DEFENCE POLICY AND THE DEATH OF PRIVATE MANNING.

• Author: Smith, Ron

Ron Smith raises questions about New Zealand's military involvement in East Timor.

The circumstances of the killing of New Zealand private Leonard Manning in East Timor last year raised many more questions than were answered (or even addressed) in the report of the official Army inquiry released last November. These questions go right to the heart of a crucial issue for New Zealand as far as its defence forces are concerned. Will we resolve properly to support such forces as we send overseas or will we continue to send them anyway?

New Zealand has a long tradition of sending overseas forces that are inadequately trained and inadequately equipped, which, as a consequence, suffer additional and avoidable casualties. To judge by the evidence thrown up by the Manning case we are still in traditional mode. Notwithstanding some recent expressions of good intentions (to buy radios and armoured personnel carriers, for example), we are still attempting to discharge our defence obligations on the cheap.

The time is long overdue that we curb our enthusiasm for good causes until we are prepared properly to support the armed forces that we send to promote them. If the sad death of Private Manning achieves nothing else, it should cause us seriously to review the way we support the military and to face some hard questions.

It is common to blame New Zealand losses at Gallipoli on Winston Churchill and the incompetence of British generals. However, historians have long identified poor training and leadership as a significant factor here.(1) Certainly the New Zealand forces that fought in Europe in the Second World War were sent with major deficiencies in all areas. They were inadequately prepared and poorly led. How could it have been otherwise, when many units saw for the first time the major pieces of military equipment they would use when they arrived in theatre, and when the permanent force from which the 20,000 plus 2nd New Zealand Division was formed numbered only a few hundred just a year before? As a consequence, they suffered a rude awakening in Greece and Crete.(2)

When it came to the Korean War deployment there was no shortage of experienced men (and artillery pieces), but Kayforce still descended on the peninsula like a plague of locusts as they sought amongst their Allies the essential equipment for fighting a war in the rigorous climate of Korea. Apart from defective vehicles and communications equipment, they were short of warm clothing and suitable boots.(3)

The New Zealand peacekeeping force sent to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 is now widely recognised to have been inadequately equipped and very fortunate not to have had this vulnerability exploited. It is, of course, precisely the same inadequate transport and radios (to name but two items) that have now been deployed to East Timor (and, in the case of the former, are sitting immobile and useless in front of base headquarters). A brief...