Australia is already deeply involved in the US–Israel war on Iran, through intelligence, military deployments and long-standing strategic commitments.

Australia is at war with Iran, actively and directly participating in the United States/Israel illegal, unjustified and brutal war in ways that are more important than the Albanese government’s carefully phrased evasive claims to be defending Australian citizens and providing “defensive military assistance” at the request of “countries who have not attacked Iran”.

Australian governments have long been addicted to war in the Middle East in concert with the United States. Reverting to type, the Albanese government is embarking on highly consequential military deployments with eyes wide shut, combined with evasion, dissembling and denial about the long running and virtually structural support provided by Pine Gap, and inflated claims of threat to Australia, largely fictitious.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the brazen illegality and lack of justification for the US/Israeli assault, the Albanese government has been almost wholly untransparent about the nature and timing of its support for the US/Israeli war.

Australian involvements with the United States/Israeli war against Iran are of six different types:

• the voluntarily announced: RAAF aircraft, personnel, and missiles;
• the confessed by government after discovery by media scrutiny: Australian navy personnel involvement in a US war crime;
• the vital but ignored: Australian support for obstructive diplomacy and the silent murder of sanctions;
• the ready and waiting: Australian Middle Eastern military infrastructure;
• all the way with Lockheed Martin – Australian 'sovereign manufacturing capability' and Iran; and
• the wholly unmentionable: the most important, longest running, and indeed structural contribution of Pine Gap.

The structural role of Pine Gap in the US/Israeli war on Iran

Let’s take the biggest first: the structural role of Australia in the US/Israeli war on Iran, which flows from the provision over decades of two types of critical military surveillance intelligence from the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap near Alice Springs to the US military – and almost without limit, under bilateral US-Israeli agreements, to the Israeli Defence Force.

Pine Gap will have been high alert for months, with tasking schedules for the satellites it controls ramping up surveillance of Iran and the surrounding region to meet the voracious intelligence needs of the US military.

A primary concern for Pine Gap in any zone of active US military interest has long included Iran. The objective is to provide the US National Security Agency with data for large, continually updated databases of known threats and targets as an Electronic Order of Battle – in this case, Iran’s.

This is clear from the technical characteristics of the geographical coverage of the Middle East of four US satellites in an arc above the equator, controlled by and downlinking intercepted electronic intercepts for processing at Pine Gap.

But the direct Pine Gap involvement in Iranian surveillance is also clear from openly published personnel requirements: as recently as September 2024, one of the key US corporations supplying personnel for NSA operations at Pine Gap advertised for a Farsi-speaking US citizen for a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information working from Alice Springs with the US military in the Persian Gulf.

Pine Gap is also a ground station for a second constellation of US satellites in the same geosynchronous orbit above the equator, but equipped with very large and sensitive infrared telescopes to detect the thermal bloom of missile launches, work out the launch location and type of missile, and determine their initial trajectory. Pine Gap ‘cues’ ground and sea-based missile defence radars to search particular areas of the sky.

After Iranian missile attacks damaged and perhaps destroyed four US-built powerful and expensive ground-based missile defence radars in the UAE, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, US reliance on data from the Pine Gap-controlled suite of satellites increased, though with much lower chance of system success, as longtime missile defence insider Ted Postol from MIT has argued strongly.

Into the air war: RAAF aircraft, personnel, and missiles

In the past week the Australian government has announced high technology direct military assistance to the UAE under the rubric of ‘ defensive assistance’. To date, this deployment has taken two forms, an RAAF E-7A Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEWC) aircraft and an unknown number of air-to-air missiles, plus an extra 87 ADF personnel to supplement the similar number that staff the longstanding ADF Headquarters Middle East for Joint Task Force 633 at the UAE Air Force’s Al-Minhad Airbase near Dubai.

The Australian Air Force’s most important non-kinetic asset, the extraordinarily capable Wedgetail E-7A AEWC aircraft, has much more than a defensive ‘reconnaissance’ role. The E-7A, built by Boeing based on its 737 airliner, has a powerful electronically scanning radar array that makes the E-7A the best in class for ‘tactical battle management, command and control and moving target indication capabilities’, capable of surveilling almost the entire Gulf region, and capable of being used for battlespace control of UAE, US and Israeli aircraft in offence as well as defence.

