By Chris Trotter*<\/p>\n
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
\u201cTo every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,\u201d<\/p>\n
From\u00a0Horatius\u00a0by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1842.<\/p>\n
There was a time when schoolboys across the English-speaking world were regaled with Horatius\u2019s heroic pledge to\u00a0patria\u00a0\u2013 the fatherland. Not recently, of course. Macaulay\u2019s stirring evocation of Roman virtues (standing-in for the virtues of the then rapidly expanding British Empire) would today be dismissed as a hymn to patriarchy, hierarchy, imperialism, suicidal ideation, and war. Certainly not ideas to be promoted before a classroom of sensitive twenty-first century students.<\/p>\n
Therein lies the fundamental problem confronting every western government anxious (and under fierce American pressure) to boost their defences. New Zealand\u2019s own Defence Minister, Chris Penk, has just returned from the latest Nato summit, bringing with him the many warnings and frustrations of his northern counterparts.<\/p>\n
Voting more money to one\u2019s country\u2019s defence forces may be a good start, but it is not enough. All the weapons in the world are useless if there is no one to wield them. Where is the West going to find the young men and women needed to defend it?<\/p>\n
It was much easier in the past when, if your country called, you answered. Even when the call to arms came in the form of a conscription notice the level of compliance was, by today\u2019s standards, astonishingly high.<\/p>\n
In the early years of the twentieth century Germany fielded Europe\u2019s most effective army by far. It was led by the aristocratic officers of Prussia, but it was bulked-up by millions of young middle- and working-class conscripts. Compulsory military training had become a rite of passage for all young German men: a patriotic duty that most of them accepted without protest.<\/p>\n
One can only imagine how Germany\u2019s present Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, envies his Imperial German predecessors. Determined to put Germany at the head of a credible military combination of Nato allies \u2013\u00a0sans\u00a0the USA \u2013 he has been confronted with the dispiriting advice that, the nation\u2019s impressive martial history notwithstanding, the level of resistance likely to greet any attempt to resurrect conscription makes the whole idea a non-starter. Young Germans, raised to view their country\u2019s past as a terrible warning against militarism and war have become pacifists \u2013 almost by default.<\/p>\n
And New Zealand\u2019s young people? Would they, too, default to pacifism? If Chris Penk, or a future Defence Minister, responding to a rapidly deteriorating geopolitical environment, decided to reintroduce compulsory military training (as Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser did at the onset of the Cold War in the late-1940s) how many young Kiwi men and women would happily submit themselves to two years in uniform? Two years of being yelled at while learning to kill their fellow human-beings?<\/p>\n
Penk and his party would doubtless reject outright the very thought of reintroducing conscription \u2013 pointing instead to their commitment to rebuilding New Zealand\u2019s volunteer defence force after years of declining capacity and shrinking budgets.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot before time!\u201d, would be the response of those who take an interest in matters military.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s NZ Defence Force is but a shadow of its former highly-effective and highly-respected self. Its loss of effectiveness was illustrated for all the world to see by the foundering of the HMNZS\u00a0Manawanui\u00a0\u2013 probably the most embarrassing display of naval incompetence in New Zealand history.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not just the Navy that has problems. Our ground forces are currently at less than half their recommended strength. Even the point of the NZDF spear, New Zealand\u2019s internationally renowned Special Air Service Regiment, has been plagued with recruitment and retention difficulties, degrading its efficiency.<\/p>\n
Only the Royal New Zealand Air Force has reason to feel confident with its kit \u2013 even if it was forced to wait for decades to get it. Like all the other service arms, the RNZAF struggles to recruit, train, and retain the highly skilled personnel needed to maintain and use it.<\/p>\n
The Coalition Government is hoping that monies already appropriated for improving the wages and conditions of NZDF personnel \u2013 serving and civilian \u2013 will take the sting out of the military\u2019s recruitment and retention problems. Chances are that it won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
There is growing concern within the NZDF that the country\u2019s most senior military personnel, the men and women responsible for orchestrating New Zealand\u2019s defence capabilities, have failed to understand what has happened to their own services, and what is happening across the wider world.<\/p>\n
The failure of the top brass to impress upon the Ardern-led government the extreme risk of ordering soldiers to guard quarantine facilities, and then to fully appreciate the catastrophic loss of morale and commitment which that failure had caused, has convinced a strategically significant number of service personnel to abandon their careers for institutions overseen by more serious people.<\/p>\n
If a small nation of just five million is to maintain an effective military then it must either declare itself wholly and unabashedly for its traditional friends and allies and adopt with equal enthusiasm their strategic and tactical military doctrines; or it must take its commitment to an \u201cindependent\u201d foreign and defence policy framework seriously and initiate a radical reassessment and reorganisation of New Zealand\u2019s diplomatic and military posture.<\/p>\n
The option the present Coalition Government appears to have chosen mirrors that of just about all of the governments preceding it: to go all-in with our traditional friends and allies. What they have not chosen to do, however, is make it clear to the New Zealand public that this is the course they have decided to follow. Indeed, Prime Minister Luxon continues to insist that his own and his government\u2019s commitment to \u201cNew Zealand\u2019s independent foreign policy\u201d remains undiminished.<\/p>\n
There will be many who argue that going all-in with our friends and allies is the only viable option for New Zealand. Who else, apart from Australia and the United States, would New Zealanders be comfortable fighting alongside?<\/p>\n
That remains a fair question, and until 2025 the answer was always obvious. With Donald Trump in the White House, however, and the moral trajectory of his lawless administration becoming ever more concerning, attaching New Zealand to the United States has ceased to be the straightforward strategic option of decades past.<\/p>\n
WHY DO HUMAN-BEINGS FIGHT? They fight out of love, or from fear.<\/p>\n
In the entrance-hall of the first institution erected to look after the New Zealand veterans of a foreign war \u2013 in this case the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 \u2013 stands a carved wooden memorial to those who fell. Inscribed upon its base are the words: \u201cThey died for the Empire.\u201d<\/p>\n
The New Zealanders who fought in South Africa did not do so out of fear for the Boers, but for the love they bore their King-Emperor and the British Empire over which he reigned.<\/p>\n
In the wars that followed, more and more fear became mixed-in with the love.<\/p>\n
Without that fear: without the hatred it aroused against Imperial Germany, the Nazis, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and \u201cGodless Communism\u201d; the vast mobilisation of people and resources required by New Zealand\u2019s wars \u2013 hot and cold \u2013 could not have taken place.<\/p>\n
How do you conscript your best and your brightest in the absence of fear and hate? How much love of country is required to rally the flower of a nation\u2019s youth to their country\u2019s flag?<\/p>\n
The Ukrainians know the quantum required of both emotions to make a people stand and fight. Horatius, the Captain of the Gate to Rome, knew what he was prepared to sacrifice for \u201cthe ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods\u201d. M\u0101ori New Zealanders also know.<\/p>\n
But the rest of us? Do we fear Xi\u2019s China enough; do we love Trump\u2019s America enough; to fight against the one and for the other?<\/p>\n
Do enough of us still love New Zealand enough to fight and die for it?<\/p>\n