to our mutual 
dependence on joint facilities such as Pine Gap and Nurrungar. 
Basically, the US would lose most of its satellite intel, and we'd lose 
all of ours. Very Dangerous for the US, in case a 3rd party intervened.

A successful military attack on one of the US invasion fleets by one of 
our subs would not be improbable (bloody difficult avoiding the SSNs in 
direct support, but once past them, we'd be in like Flynn) : but it 
would kill thousands of Americans, and make the others mad as hell. 
Remember the Maine and all that. See Pearl Harbor (this was before 9/11 
of course). In fact, any military action on Australia's part that ended 
up with Americans in body-bags would be counter-productive: we'd be 
better off using Gandhi-like tactics. It would also be very unpopular at

home, Americans are our mates.

The only military attacks we could do would be ones which were 
indistinguishable from accidents caused by gross military incompetence 
and/or corruption. If we *really* had to kill a few thousand US troops, 
well, a bushfire in the right place could do that. "Lovely Armored 
Division you have there Squire. Shame if something was to happen to it".

Contamination of vaccines could do a lot more - especially if we could 
arrange so that the majority of the bad vaccines were given to minority 
groups. (Don't invade Australia unless your inoculations are up to date 
- not (just) for BioWeapons, things like Murray Valley Encephalitis, 
Q-Fever etc).

Australia has lots and lots and lots of native fauna and even a bit of 
flora that are not so much toxic/venomous as natural weapons of mass 
destruction. It would not take much of a black propaganda campaign 
stressing the toxicity of some of them to make morale in the invading 
forces plummet. When the first lecture you get in training is about 
things like the box-jellyfish (or worse, the Irukandji - we don't 
classify the Portugese Man O'War as more than a minor nuisance, even 
though elsewhere it's considered very dangerous) - well, you get the 
idea. There's just enough truth so that trainers have to tell people 
about them, and with only a little over-emphasis by us, many troops 
would be terrified of walking outdoors.

See http://www.avru.unimelb.edu.au/avruweb/jellyfi.htm

Most of the US homeland vulnerabilities identified at the time have been

remedied. Let's just say that the Chicago Stock Exchange and Bank of 
America were, at the time, accidents waiting to happen. We could have 
totally wrecked the US economy, and cost the US 100 times more than all 
the wars it had ever fought put together, purely by Cyber-attack.

Unfortunately, that would have precipitated a worldwide recession that 
would have been far worse than 1929. It would have won us no friends, 
and instead of having the US mad at us, it would have been the US, 
Europe, Japan, etc etc.

There's also the difficulty of only doing economic damage: most 
successful Cyber-attacks would have killed tens of thousands as power 
failed and fuel supply distribution came to a halt -  possibly millions 
if it was winter. I won't mention the spreading of low-level (harmless) 
radioactive nucleotides in the vicinity of Nuclear power plants so that 
the outcry gets them closed down. Far easier than attacking them 
directly. Oops, just did.

Again, this was many years before Y2K, and most of these vulnerabilities

have been fixed. It's possible that many of the countermeasures that 
were taken in the early and mid 90's were a result of this little
exercise.

Our final conclusion was that we could still win - though might have to 
suffer invasion first. We'd win by Dirty Tricks and propaganda. Things 
like planting drugs on the children of senior US officers in command of 
the Invasion, so their effectiveness is impaired. In extremis, kill a 
few of their kids, with evidence planted of drug deals going wrong (news

of which any General would find extremely distracting). Similar tactics 
to frame Administration and Industrial leaders, so that it appears that 
the whole thing is a scam designed to enrich the wealthy. Lots of 
pictures, real if we could get them, fake if not, of kindergartens 
bombed, widows and orphans, US war Crimes and massacres. Our best friend

would be the US mass media (and the US legal system, which could tie 
things up in knots) - and remember, this was before the Internet, the 
greater US public had no independent source of info. Think Vietnam x 
1000. Abu Ghraib every hour. A My Lai a week. A Watergate every 6
months.

We'd play the Injured Innocent, until the US Administration officials 
were either hounded from office at the next election, Impeached, or hung

from lamp-posts by vengeful mobs. Again, the difficulty would be to do 
all this without causing a US Civil War, with associated danger of 3rd 
party intervention and worldwide recession that would kill billions.

Post 9/11 the risk of this is basically zero, but 10 years ago things 
were different.

Al Qaeda, various Palestinian groups, and other entities have used some 
of these tactics, but haven't done them nearly as thoroughly, 
systematically, and in a planned manner as we would have done.

It was a very useful exercise for both parties, and at the end of it, 
everyone concerned was inordinately glad that we're Allies. There are 
some Evil Bastards on both sides, with ingenious and creative minds.
The US guys tended to concentrate on ingenious military stratagems, 
(some of which have been used since then) while we were a bit more into 
the lateral arabesque and what is now called assymetric warfare.

-- 
Alan & Carmel Brain
http://aebrain.blogspot.com
mailto:aebrain@webone.com.au