“Few Australians remember the last threat to our sovereignty”

Via Catherine MacGregor today who is one of the few to have noticed the exploding Sino/US Cold War:

…The People’s Liberation Army was humiliated and shocked at its inability to locate the US naval carrier groups that sailed into the Taiwan Straits during the crisis of 1996. Ever since then, their military force structure and strategy have been fused under the rubric of anti-access area denial.

…As this crisis intensifies, we have learnt that our expensive submarine program is beset by problems. Our 2016 Defence White Paper belatedly recognised that the era of expeditionary land force operations by niche forces was over and that we urgently needed to configure the Australian Defence Force to fight a conventional adversary in the littoral approaches to our continent. Yet our most potent maritime strike platforms are nowhere near operational capability.

…Few Australians remember the last existential threat to our sovereignty. The Second World War ensued the last time two totalitarian quasi-capitalist rising powers challenged the global order. Those preconditions exist again today. We are sleepwalking into an era of unprecedented danger with a legacy force configured to contribute small force packages to the United States in hybrid wars.

Yep.