Mission complete

Jim Molan’s seminal book assessing Communist China’s military strength and Australia’s woeful state of unreadiness was his final and most important act of service to his country. By nick cater.

As NSW was emerging drowsily from an extended Covid lockdown in the Spring of 2021, I took a call from Jim Molan asking me if I would review an essay he had written. His thesis was disturbing. While Australians had been obsessing about a novel virus, we faced a far more dangerous potential enemy that we had yet to find the courage to even name. Defence officials tasked with preparing the nation to defend itself against external threats appeared happy to leave the details of the next war in the hands of our largest ally, the United States.

Molan’s essay was an early draft of Danger on our Doorstep: Could Australia Go to War With China?  which was to appear in print 11 months later. That seminal book with its uncoloured assessment of Communist China’s military strength and Australia’s woeful state of unreadiness was Molan’s final and most important act of service to his country.

Molan’s intolerance of bullshit, backed by decades of experience, his vast intelligence and reserves of courage, empowered him to write about Communist China in a way no one else would. His straight talking style made some uncomfortable, including leaders of his own party who foresaw the collateral damage that it would do among immigrant voters that would hurt the Coalition at the 2022 federal election. For Molan, however, some things were more important than winning an election, or even winning his own private battle against the aggressive form of cancer that claimed his life this week. The dreadful diagnosis that he received 20 months ago, at the age of 71, was not an excuse for anger or self-pity but a call to action.

Danger on our Doorstep was a book Molan wanted published in a hurry. Australians had been sleepwalking for too long, dreamily imagining that China was just a benign trading partner, imagining that the descriptor ‘Communist’ in the name of its ruling party was a meaningless, historical relic. The Aukus agreement, which had just been signed, was an important development, but the nuclear submarines wouldn’t be arriving tomorrow. We must start preparing for the coming war from the bottom up, even while doing everything we could to ensure it never starts.

Thinking and talking about war was Molan’s profession for 40 years as a member of the Australian Defence Force. He was in the higher echelons of allied command as chief of staff for operations in Iraq. He had served as a soldier in Asia and the South Pacific. He masterminded a plan to protect the integrity of our national borders with the turn-back-the-boats operation implemented by Tony Abbott’s government in 2013. Molan’s contacts in the US military were impeccable and he had an intimate working knowledge of our strongest allies at war and in peace.

The power of Molan’s narrative was not just his words, but the authority which he commanded at the highest levels of defence in Canberra and Washington. His warning could hardly be dismissed as the ravings of an amateur xenophobe. It was the considered assessment of a soldier who knew from experience what happens to nations that blunder into wars without a plan to win them.

We should not be swayed by the false hope that war was so appalling that it could never occur or the probability is small enough to be ignored, Molan wrote.

Our strategy for dealing with the Peoples Republic of China should be ‘based on the real world, and not on how we hope the world is.’

Australia had done precious little to prepare for war, perhaps because the nation has profited so greatly from China’s economic expansion. Against all the evidence we convinced ourselves that the Chinese Communist Party would come good one day. We had taken reassurance from the firmness of our relations with the United States, buttressed by a blind faith in America’s technological superiority.

Molan’s blunt message was that the technological advantage now lay with China. Molan wrote that China posssesed ‘the ability to spring a devastating attack on US regional bases that would remove US power from the Western Pacific and leave China free to resolve the Taiwan issue in its own time , without any interference .’

In an interview on ADH TV last August, I put it to Molan that the most worrying thing about that sentence was the absence of any qualifying ‘ifs’, ‘buts’ or maybes’. Molan replied that Chinese technological advantage in a war in its own backyard was beyond doubt in military circles. If the US and its allies were prepared to come to the defence of Taiwan, they had better find a way to do so quickly. For Australia this meant a sharp rise in defence spending and adopting the strategy of Israel, turning Australia into a self-reliant, technologically-advanced, prickly foe with the ability to project our force in China’s own backyard.

‘War is not inevitable,’ wrote Molan, ‘but whether it occurs or not is likely to depend on the strength and resolve of the US and its allies, including Australia.’

Molan’s second career as a politician was to last for less than five years, bookended by his first speech in the Senate in February 2018 and his appearance at a Senate estimates committee in November when he asked defence officials what war they were preparing to fight. A senior Defence official replied in immaculate bureaucratese that that was a matter to be decided by the forthcoming Defence Strategic Review. Those responsible were working on ‘the priorities associated with that environment in which we find ourselves’ and would ‘form a view of where its priorities for military capabilities lie.’

It was the kind of woolly thinking which Molan devoted his brief time in the Senate to exposing. How could we be serious about preparing for conflict if we could not bring ourselves to name the potential enemy? As he rests in what he confidently expected to be a better world, Molan can look down on Canberra with his mission accomplished.

Click here to read an edited extract from Danger on our Doorstep by Jim Molan (Harper Collins).