Since 1945, declared wars have been rare; non-state actors, such as those variously described as liberation movements or terrorist organisations, have become increasingly prominent; and the range of activities undertaken by military forces has evolved far beyond traditional state-versus-state conflict. War, as Clausewitz famously commented, has always been the continuation of policy by other means, but the interaction of the political and military spheres has become ever more intimate and complex, aided by the intense involvement of the news media.

Australian military and, less commonly, civilian personnel became involved in peacekeeping missions, usually but not always under the auspices of the United Nations, from the late 1940s, but that role expanded in the 1990s until some thought it might become the principal focus for Australian armed services. Peacekeeping evolved into peace enforcement, ranging from the policing of sanctions to substantial combat missions. Military activity has come to cover a spectrum of activities. At one extreme is total war; at the other is the observation of a ceasefire line between hostile parties; and in between is an extraordinary diversity of actions and missions. To add to the complexity, armed forces have been deployed to render assistance in emergency relief operations.

As the nature of military missions has evolved, so has the writing of current and historical commentary, including Australian official war histories. Charles Bean initiated the tradition with his twelve volumes on World War I, with covers described by an early reviewer as ‘the colour of dried blood’. Gavin Long assumed Bean’s mantle, with twenty-three volumes on World War II, followed by Robert O’Neill with two on the Korean War. I was commissioned to undertake an official history of three conflicts in South-East Asia (the Malayan Emergency, Indonesia’s Confrontation of Malaysia, and the Vietnam War). The long-awaited ninth and final volume of this series is scheduled to be published next year (long after my active involvement in the series ended).

David Horner’s appointment as Australia’s fifth official war historian continues the trend towards coverage of a larger number of relatively small conflicts over a long time span, including some politically sensitive missions. The projected six volumes of The Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations will cover, as Horner notes, ‘more than fifty missions in some twenty-seven conflicts over a period of more than sixty years’. Nor will this necessarily be all. In the first footnote to his preface, Horner asserts his hope that the government will authorise the inclusion of East Timor, Iraq (2003), and Afghanistan, the only three conflicts explicitly excluded from his initial brief. (In the interests of full disclosure I should note that, while I have an interest in the reputation of official histories, I have had no role whatever in the planning or preparation of this series.)

Like Bean, Long, and myself, Horner is the author of some volumes, as well as general editor of the series for which he is responsible. No one familiar with his record of productivity will be surprised to note that he is the first author to complete a volume, although it is designated as Volume II of the series. The book covers the commitment to the new nation of Namibia, including assisting in the conduct of the first election there, some missions associated with the Iran–Iraq war, and mine-clearing operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan; but more than half of it is devoted to the Gulf War of 1991.

Horner describes these missions at strategic, operational, and tactical levels. In other words, he writes of the high-level political and diplomatic discussions that led to Australian commitments; the way that the Australian Defence Force planned and executed the missions; and some of the personal experiences of the individuals involved.

At the strategic level, the global context for the volume is the end of the Cold War and the hope that this would lead to a ‘new world order’, a phrase that in the late 1980s and early 1990s was uttered first with idealistic hope, then with cynical disillusion. Much of the disillusion centred on the performance of the United Nations Organisation. After being paralysed by the Cold War, the UN would, many hoped, be able to play the role its founders had intended in ending and even preventing international disputes. The early parts of this book refer, time and again, to the UN’s inability to handle this projected role competently, either militarily or politically.

Horner’s assessments of Australian service personnel are generally more positive, but he acknowledges weaknesses in their performance in some areas. He recognises that New Zealand forces, with their mixture of Maori and pakeha, were superior in matters of cultural sensitivity.

While Horner includes accurate, if dispassionate, coverage of the decisions and achievements of politicians and diplomats, his discussions of the operational and tactical levels is overwhelmingly devoted to the military. The mission in Namibia, including assisting the new nation to hold its first election, involved a significant contribution by officers of the Australian Electoral Commission. Their role, actions, challenges, and achievements might have attracted greater attention in this book.

The appendices to the book include not only a table of Australian participation in multinational peacekeeping operations, with their alphabet soup of acronyms, but also two valuable essays by researchers on Horner’s team. Daniel Flitton, now diplomatic editor of The Age, records the work of Dr Peter Dunn, a scientist who, as part of a team of five, investigated the use by Iraq of chemical weapons in that country’s war with Iran, the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. This was work that involved no little danger, both from the material that Dunn and his colleagues were investigating and from the inevitable hazards of entry into a war zone.

The other essay has already sparked some media comment. Rosalind Hearder, an able historian of the medical aspects of conflicts, discusses the ‘Gulf War syndrome’. She observes: ‘That many ex-Gulf War service personnel are suffering is not in dispute, but the reasons for their suffering are.’ Hearder notes that the debate over the Gulf War syndrome has striking parallels with the debate over the toxic chemicals generally known as Agent Orange for decades after the Vietnam War. Taken together, these two episodes suggest that the major revision of the post-service medical care of veterans, recently announced by the Australian Defence Force, is long overdue. It is clear that post-traumatic stress disorder is much more important than was understood in earlier decades and conflicts; but much remains unclear about the interaction of PTSD and other causes of disease in affecting the mental and physical health of veterans.

Since the Great War, the centenary of which will dominate the media in the coming years, much has changed in the nature of conflict and in Australia’s experience of war and peace. The tradition of Australian official war histories has reflected many of those changes. This volume, and the series of which it is the first to appear, will record the service of Australians, mostly service personnel but also some notable civilians, in missions around the world, some of which were highly controversial, while others have remained virtually unknown. With or without acknowledgment, it will provide a sound basis, in fact and interpretation, for much that will be written for many years to come.