[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

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,