"Nor did he go to North Vietnam and praise its leaders (as Snowden did in Russia)"
This is misleading and ignores the differences between Snowden's situation and Ellsberg's situation, the biggest difference being that we are not at war with China.
One might say being an informed consumer is a moral imperative, because investing time and energy into being informed sure doesn't provide a competitive advantage.
What are their defensive requirements then? As far as I know Australia does not have any island territories not close the it's mainland. Would range really be a problem for Australia's defensive needs?
> Would range really be a problem for Australia's defensive needs?
Yes.
Leaving to one side that Australia is in itself very large, we rely almost entirely on 3 lanes of approach for all our trade. Those lanes extend thousands of kilometres to the west, the north (which includes -- whisper it quietly because we are good friends and neighbours -- Indonesia) and the east.
To win a genuine shooting war, or merely to stalemate, we would need to be able to control those lanes. One critical element of controlling sea lanes is to control the air over those lanes. Since we don't have aircraft carriers, we need aircraft that can fly a long way, penetrate naval air defences and shoot at enemy planes and ships.
It also matters in case of a straight up land invasion. Australia's best defence in such a case is Australia. The sheer bulk of the landmass makes an invasion from any direction a long slow slog to occupy the rest of the country. Especially if that country possesses aircraft capable of very long flights from bases dispersed around the whole perimeter.
So in actual fact, aircraft range is worthy of consideration. Air tankers help, but while they multiply force, they also multiply vulnerability.
The Australians picked the F111 for its range. There is a good discussion of the politicking that lead to the selection on the "Replacing the Canberra" section of this wiki page:
Considering Australia's immediate neighbors and the likelihood of them attacking, that's not exactly arbitrary. (Not to say said likelihood is high anytime soon, but it's higher than, say, needing to bomb Auckland.)
Australia is huge. So range is important even if all you're planning on doing is defending the Australian mainland.
Any conflict they would be engaged in would also have a significant naval component, so range is valuable there as well -- it allows land-based planes to join battles far out at sea, so you can meet the enemy away from civilian population centers instead of right over them. The alternative is to use naval aviation (i.e. aircraft carriers) instead of land-based planes, but carriers are hugely expensive so the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) doesn't operate any.
Just curious since I'm not as familiar with military science as I am with the wonderful world of product management... is "edge case" an acceptable term in military planning parlance?
With a combat radius of under 600 nautical miles, quite a lot of mainland Australia would be outside useful range of existing airbases and supply lines. 600nm circles drawn around Darwin and Perth leave a fair bit of resource rich WA coastline uncovered…
It is not the defence of the mainland that creates problems. For example that unprotected Western Australian coastline that you pointed to is substantially covered if you take into the account the existence of bare bases such as Curtain.
No, range is more of an issue because Australia's current defensive posture is to try to stop any potential enemy in what is called the air-sea gap. That means interdiction at long distances off the coastline. With aircraft carriers being financially out of reach that leaves long range aircraft as the only viable option. The f-35 is going to be a disaster for Australia's defence, we can only hope that the US honours the goodwill that the purchase of those systems was supposed to procure. Of course, they're going to be flying the same crappy airframes, so meh.
Just one last thing in defence of the JSF though. It's unique capabilities in takeoff / landing make cheaper aircraft carriers a real possibility. Of course Australia hasn't actually tried to procure any such thing so it's only a theoretical, but if tensions were to start to mount in Asia that is something that could be rectified relatively quickly...
I have never read Hobbes but it sounds like his notion 'Common Power' could be more than a governing entity. Although trade is done peacefully without bloodshed I think that smaller societies realize that refusal to go along with larger societies' best interest would mean war, obviously this would not be good for the smaller society. So smaller societies co-operate and trade because they know they are better off doing so.
The reason I state that is because the OP glosses over the positions and power dynamics at play, turning the prime actors into just two regular old people.
Context matters and purposefully taking it out to make a point about moral relativism is disingenuous in my opinion.
I think personal characterizations have no place in the discussion of public characters, as these can only ever be opinions that are unable to be proven true or false. They only serve to derail a discussion when the argument turns away from one's favor, and is a very dishonest thing to do. Shame on you snowwrestler.
