Talisman Saber 2013 − bringing war to our door
Robin Taubenfeld
At a time when Australia and the US are actively engaged in wars on foreign soil, military recruitment is accepted in our schools, fighter jet fly-overs and tanks are part of family fun days.
And warfare is going green. The world's largest manufacturer of military aircraft is developing an 'eco-plane'. The US military is 'Enlisting the Sun' – with plans to increase its solar power use. Every two years the Australian military publishes an Environmental Management Plan for the Talisman Saber joint US-Australian military exercises that take place primarily in Queensland.
War is anathema to the environment and yet peace is rarely discussed as a necessity for sustainability – or global survival. While the superficial reasons for wars are varied and complex, war represents our failure to make and defend systems based on cooperation and ecological and social justice. In the environment movement, for example, we often spend energy on protecting a habitat or stopping a destructive practice, without addressing or deconstructing the systemic conditions that cause these threats. One result is that we always seem to be 'putting out fires' rather than changing the conditions that start the fires. There can be no real sustainability without peace and ultimately no peace without sustainability. Peace, social justice and ecological sustainability go hand in hand.
Australia and the US were built on the spilling of first people's blood, and the occupation and desecration of their lands. Australia shares a legacy of colonisation, militarisation and nuclearisation with her neighbours in the Pacific. As environmental campaigners/activists or advocates, it is our responsibility to challenge this status quo.
We need to re-integrate peace and social justice in our calls for environmental sanity – and vice versa. For instance, it doesn't make sense to talk about protecting the Great Barrier Reef without addressing the fact that parts of the Reef are used for bombing practice and military exercises. Nor can we distance ourselves when refugees are being turned away from our shores, when we know that environmental crises or inequitable access to resources are a major cause of wars that create refugees.
While working on our areas of specific concern we need to chip away at the system that perpetuates these crises. Military industrial capitalism cannot save the planet – but people can.
Say NO to US war games in Australia
From July 15 to August 5, Australia hosted the US-Australia military exercises Talisman Saber 2013 (TS13). Up to 23,000 US and Australian military personnel engaged in combined land, sea and air training in Queensland (Shoalwater Bay and in the Great Barrier Reef), the NT (Darwin and at Delamere Range and Bradshaw), and in the Coral, Timor and Arafura Seas. Talisman Saber also used military and civilian facilities in other parts of Australia, including Brisbane and Townsville.
The biennial Talisman Saber exercises involve live firing, the use of explosives, urban warfare practice, the use of high power sonar and active sonobuoys, amphibious assaults, parachuting and land force manoeuvres.
Talisman Saber exercises threaten our security by further entrenching Australia's complicity in US global military expansion. The list of weapons and equipment that the Defence force claims "may be utilised during TS13" (2013 Public Environment Report p.13) leaves no doubt that Talisman Saber will put Australia at risk of being perceived as provocatively "saber rattling" in the Pacific.
The long list includes Ohio Class nuclear-powered submarines (capable of delivering nuclear weapons), Los Angeles Class nuclear-powered submarines, and Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
Talisman Saber is one facet of an expanding US military presence in our region, and Australia's support for it. Australia already hosts Pine Gap (US satellite base), allows US bombing fly-overs, will station US troops in Darwin, hosts nuclear-powered and nuclear-weapons capable war ships, and opens both its civilian and military infrastructure to the US.
The US is repositioning its global force and Australia is playing a vital role in acting as a launching pad for US military activity, as an ally in the field, and as the face of the US nuclear umbrella in the Asia-Pacific region. To our neighbours, Talisman Saber is an expression of US/Australia joint posturing − a show of force.
Environmental threats
Talisman Saber threatens our environment. The Shoalwater Bay Military Training Facility encompasses some of Queensland's (and Australia's) most pristine coastal regions. Rather than being earmarked for complete protection, it is valued as the Austrailan Defence Force's most important area for the conduct of amphibious and combined arms exercises due to its accessible coastline.
The Public Environment Report states: "The Shoalwater Bay Training Area (SWBTA) is a critical asset for Defence training due to the capacity to integrate training of naval, air and sea units, as well as the capacity to conduct large scale live fire training exercises. The majority of the TS13 exercise activities will be undertaken in this training area. The continuous and relatively undisturbed nature of SWBTA is the key to both a high value for conservation and Defence training capability."
Waters included in the military zone, or used and traversed during military operations, include areas of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and RAMSAR listed wetlands. Talisman Saber also uses other locations of environmental significance such as Saumarez Reef, the Timor, Arafura and Coral Seas, Cowley Beach (located within the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area), and habitat for endangered species such as the Northern Quoll and Gouldian Finch (Bradshaw, Delamere Range, Mt Bundy, NT) and vulnerable and/or endangered species such as turtles, dugongs and migrating whales.
Being a combined exercise, Talisman Saber includes army, navy and air force practice. The military, in particular the US military, are known to be some of the world's worst polluters and producers of toxic chemicals. It is inappropriate to expose some of our last coastal wilderness areas, threatened and endangered species and heritage sites, to bombing, on-shore landing practise, the use of sonar, and potential radiological contamination from the use of nuclear-powered ships for these military operations.
Military exercises are the face of ongoing colonisation. War games and bases in Australia and the Pacific deny First People's Sovereignty. Shoalwater Bay, for example, is the ancestral lands of the Darambal people who have only restricted access to their significant sites within the Training Area.
The Pacific island country Guam, or Gua'han, the traditional lands of the Chamorro people, is now one-third occupied by the US military. Australia permits the US military to conduct bombing practice in the form of bombing fly-overs on Australia's Northern Territory from Guam. Pine Gap, in the NT, is used to support US missile defense. The US military continues to conduct ballistic missile test launches from the mainland to the Marshall Islands, where the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the 1950s. Some atolls were completely destroyed, many Marshallese displaced. The legacy of nuclear testing in Australia and the Pacific is ongoing.
Continuation of the system that colonises these lands and waters and uses them as tools for further militarism is unacceptable. Instead, compensation, restitution and ongoing support for affected people should be guaranteed, rehabilitation of sites and guardianship of sites beyond rehabilitation should be ensured, and control of all land and seas used for military activity throughout Australia and in the Pacific should be returned to Traditional Owners.
It is time to stop preparing for war and to start practicing peace. By refusing to fuel the global nuclear cycle through exports of uranium and refusing to collude with US global military expansion by hosting bases, troops, nuclear ship visits and military exercises, Australia could take a leading role in pushing a dialogue based on peace and cooperation rather than imperialism and competition.
Robin Taubenfeld is a member of Friends of the Earth, Brisbane.
------------------------
Peace Convergence
As part of our ongoing work to de-nuclearise, de-militarise and de-colonise the planet, Friends of the Earth Brisbane supported a Peace Convergence in the Shoalwater region at the time that the Talisman Saber war games took place. This year, US Veteran for Peace Vince Emanuele voiced his concerns on the east coast, Darwin and Rockhampton. Chamorro activist Vicky Leon and Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, spoke in various locations during the war games.
Creative actions and events were held in Rockhampton, Yeppoon, Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin and Melbourne. On August 19, friend and comrade Graeme Dunstan will be facing trial in Rockhampton for the Tiger Ploughshares action that took place during Talisman Saber 2011.
More information about specific events and the Rockhampton Peace Convergence can be found: