Abbott’s Persuasive Case for National Service

A well read colleague in Washington — a former member of the Bush Administration — recently told me a column of Tony Abbott’s, published this year in the Wall Street Journal, was about the best thing he’d ever read regarding the West’s crisis of strategic competence. As perhaps only a former national leader can do, Abbott seems to have a particular knack for finding the nexus between military strength and Western cultural confidence. His February piece in the Journal essentially linked self-inflicted degradation of Western freedoms at home, to self-defeating military weakness abroad.

This week, Abbott found that sweet spot again, positing that mandatory national service for young Australians could be an effective unifier for the nation. Speaking for the Institute of Public Affairs, Mr Abbott put forth the proposition that school-leavers undertake at least one year of service in a branch of the military, or alternatively, in a community outreach organisation, or Australia’s Pacific Peace corps.

Mr Abbott is to be commended for having the temerity to persist with airing his (often unpopular) views post-prime ministership. Whilst the compulsion of any citizen into forced national service is a grave matter for a free nation to countenance, Abbott has recognised the evident gravity of our national predicament. There are three paramount reasons why Abbott’s suggestion ought to be taken seriously.

The first is that young Australians are in dire need of a mechanism by which their bonds of national fraternity can be strengthened in the critical years following their departure from high school. The United States – whatever it’s manifest flaws – still holds fast to a university system which cross-pollinates young Americans across geographical and socio-economic lines in these critical formative years. Australia does as well, of course, however the size of the nation, and our relatively small number of universities severely limits how effectively this cross-pollination occurs.

America’s military service academies and elite universities bring together the best and brightest young people from across the country in an educational product decidedly national in flavour. In Annapolis, Maryland, where I live in close proximity to the United States Naval Academy, I am as likely to bump into a young surface warfare officer from Nebraska, as I am a trainee submariner from California. This ‘national’ experience — if not the field of expertise — is similar at the Ivy League, and big state-run universities which pump out the administrative talent that decides upon sending those officers to war.

This is simply not the case at Australian universities, and in a country of only 25 million people, won’t be remedied by creating new institutions. National service could instead serve as a proxy mechanism to build a national fraternalism which serves the country beneficially into the future.

Secondly, Abbott recognises that holding national ‘values’ is pointless, unless those values are strengthened by active practice, and applied discipline. This active practice of values is an awfully difficult concept to sell to our young in the years they are most consumed with living freely and happily, newly emancipated from chains of parental control and schoolyard obligation. But this is also why engaging Australians so actively at this stage of their lives is critical to our national project going forward. For six years I taught at The King’s School, in Sydney. The school’s unique strength lies is its military heritage, and its long-held tradition of engaging boys aged 14-18 in a form of compulsory military service, and concomitant national pageantry. This always seemed, to me, to inculcate a selfless love of country in the young men I had the privilege of teaching.

Done well, building this taught national virtue amongst young Australians does inestimable good for the country. In my time teaching, however, I came to hold two grave concerns concerning its execution writ-large: Firstly, that more Australians weren’t exposed to a culture of military service at a younger age; Secondly, that many of the great young men I farewelled each year at the end of year 12 seldom got another chance to practice that virtue in the community at large.

We know that young people leave school incompletely formed, and that young men’s brains in particular take perhaps a decade more to fully mature. It follows then, that in a country concerned with building national resilience, it behooves us to take seriously the prospect of doing something beyond the school gate to buttress the virtues of our young adult citizens.

Finally, and most critically, Abbott should be taken seriously if for no other reason than the ‘maths’ alone.

There are two primary metrics of which Australia must be cognizant in assessing its future national security burdens: Firstly, the likelihood of war in the Pacific, and secondly, the capacity and resolve of the United States to defend its allies, should that war break out. The first is running sky-high. No serious analyst now disbelieves that, short of an internal coup, Chinese President-for-life Xi will move, at some point, to take Taiwan. It will be almost impossible to avoid allied conflict when that occurs.

The second metric is also receding alarmingly below the confidence line. Last month the Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive report into the state of the US military produced damning findings regarding naval and airforce preparedness. A week later, the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy appeared, highlighting a growing American incapacity to realise two-war battlefront capability. Then, as if to confirm that incapability, last week the last squadron of US Airforce F15 Eagles left Okinawa, Japan, unreplaced by a permanent Fifth Generation fighter squadron stationed in the Pacific — a move expressly linked to airpower capacity shortages across the US Airforce, and heavily criticised by expert commentators.

Assessing this equation in real terms should be a sobering exercise for any Australian concerned for the future of the nation. The sum outcome, is that Australia is in urgent need of more boots on the ground, planes in the air, and boats on the sea if it is to have even a remote chance of meeting its national security challenges.

Tony Abbott remains the only major Australia political figure willing to assess fully, truthfully, and publicly, the nature of the threat the nation faces. Australia will do well to heed his advice, and take seriously his well-considered call to national service.

Ben Crocker is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar, and Research Fellow for Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns