The ANZACs in T2k

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Olefin

I wasnt talking about PNG military forces - I am talking about the West Papua guerrillas who have been fighting off and on against the Indonesians ever since they took the area over from the Dutch. Have a feeling the Australians would love to move that switch back to on as to them fighting against the Indonesians and making their use of the western end of New Guinea one that entails a hell of a lot of fighting guerrillas - and thus keeping them from concentrating against the Australians.

West Papuans are technically Indonesian and have been for about 50 years. I know what you're say though.
However I intend most of the fighting will be east of the border. The Anzac forces won't be in place in sufficient numbers early on to be anything more than speed bumps, and will never have the strength to push the Indonesian's back across a wide front. There simply won't be much of an opportunity for training any of the West Papuans although there will possible be an SAS presence from time to time. They however will be focused on conducting relatively short term missions of no more than about a month in length, and won't be in a position to do very much with the locals - in fact it's highly likely they'll be doing everything possible to avoid them!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

And logistics in that region will be excessively difficult. The only reasons there's even roads in some of those areas east of the border is because the mining companies working there, earning enough money to justify making & maintaining those roads.

In other areas there's nothing other than foot paths or animal trails.
Most items will have to go in by air transport or be carried in by porters and with a war in full swing, airspace is obviously going to be contested.

Ok Tedi is probably the most well known mining lease/company site in the area. It's approximately 10km from the border in some places but that's 10 kilometres of mountainous, jungle terrain. However there are other mining leases much closer to the border, one of the Ok Tedi leases is as close as 5 or 6 kilometres

Mind you, those mines are probably part of the reason why Indonesia wants to add the place to it's empire - copper, nickel, silver & gold are the big money makers but there's also cobalt, platinum, iron, chromium, molybdenum and rare earth elements. Because of the volcanic nature of some regions, there's also likely to be decent deposits of gemstones such as diamonds (the islands of New Britain, New Ireland and Bougainville are known to have deposits of diamonds although they've been deliberately left unexploited to allow for revenue in the future).

This map has some of the major minesites shown
https://www.niuminco.com.au/index.html


This link however gives a much better overview of the mining situation. It shows not just minesites but also exploration leases and the map itself has a good representation of the mountainous nature of the land.
http://portal.mra.gov.pg/Map/

[Legbreaker]

Indeed you are correct. I've included Indonesia building roads in West Papua during the build up to their offensive for just that reason, with their cover story being they're simply improving civilian infrastructure prior to moving a few hundred thousand citizens from the overpopulated areas to the west.
Of course they can't actually cross the border during this phase, and there's only so much you can do in the proceeding year, especially if you're trying to conceal the fact all the major routes lead towards PNG...
By itself it's not enough to trigger a military response, or even a diplomatic one, but it is sufficient to alert defence planners to the increased probability of conflict and therefore improve Anzac preparedness by drawing in personnel from low priority offshore missions and boost overall manpower (basically begin to flesh out the three Australian Divisions from their peacetime levels of absolutely abysmal).

[Legbreaker]

Reading through the Australian Army Training Information Bulletin - The Infantry Division, 1975 and came across something that would never even be considered today.

Air defence from Division level down was considered "optional"!

The best that could be expected by lower commanders if the Div CO chose not to take dedicated AA, was their subunits organic GPMGs. Even an entertainment unit had a higher priority!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Yeah...
I remember in the 70's-80's that the attitude towards air defence seemed to be "that's the job of the air force". The feeling towards that idea was most colourfully expressed by one of my training sergeants when he said something along the lines of "if the air force can't stop them, we're fucked".

Then only about a decade later we were deploying Army air defence units on RAN ships to bolster their air defence (I think it may have been for East Timor but I can't remember, it could just have easily been the Persian Gulf) - because even the RAN wasn't given sufficient air defence!
And all that shows once again, that there are some circumstances were you cannot expect the Air Force to be providing air defence.

It's a holdover from WW2 I think - too many politicians believing that Australian defence policy consisted of expecting the enemy to attack Australia over hundreds of miles of sea and not thinking that Australian military forces could/would be deployed to regions beyond RAAF control.

[Raellus]

Out of curiosity, I hit up Wikipedia and, apparently, Australia was a one-time user of the FIM-43 Redeye MANPAD. I guess it's better than nothing.

NOTE: I checked the entries for the Stinger and Blowpipe first. No dice.

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Out of curiosity, I hit up Wikipedia and, apparently, Australia was a one-time user of the FIM-43 Redeye MANPAD. I guess it's better than nothing.

Yes, had the Redeye from 1973 to 1987, Rapier from 1979 to 2005, and RBS-70 from 1987 to now (this was the weapon mounted on the navy's ships). The AIM-120 SLAMRAAM is due to be introduced next year.
Up until 1973 they were still equipped with the WWII 40mm Bofors.

[Legbreaker]

Definitely the gulf. I can remember seeing video of holes being drilled into the navy's nice clean deck to bolt the mounts down.