[Legbreaker]

Manpower can possibly be scraped together. The problems are equipment, politics, and finance.

The best Australia could do by itself is 1950-60's vehicles and heavy weapons, except on a small scale. What's the point in having half a million troops if virtually ANY opponent is using far superior equipment?

Politics is another matter. Australians simply will not stand for wide scale conscription any more. It was tough enough in WWI and WWII - by Vietnam the tide had well and truly turned against forced military service, so any recruits would have to be volunteers. To conscript civilians would almost certainly result in the downfall of the government which tried to implement it.

Then there's finance. Volunteers don't come cheaply - patriotism only goes so far. Equipment (what little of it which may be available) will fetch premium prices, prices Australia simply cannot afford. Even raw materials will go up in price putting them out of the reach of many smaller nations.

Australia is not America. We only have about 20 million people in total and not enough heavy industry to cover all our domestic needs. Most of our cars, trucks, heavy equipment is imported. We do not have the industrial base to enable us to ramp up production to cover wartime requirements. We do not have large scale heavy industries to switch from making consumer goods to tanks and aircraft. We DO have the capability to upgrade, modify and maintain what we have, and some limited small scale production.

WWII is commonly pointed at as an example of what can be done to rapidly build up forces, but that's a very misleading example to use for modern warfare. The technology of today, or even 20 years ago (the time of T2K) is much more advanced than the 1940's. It required much lower technical skills and specialised equipment to produce.

Australia did have a large military, but it was so large we simply could not support it. Australia was the only nation (to my knowledge) to actually reduce the size of it's forces while the war still raged - we had no choice if we wanted to eat and have enough manpower to produce and transport the materials our soldiers needed.