ABSTRACT
There are significant differences between the ‘raw power’ capabilities of each state. The United States remains the single-most-powerful state in the world, with an economy about 14 times larger than Australia’s, a population about 13 times bigger, and defence spending about 18 times higher. This chapter considers the allies’ joint operations, starting with combat operations in the past decade, then the ‘war-gaming’ both states’ armed forces undertook together recently. Since the Marines began rotating through Darwin there has been speculation that substantial upgrades might be made to the RAN’s HMAS Stirling, near Perth in Western Australia, to enable it to re-provision US Navy submarines. The United States is Australia’s primary source of defence equipment, with the 2016 defence white paper confirming that ‘Around 60 percent of our acquisition spending is on equipment from the United States’. Both Australia’s and America’s bilateral relations with China therefore deteriorated in the first half of 2020.
