It seems Australians are only too eager to pay out of their own pockets to do what the U.S. government deputized them to do.
***** New York Times September 26, 1999
Getting Tough Gets Tough for Australia
By JANE PERLEZ
...And now that Washington has deputized it to do the neighborhood policing job, does Australia have the political and financial wherewithal to follow through on its own?
For Australia, which has an army of only 24,000 soldiers -- about the same number the Indonesian Army had in East Timor alone -- these are milestone questions.
...Washington has committed just 200 troops for the operation, most of them for logistics, and only 100 for East Timor itself. It was hardly the commitment Australia had in mind.
An optimist might find a good side to this. Australia won points in Washington because it was setting a precedent that was comfortable for the Americans: It was leading a regional peacekeeping force, sent in harmony with American policy, that did not require the use of American muscle itself....
"Unlike the Europeans, who were reluctant to go into Kosovo, the Australians showed themselves to be adults and to take part in adult supervision," said Douglas Paal, a member of the Bush Administration's National Security Council who now heads the Asia Pacific Policy Center, a Washington research institute. "The Australians were not waiting for Uncle Sam. That's the kind of alliance partners we want."
...[N]ow Australians have been told, in effect, that the bond is not a free one. With defense spending at the equivalent of less than $10 billion -- only 1.8 percent of the gross domestic product -- the commitment to East Timor of 2,000 soldiers -- to rise to 4,500 in coming weeks -- is more than the current military budget can bear, Australia's preeminent defense analyst, Paul Dibbs, said. Last week, Australia started to call up reservists.... *****
Yoshie