Anthony Albanese is taking a battering from ill-informed commentators for thinking Australia can be defended by spending a little over 2% of GDP on its military forces.

The previous Labor Government sometimes spent less and defended the country well. But Albanese may surrender and spend more.

The cry is that Albanese must suck up to Trump by spending over 3.5% of GDP to ensure US defends Australia. The US will certainly sell Australia highly expensive weaponry. But it has never shown any interest in being Australia’s protector, not even in World War II.

The US did send military forces to Australia during World War II, but the general in charge, Douglas MacArthur, made it clear to the then Australian prime minister John Curtin on 1 June 1942 that the US had “no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia”.

He said the US was building forces here as a base from which to hit Japan and “would be doing so irrespective of the American relationship to the people who might be occupying Australia”.

After the war, Australia wanted a treaty that guaranteed America would come to our aid like it was pledged to do with NATO members. But the US refused point blank to give Australia the same clause in the 1951 ANZUS treaty. That didn’t stop some future Australian leaders from trying it on.

Later, Australia troops crossed into Indonesian Borneo to fight a secret war against Indonesia on behalf of Britain. Privately, Menzies was not a big fan of the treaty which he described as having “a superstructure on a foundation of jelly". But Menzies went to Washington to ask President Kennedy to promise troops to protect ours in the secret war. Kennedy gave him a blunt rejection.

When Howard said he wanted “American boots on the ground” in Timor to support Australian troops, the then foreign secretary turned him down flat.

Having the US as a partner has drawn the country has drawn Australia into illegal wars in which horrific numbers of innocent people have been killed. The Vietnam war was a sickening example. So was the 2003 invasion of Iraq where phony intelligence was used to claim Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when Australian weapons inspectors correctly said it didn’t.

Some commentators take it as self-evident that China will invade Australia unless it is protected by the US. China has shown no desire to invade Australia and has no obvious motive. Japan did not try to invade Australia during World War II because it concluded it was too hard to do when it had a population of only seven million. But this didn’t mean it was helpless. It had more than a million in its armed services.

Australian industry supplied huge quantities of food, medicine, clothing, another support to Australian and American troops. In 1942, it quickly began producing ammunition, explosives, rifles, machine guns plus bigger guns as well as ships and large numbers of fighter planes. By the end of the war, local industry had built 2000 combat aircraft.

Now that Australia has a population of 25 million, it should have sufficient troops to defend the country, particularly as modern surveillance techniques provide much longer warning time than in 1942.

Part of the problem in 1942 was Australia relied on a “forward defence” policy with the big British naval base at Singapore as the core component. The idea what was that it was “better to fight them up there than down here”. The Japanese destroyed the base with ease – 15,000 Australians surrendered.

Yet some recent Australian leaders have adopted policies based on a return to the forward defence doctrine. The former prime minister Scott Morrison explained he had ordered nuclear submarines from the US because they would allow Australia to fire missiles into the Chinese mainland a long way from the Australian mainland. To invade Australia, China would have to travel at least 7000 km, creating very long supply chains that would have to be protected which would be very hard.

More importantly, no one has explained what motive China might have to try to invade Australia so long as it continues to trade with China on a large scale and doesn’t gang up on it. Meanwhile, people like the Defence Minister Richard Marles send Australian ships on exercises in the south China Sea to practise invading China. He also continues the aggressive policy of using Australian maritime patrol planes to drop acoustic buoys into the South China Sea to build up a library of their sounds so they can be detected and sunk in a future war.

Similar aggressive activities occur in the Yellow Sea with Australian anti-submarine helicopters using sonar buoys. Exercises are held to practice how to defend Taiwan, when Australia and the US accept Taiwan is part of China. Previous governments basically adopted a defence of Australia doctrine which focused on securing the approaches to Australia.

The cost of doing so has gone down because it now makes sense to make more use of drones, long-range missiles, and sea mines for this task, provided the latter can be deactivated remotely. Ukraine has shown how it can sink ships with fairly simple surface drones and destroy planes on tarmacs with airborne drones.

In Australia’s case, it makes no sense to focus spending on big surface naval ships that have huge trouble surviving against hypersonic missiles. The policy of acquiring eight nuclear submarines for a cost of about US$400 billion should be scrapped immediately. Only two will be available at any one time.

Small new conventional submarines using advanced batteries should be acquired, supplemented by underwater drones. A new Defence of Australia doctrine a could easily be funded from within a budget allocation of 2% of GDP.

There is an opportunity cost to spending more on defence than is required to protect Australia. There are a large number of improved services that Australian Governments could deliver to low- and middle-income people. Better schools and improved funding to construct a much higher level of public housing would also be possible.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.