From military bases to diplomacy and defence manufacturing, Australia’s long-standing ties are drawing it further into the US–Israel war on Iran.

In Part 1 of this article I discussed the deep and long running intelligence assistance provided to both countries through the activities at the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, the deployment of a critical Australian Air Force airframe and air-to-missiles to the UAE, and Australian personnel aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate without warning 3,000 kilometres from the conflict zone.

Here I’ll examine three more pathways to war for Australia:

• the Middle Eastern military infrastructure in the Middle East ready and waiting after Australia’s last rounds of imperial assistance;
• Australia’s echo chamber of US obstructive diplomacy towards Iran, with its repeated inflation of actual threat, demonisation of Iranian society and culture, and support for the silent murders of sanctions; and
• All the way with Lockheed Martin: Australia’s 'sovereign manufacturing capability' and the war with Iran.

Ready and waiting: Australian Middle Eastern military infrastructure

Australia retains considerable infrastructure in Middle Eastern bases of the US and its regional allies, built over more than two decades of war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The UAE’s the Al Minhad Air Base outside Dubai has been the ADF’s Middle Eastern primary home for most of that time, with more than 800 Australian personnel a little more than a decade ago. Numbers are lower today, with about 80 ADF Australians in a regional headquarters and logistics hub, with others at the US base Naval Support Activity Bahrain. Even under lower operational activity, Al Minhad has supported Australian naval assets embedded in US- Combined Maritime Forces headquartered in Bahrain, including commanding the CMF’s Task Force 153 in the Red Sea/Arabian Sea in 2024.

Unusually, there appear to be no Australian warships or supply ships on station in the region – a variation from two decades of almost constant Australian navy presence – though with greatly restricted Defence provision of information about overseas deployments in recent years it is hard to be certain.

One of the most serious next steps to be concerned about is the US request – or Australian anticipatory offer – for a resumption of Australian naval deployments to assist with the US operation clearly in preparation to assemble a coalition naval group to force the Straits of Hormuz should Iran make sustained efforts to close them.

The United Kingdom, after a brief flirtation with resistance based on international law, has joined the war, with Trump overtly pressing the UK for its traditional naval contribution to wars of empire. Australia’s navy is small, but long habituated to Middle Eastern deployments.

The Albanese government appears to have resisted the call for Australian deployments – so far.

Australian support for obstructive diplomacy, inflation of threat, and the silent murder of sanctions

After Pine Gap‘s structural role, the second enduring Australian support for the war against Iran has been the consistency and virulence of Australia’s diplomatic support for a US and allied campaign of threat inflation, often blatant exaggeration of the status of Iran’s nuclear program (‘just two weeks until Iran gets a nuclear weapon’), demonisation of Iranian society and culture, and the silent murder of sanctions.

Australian diplomacy has been largely an echo chamber of Washington, if in a minor key. The judgement of Robert O’Malley, former lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, that “this war is the logical conclusion of how the United States has long dealt with Iran” is equally true of Australia:

“For decades, presidents have depicted the Islamic Republic not just as a pernicious presence in the Middle East but also as an intolerable danger to the United States that no diplomatic deal could redress. When politicians inflate a threat and stigmatise peaceful means of handling it, an enterprising leader will one day reach for a radical solution.”

There may be a risk of casualties from Iranian attacks amongst Australian residents of Dubai and other Gulf cities. And even more so, if the number of ADF personnel in theatre increase on US and Gulf state bases.

The question not asked is simple: why does Australia retain these bases on the other side of the world, other than to serve US interests?

On 10 March the foreign minister suggested that one Albanese government objective was to defend Australian citizens in the United Arab Emirates, and in the same breath, participate in and contribute to the “collective self defence” of Gulf countries, including particularly, the UAE – a country “we have a close relationship to.”

Another way of protecting Australian citizens would be to follow common practice in other risk zones – facilitate their exit, temporarily or otherwise.

In fact, the argument that defence of a country’s citizens abroad justifies substantial deployment of that country’s armed forces is in general best avoided – partly because of the obvious immediate risks involved, but more so because of the risk set by the precedent.

China, for example, has very large numbers of its citizens working abroad, some of them in risk zones. If Australia was taking international law seriously, it may wish to think more carefully.

And lastly, with a clear acknowledgement of the violence of the Iranian state towards a very large number of its citizens, Australia needs to think hard about committing to the defence of the United Arab Emirates. The Labor government seems to have overridden concern about literally supporting despotism – perhaps the meaning of ‘absolute monarchy’ has escaped it.

The domestic crimes of the absolute monarchy of the UAE are not hidden from view. Nine tenths of its current inhabitants are foreigners, the vast majority of whom are not well paid western expatriates. The economy of the UAE is existentially dependent on hundreds of thousands of poorly paid, unentitled and frequently violently oppressed foreign workers.

Moreover, the UAE is an openly regionally expansive, wannabe regional hegemon, establishing military bases in Yemen, the Red Sea and the coast of the Horn of Africa. In the war in Yemen, UAE forces and those it openly supported carried out serious war crimes.

Quite simply, if there is an alternative way for the Australian government to support Australian citizens in the UAE by offering evacuation assistance, why would it choose the escalation risks and ignominy of military alliance with vicious local despotism and imperialism led by an unhinged president?

The answer is in part incompetence, and in part unassuaged addiction to alliance war.

But more than anything else, the rush to a criminal war with Iran – though it has been long in preparation – and the inability, or outright opposition to, distinguishing Australia’s genuine security interests from those of a brazenly imperialist ally led by an unhinged predator.

 All the way with Lockheed Martin – Australian ‘sovereign manufacturing capability’ and Iran

The Morrison and Albanese governments have assiduously pursued an expansion of domestic production weapons systems and associated military services, and wherever possible, exports.

While many small and medium sized Australian sub-contractors are involved, with highly active support from the Commonwealth and state and territory governments, almost all of these production activities track back to a very small number of the world’s largest armaments and military services companies.

Lockheed Martin, the largest armament company in the world, epitomises this phenomenon and our industrial involvement in arms for the United States/Israeli war in Iran. A formal Strategic Partner of the Defence Department in a variety of roles, Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor for the world’s largest armaments production, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, some 1300 of which have been produced and sold to many air forces, including Australia and Israel.

One of the many unique features of the F-35 program was Lockheed Martin’s extremely successful sales pitch for ‘the arms deal of the century’: countries buying the aircraft would be allowed to contribute to a global, just-in-time production chain unprecedented in volume, complexity, and financial reward.

The result of this benign correspondence of the interests of military capital and alliance government in Australia is that the F-35s the United States and Israel have both used to staggering destructive effect in the war in Iran have been, to a significant extent, manufactured in Australia. As part of its contribution to what the Albanese government calls its commitment to a sovereign manufacturing capability for defence of Australia, Lockheed Martin proudly announces that some 70 companies sub-contract for the F-35 program, with ‘exports’ of over a billion dollars a year.

As recently as September 2025, at the height of the Gaza genocide, the Albanese government secretly approved exports of Lockheed Martin F-35 components to Israel. To date the government has ignored F-35 connections to the war in Iran.

Lockheed Martin’s Strategic Partnership with the government’s Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise was scheduled to begin production in 2025 of Lockheed Martin’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles in Sydney’s Defence Establishment Orchard Hills. If supplies of US guided missiles for the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran – and, via the UAE, Sudan – have depleted Pentagon stocks as much as has been reported, Australian-assembled Lockheed Martin guided missiles may be on their way abroad.

Read Part 1 of this article:

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/australias-six-pathways-to-the-war-with-iran-part-1/