Locking in a 2% spending on the war sector means spending for the sake of spending.
Rather than target spending for the most effective murdering of civilians.


Since both old parties are joined at the hip on war spending, can they justify waste spending on inefficient machinery when target spending to decrease the effects of war is more logical and more efficient spending.

2

Australia's defence sector on increasing climate alert


Climate change and conflict are two of history’s oldest bedfellows. The impacts of natural climate change on food yields, river flows and habitable land have long acted as triggers for conflict. Human-driven climate change is likely to do the same this century, but on a larger and more intense scale – unless extraordinary international emissions abatement occurs.

No surprise, then, that this year’s annual conference of the Australian defence industry, held in Canberra in February, devoted a session to considering what climate change means for Australia’s defence planning, equipping and operational scope. And no surprise that the large audience did not query the basic science.

Indeed, the defence sector does not have, or want, the luxury of ideological distortion, vacillation or rejection of mainstream science. That’s not how to prevail in conflict or to defend the home population. The sector’s basic task is to protect the national interest and the population’s safety.

In today’s more densely interconnected world, that task will broaden as human-driven climate change proceeds. There will be an expanded role for Australia’s defence sector in regional peace-keeping, especially when geopolitical instabilities arise from the mix of climate change, population growth, other large-scale environmental changes (such as ocean acidification, land degradation and emptied aquifers) and widening wealth disparities.

As the tempo of extreme weather events increases in a warming world with an energised atmosphere, the need for disaster relief and rebuilding will escalate, both here and within the Asia-Pacific region.

Less dramatic, but more fundamental, coastal habitability will be eroded by rising sea levels in many locations, food yields will decline as salt water intrudes or as changes in temperatures and rainfall join the mix of pre-existing stresses, and the flow of refugees and migrants will increase. In all these, and other, climate-affected areas the military can foresee likely engagement in assisting with engineering, food aid and co-ordination of people flows.

Discussion of climate change and its consequences has circulated in senior ranks of the armed services in many countries for well over a decade. The Pentagon made clear its serious security concerns early last decade. So did the British Department of Defence, whose world map showed flashpoints where climate change would act as a "risk multiplier", exacerbating local environmental tensions due to water shortage, food insecurity, deepening aridity and low-lying coasts.

The opinion of the US Navy’s Admiral Samuel Locklear is global warming is: "the most likely thing [to] cripple the security environment." And Britain’s Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the British Foreign Secretary’s climate envoy, stated last year that climate change poses "one of the greatest risks we face in the 21st century … it will affect all of us."

Last year the Department of Defence commissioned a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on the prospects for climate change, its environmental and social impacts, and implications for regional defence and engagement. The report, entitled Heavy Weather: Climate and the Australian Defence Force, concluded that while the ADF always needs hard-edged war-fighting capability there will be an “increasing requirement to become involved in capacity building, especially in those countries that are already feeling the effect of stresses and where climate change will have its greatest impact.”

It is not a matter of the military adopting a "green" view, stated the report, “it’s about the ADF being well placed to deal with the potential disruptive forces of climate change.” 

Those disruptive forces have been evident in other parts of the world over the past half century. For example, a recently-published review of hundreds of documented civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1950 showed that lethal conflicts rose by up to 40 per cent in years when the country’s annual temperature rose by up to one degree above average.

Historically, a clearer picture is emerging in the scientific literature, showing how periods of climatic adversity and resultant food shortages and other miseries have fomented social unrest, conflicts, wars and the overthrow of governments during the last 3000 years.

Five of the last six dynastic collapses in China occurred in such conditions. Droughts finally undid the Mayans. The historians’ "General Crisis" of the seventeenth century in Europe occurred during the coldest and harshest period of the Little Ice Age when famines, epidemics, lawlessness, witch burning, and chaotic warfare prevailed.

February's conference was entitled “What Does Government Want of the Defence Industry?” I doubt that our national government, disdaining science as an impediment to unfettered trade and accelerated economic growth, wants to hear about national and regional threats from climate change. Meanwhile the defence sector will go about its business.

I stopped reading after seeing this: "... the most effective murdering of civilians." Simply appalling to suggest the ADF murders civilians. Appalling in the extreme. Shame on you.

Armchair_Politician wrote on Apr 4^th, 2014 at 8:40am:



http://www.news.com.au/national/australian-soldiers-shot-dead-two-children-tendi...


AGW wars are going to cripple the world economy and that effects Australia financially. So why are the old parties ignoring the threat of AGW while wanting to lock in more and more money into war machinery.

Are the olds just war mongering and using the climate to inflame wars and create boat refugees.