Whether it is based at the UAE Air Force’s Al Minhad Air Base outside Dubai or the larger Al Dhafra Air Base east of Abu Dhabi, the RAAF surveillance and control aircraft will very likely cooperate in combat operations with the US Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing equipped for intelligence, surveillance and command and control at Al Dhafra.

More importantly, as Defence Minister Richard Marles revealed when pressed by journalists, the deployment of the RAAF Wedgetail surveillance and control aircraft is a matter of returning to a familiar pattern of subordinating Australian forces to US control. The Wedgetail deployed to the UAE will once again be into integrated into US operations in the Gulf, again placing Australian combat assets under US control:

“To be clear, the information that it is able to obtain is being coordinated through the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) based in Qatar, which obviously involves the United States. And that’s really important in terms of coordinating all the integrated defensive measures that can be done for the countries of the Gulf and for the UAE.”

The CAOC in Qatar is an American organisation, established in 2014 to allow US control and coordination of its own and coalition forces throughout the Gulf region. An Australian Wedgetail, as well as RAAF fighter-bombers, was under CAOC control in operations over Iraq, and later Syria, from 2014.

Australia will send an unknown number of AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) that their maker, RTX/Raytheon, advertises as ‘the world’s most sophisticated, combat-proven air dominance weapon’. Costing US$1 million per missile, the AMRAAM is used mainly for air-to-air combat, but also for ground-to-air combat.

It may well be that this marks a new extended alliance role for Australia, making up for what are possibly diminished US and Israeli missiles stocks.

The Australian-supplied air-to-air missiles appear to earmarked for equipping to UAE Air Force fighter aircraft, although conceivably they could be used with UAE-based USAF aircraft, including F-35s, as in Australia - and possibly, with Australia fighters if they should be deployed.

Either way, the Australian-supplied airborne warning and control aircraft and the missiles have a reasonable chance of being used in combat. The Australian government’s assertions that all uses to which the aircraft and weaponry will be put will ‘defensive’ in character, and used only in defence of the UAE in particular are both difficult to sustain.

The government has mentioned ‘objectives’ and ‘parameters’ that will ensure these ‘defensive’ outcomes, but has given no indication of how that will be guaranteed, and indeed it is unlikely that any such ‘parameter’ fit for purpose exists.

Australian navy personnel involvement in a US war crime

Australia is fond of ‘embedding’ ADF personnel and weapons platforms with US forces, with the total number unreleased. In volatile regions like northeast Asia there have long been concerns about embedding Australian navy ships in US-commanded task forces that had a good likelihood of involvement – quite possible contrary to international law – in conflicts with North Korean forces. Once under US command, in the face of immediate armed conflict, governments would be loathe to risk US ire by suspending involvement for the duration.

The rush to create a nuclear propulsion-capable Australian submarine capability has led to embedding of at least 50 Australian navy personnel on US attack submarines. It needed no great strategic understanding to foresee a possibility that some of those submarines could be involved in conflict – ‘legally justified’ or not.

A competent defence minister would have ensured that their department had prepared a risk assessment and protocols for dealing with this possibility with something other than business as usual silence, stonewalling, dissimulation, and when forced, denial.

The USS Charlotte reportedly sank the Iranian frigate _Dena_ off the coast of Sri Lanka, with the loss of at least 80 Iranian sailors after the US commander made a deliberate decision to not contribute to the rescue the drowning survivors. The ship was returning from a joint exercise with the Indian Navy, for which it may have offloaded armaments, and was over 3,000 kilometres away from the nearest Iranian naval base.

The attack was unjustified, unprovoked, and without warning – the first such attack since 1945. Claims that such an attack was permitted under ‘ the laws of naval warfare’ notwithstanding, the attack was a reminder that the laws of armed conflict legitimate atrocity.

Had the names of the countries involved been the other way around, memes of Iranian criminality and barbarism would have flooded the free press. Though with the US Secretary of War enjoining US armed forces personnel to abandon “stupid rules of engagement”, idolising extreme violence, and promising war without mercy, ‘American barbarism’ is the more likely takeaway from the ‘lawful’ atrocity.

The Australian government’s claims that the three sailors on board had nothing to do with a war crime, and are a matter solely for the United States to explain, are a matter of pathetic and shaming sophistry. And the ministerial bad faith and refusal to countenance responsibility, if not direct culpability, is further evidence that the government had not considered such a possibility in advance, and had not made adequate preparations in the form of protocols and agreements with the United States that would have ensured that at the first sign of an armed conflict breaking out, Australian embedded personnel were removed to the nearest port.