Peacekeeping is far from irrelevant: its successes and failures have important ramifications for both international peace and security, and for Australia’s own domestic security. Those who think otherwise should think hard about what our immediate neighbourhood would look like had Australia allowed the states of East Timor and the Solomon Islands to descend into anarchy. They should also contemplate the ramifications of defeat in Afghanistan, and reflect on the fact that today’s scourge of piracy off the Somali coast was enabled by the collapse of the UN peace operation there in the early 1990s, and by more recent botched attempts at restoring order by arming warlords opposed to the Islamic Courts and lending support to Ethiopia’s self-interested intervention in that troubled country.

Add to this the role of various peacekeeping operations (one of them, UNTSO, commanded by Australian Ian Gordon) in preserving a modicum of peace and decency in the Middle East, and it soon becomes clear, as this volume makes plain, that peacekeeping is not something that militaries do in their spare time. It is fundamental to both global security and our own security interests.

Despite all this, the role of peacekeeping and related counter-insurgency type activities has tended to be downplayed in Australia’s defence policy. As David Horner shows in his contribution to this volume, the 1987 White Paper articulated three primary goals for the ADF: to maintain independent capabilities for the defence of Australia; to promote strategic stability in the region; and to assist in the easing of superpower tensions and minimise the intrusion of external powers in the region inimical to Western interests. Although peacekeeping was mentioned in passing as something to which Australia might usefully contribute, the paper did not identify the development of deployable expeditionary forces or specific peacekeeping capacities as a priority.

Over the five years that followed, the lack of these capabilities limited Australia’s capacity to respond effectively to political disruptions in Fiji and Vanuatu, the land component of the Gulf War, and to make a significant contribution to the eminently successful UN mission in Namibia, despite Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s commitment to do so in 1979. As Horner comments, ‘the ADF’s force structure was being developed with overwhelming emphasis on the defence of Australia’, premised on the assumption that such forces could also be pressed into service for peacekeeping and counter-insurgency style operations. ‘In reality,’ he points out, ‘the army had only limited capacity to send formed units overseas.’

This book therefore helps illuminate some important themes of continuity, most notably the gap between the wars we prepare to fight and procure for and the operations in which we actually participate. Indeed, we would be hard pressed to think of a single active operation in which Australia’s current Collins Class submarine fleet played a role. The upshot of this disjuncture is that, in practice, ADF personnel in the field have been forced to innovate by pressing into service equipment and skills developed for other purposes. In the sixty years of Australian peacekeeping, up to 40,000 Australians have been deployed to twenty-seven different conflict zones whilst making barely a ripple in defence planning and strategy. The fact that they have proven so successful is testament to the ADF’s key abiding capability – the professionalism and resourcefulness of its personnel.

General Peter Cosgrove’s use of heavily armored infantry vehicles at the beginning of the Australian-led mission to East Timor in 1999 is a salient case in point. Given East Timor’s terrain, the vehicles served little direct military purpose, but they helped send a clear strategic message to any militias that might have considered trying to disrupt the peacekeepers’ deployment.

Insightful chapters by military and police practitioners involved in the missions in Cambodia, Cyprus, Rwanda, the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Solomon Islands, including force commanders such as John Sanderson, Tim Ford and Ian Gordon, provide testament to this ingenuity and resourcefulness. Their professionalism and contribution deserve more recognition and need better support in terms of doctrine, training and equipment. In that vein, it is highly fitting that the editors decided to donate the royalties from this book to the appeal for a memorial to Australia’s peacekeepers.

The book also illuminates some important themes of change. In light of more recent debates about the Howard government’s decision to support the US-led invasion of Iraq, readers might enjoy a wry smile at the book’s account of the Hawke government’s decision to deploy navy divers to aid US-led efforts in the Gulf and the Liberal opposition’s criticism. In stark contrast to its contemporary stance on the Australian–United States alliance, The Australian’s defence correspondent joined the attack, insisting that the decision to make a modest contribution to allied efforts in the Gulf ‘will be seen by some as coming dangerously close to a replay of how Australia got involved in Vietnam … it’s a risky business, and it is hoped that we won’t have to pay for Mr Beazley’s need to please Washington either in lives or in being drawn into another Vietnam style quagmire from which we would once again only end up as the loser’.

Another important theme of change – highlighted in the chapters detailing experiences in the field and in the concluding chapters written by former UNTSO commander and military adviser to the UN, Tim Ford, and prominent UN expert and public commentator Ramesh Thakur – is the increasing complexity of peacekeeping operations. Where once these operations involved monitoring ceasefires, today they span a wide range of activities, sometimes conducted in highly hostile environments. Although the editors try to demarcate peacekeeping from war-fighting, nowadays the dividing line between peacekeeping, peace enforcement and counter-insurgency can be a very fine one, exemplified by the American notion of a ‘three block’ war, developed by General Charles Krulak, where soldiers engage in full-scale combat, peacekeeping activities and the provision of humanitarian assistance within three connected city blocks.

Marking the sixtieth anniversary of Australian peacekeeping, this book makes a timely call for peacekeeping and associated tasks to be recognised as a core part of military operations. It is to be hoped that our next defence White Paper takes heed of this call and pays a little more attention to the operations that the ADF actually engages in.