The development of Australian Army jungle warfare doctrine and training, 1941-1945 (2024)

Jungle Warriors: From Tobruk to Kokoda and Beyond, How the Australian Army Became the World's Most Deadly Jungle Fighting Force

2014

The sources of the Australian tradition in irregular warfare, 1942–1974

Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2009

This article had its genesis in a background study for the development of a new Australian Army counter-insurgency doctrine. Archival research showed that the Australian counter-insurgency doctrine employed in such post-1945 conflicts as Burma, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam originated in the jungle campaigns of the South West Pacific Area during World War II. The historical record also showed that the Army's counter-insurgency doctrine, as with its World War II-jungle warfare doctrine, was a pragmatic amalgam of Australian experience and British doctrine. The article traces this process through the development of a series of doctrine manuals. It also considers the contribution of key individuals to both counter-insurgency theory and practice. This distinctively Australian approach to the development of doctrine was responsible for producing a highly successful manual, The Division in Battle: Pamphlet No. 11, Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (DIB 11), which the Army used during its involvement in Vietnam.

Coping With the Jungle Environment and Fighting in It - the Evolution of U.S. Army’s Jungle Warfare from World War II to Vietnam.docx

Overview of the evolution of tactics and techniques in the conduct of jungle warfare by the U.S. Army in manuals from World War II to Vietnam.

Future Land Warfare and the Australian Army

Defence Today, Vol. 11, No.1, 2014

The Australian Army is being steadily withdrawn from operations in Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. The intense operational period of the last decade may be lessening, but the Army remains committed to a long-term capability development program that is progressively reshaping it. This program is two fold....

Land Warfare Studies Centre A Capability of First Resort Amphibious Operations and Australian Defence Policy 1901–2001

During the 20th century, joint operations—and particularly amphibious operations—have played an important role in the defence of Australia. This paper is a survey of the major joint operations undertaken by Australian Forces in the past one hundred years and aims to examine key factors such as the changing mechanisms for joint operations, doctrine and equipment. The survey begins with the first joint operation that Australian Forces undertook in 1914. The influence of Gallipoli on Australian defence policy is also considered briefly. Gallipoli eclipsed the success of the joint Army–Navy operation in German New Guinea, and the importance of such operations to the defence of Australia and its national interests. In the inter-war period, amphibious operations did not feature greatly in Australian defence planning. Although there was one training exercise, Imperial Defence was the predominant theme in Australian security policy. However, both British and US Forces experimented with amphibious operations. These experiments laid the groundwork for victory in World War II and Australians were heavily involved in landing operations during the Allied campaigns in the South-West Pacific. Between the late 1940s and the early 1990s, however, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) concentrated on operations aimed at the defence of the continent. This was a dark period for amphibious and joint operations, which were only kept alive in largely unread doctrine or through heavily orchestrated training exercises. Only in the late 1990s, with the impetus provided by operations in East Timor, did the ADF rediscover the importance of joint operations to national security. The paper ends by briefly considering the problems that the ADF faces as it attempts to revitalise this important capability in the 21st century.

'‘There is no Frontline: Lessons from Black Hawk Down’. The Army Journal, September 2000, 73-88.

Australian Army Cooperation with the Land Forces of the United States: Problems of the Junior Partner, Land Warfare Studies Centre , Canberra, January 2003.

2002

[With Lachlan Grant], ‘The liberation of Australian New Guinea’, Wartime, no 64, 2013, pp 58–61.

Blaxland, J, 1989, Organising an Army: The Australian Experience 1957-1965 (Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Canberra)

On the precipice: the battle for Shaggy Ridge was one of the Australian 7th Division's great achievements in the New Guinea campaign of 1943–44

Wartime, no. 83, July 2018, pp. 8-16., 2018

This article describes the battle of Shaggy Ridge in New Guinea which took place from October 1943 to January 1944.