SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry considers the import of what President Trump and US Secretary for War Pete Hegseth had to say to US top brass on 30 September just gone.
On 30 September, US President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, addressed a gathering of 800 top commanders of the US military. Their reported speeches are startling, bizarre and threatening. The threats are clearly aimed at US citizens, but they raise questions about how involved do Australians want to be with such a country.
In the transcript of Hegseth’s speech, posted on the Department of War website, he said that the US will no longer “fight with stupid rules of engagement.” That presumably means dispensing with the Geneva Convention.
“We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country,” he said. “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for war fighters.”
Apparently, the Netanyahu, Gaza-obliteration military doctrine is the template for the US military from here on. This has significant implications for Australia.
The Howard government championed the doctrine of “interoperability” with US forces. That meant buying US equipment and training together so that the two forces could smoothly collaborate.
One arena of that close interaction was in Afghanistan. An aspect of US military culture that rubbed off onto Australian forces was illustrated in 2018 when an Australian military vehicle there flew the Nazi swastika flag for an extended period. Australian service personnel also posed for a photo with the racist Confederate flag, which was at a US base.
Australia, under the direction of Defence minister Richard Marles, has moved the collaborative military doctrine up a couple of notches. In 2022, his mission was to “integrate” Australian forces with those of the US. Now that has escalated to “interchangeability”. The line between where the US military ends and the Australian military starts is beingdeliberately blurred.
Donald Trump, on 30 September, specified that US cities were “a big part of war now, it’s a big part of war.” He went on to say that “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room…And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”
The US president seriously suggested that US cities should be training grounds for Hegseth’s doctrine of “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” But the Trump/Hegseth doctrine does not stop there.
According to the US ABC news channel on 3 October, Trump notified Congress that the country is in “a non-international armed conflict” with drug smugglers. This was an attempt by Trump to give fig leaf cover to the murder of civilians in boats by US military forces in the Caribbean Sea.
The ABC report quoted congressional “lawmakers” interpreting Trump’s notice as the administration “essentially waging a secret war against secret enemies, without the consent of Congress.”
Trump claims that the boats that have been destroyed were smuggling drugs and that justifies the wanton murder of civilians on the high seas. Of course, all evidence has been annihilated so nobody can confirm what is true. What is clear is that Trump is mobilising US Navy and Airforce assets in a show of force against Venezuela in breach of international law.
Besides authorising ultra-violence, another thing that Hegseth promised the gathered military chiefs was: “No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations.”
Those statements appear meaningless outside of the US military, but they have a hideous meaning.
Women in the US military are raped at a rate higher than civilian women and the perpetrators are often their superior officers. During the Iraq deployment a number of women died of dehydration because they were rationing their water intake so that they could avoid walking to the toilet block in the night for fear of rape. A lower number of men also experience sexual assault.
The issue became such a scandal that the high command was forced to institute a system of anonymous reporting. That is precisely what Hegseth and Trump are dismantling: the right of US service women to live free of sexual assault or rape.
Towards the end of his speech Trump said that “it is the culture, the spirit of our military that truly sets us apart from any other nation…the most unstoppable force ever to walk the face of the earth.”
The Albanese Labor government and the Cook state Labor government have set us on a path of being an “interchangeable” part of Donald Trump’s “culture.” At Garden Island the massive nuclear submarine facility will be operating by 2027 and over the next couple of years war industries are to become the second biggest employer in WA.
These facts on the ground will have a profound impact on life and culture. Slowly but surely people in Fremantle and surrounding regions will experience changes in civilian life.
Bit-by-bit the culture of “no more politically correct” will seep into everyday conversation. The assumption that it is OK to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country” will become commonplace. But whose enemies?
One day we will wake up to discover that it isn’t the enemies of the Australian people who we are obliterating, but those that the US directs us to murder. Indeed, if our military operates “interchangeably” with the US will we even know who is killing whom and under who’s command?
Currently we are being prepared for war with China, even though China has never presented a threat to Australia, just as Venezuela has never threatened the USA.
The questions that we need to face are quite simple: is China our enemy? Is the USA our friend? Answering that question should focus our minds on the kind of society we want and the type of foreign policy we need.
By Barry Healy
* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.
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