Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill is budgeting up to $350 million for the missiles, to be used on Australia's F-18 Hornet fighters and AP-3C Orion maritime surveillance aircraft, and to extend the lethal reach of the Australian Defense Force as far as the South China Sea.

The new weapon will significantly enhance the ADF's air strike capability, providing a long-range, accurate and lethal attack against a range of targets including fixed and re-locatable targets on land and sea, Hill said in a statement. Combined with the new air-to-air missiles and upgraded precision-guided bombs, Australia's fighter jets will be the region's most lethal capacity for air combat and strike operations.

What Hill did not say was that these cruise missiles render the air defenses of every other country in the region obsolete overnight. Land-based radars cannot see them, so the first an enemy knows of an attack is when they hit. To counter them requires a new level of technology based on airborne aerial warning aircraft, which in turn have to be defended from hostile fighters.

The Australian navy also intends to equip three new destroyers with cruise missiles of even greater range, and hopes to do the same with its submarines. Australia has already signed up for the U.S. joint strike fighter project and the missile defense program, and last year's review of the ADF structure has sharply increased the size and support system for Australia's special forces.

The basic thinking behind the changes, as defined in last year's defense review, is that Australia's security cannot afford to be narrowly defined by local geography. While the Bali bombings suggest that the threat of fundamentalist terrorism is coming very close to home, Australia is defining its defense policies on a far wider scale, while sticking firmly with the mutual defense pact of the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-U.S.) Treaty.

Our national interests remain subject to security changes far from Australia, and there are global influences on the security of our immediate neighborhood. Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are cases in point, said the government's statement on the review.

The statement also stressed the continuing importance of long-standing security problems in our immediate neighborhood and the additional threat from terrorism, and with Australian troops already involved in operations in Iraq, noted, the greater chance of our involvement in coalition operations further afield.

What the Australians do not publicly mention is the country that started the Asian arms build-up -- China. The modernization of the Chinese military, replacing the massive armies of Mao's day with Russian-built Kilo-class submarines and Su-30 fighter-bombers, along with the breakneck pace of China's economic growth, has changed the strategic dynamics of the broader Asia-Pacific region.

For Australia, China is now a major customer. After the $18 billion deal signed with the China National Offshore Oil Corp. in 2002 for supplies of gas from Western Australia, another $20 billion deal was agreed last year for gas from the huge Gorgon fields off Australia's Northwest shelf. Throw in the $9 billion deal of China's purchases of iron ore, and China is set to overtake the United States as an export customer. That may have been in the mind of Foreign Minister Alexander Downer when asked how Australia would react to a Chinese attack on Taiwan at a Beijing press conference last month.

Well, the ANZUS Treaty is a treaty which is, of course, symbolic of the Australian alliance with the U.S., but the ANZUS Treaty is invoked in the event one of our two countries, Australia or the U.S., being attacked. So some other military activity elsewhere in the world does not automatically invoke the ANZUS Treaty, Downer replied, to the irritation of his prime minister (and the Americans).

Downer is clearly fed up with the number of times he has had to fend of that jibe of Malaysia's former Premier Mahathir Mohamad that Australia was the regional deputy sheriff to the United States. Australian Prime Minister John Howard -- who has said that he would be willing to order military strikes to pre-empt terrorist attacks being planned in the region -- is a staunch ally of the Americans. But even Howard just dismissed Downer's remarks on the ANZUS Treaty not applying to Taiwan as hypothetical.

Australians have read with careful attention the platform adopted in New York last week by the Republican Party, whose section on Asia takes aim at China, expressing profound disagreements on human rights, over Taiwan and on Beijing's outdated path of seeking advanced weaponry.

We deny the right of Beijing to impose its rule on the free Taiwanese people. All issues regarding Taiwan's future must be resolved peacefully and must be agreeable to the people of Taiwan, the platform says. If China violates these principles and attacks Taiwan, then the United States will respond appropriately. America will help Taiwan defend itself.

The question is whether Australia will stick by its American ally in such an event, given that Australia has taken part alongside the Americans in every serious conflict since World War II. It is the question that loomed over the recent five-day trip to China of the chief of Australia's Defense Force, Gen. Peter Cosgrove, for talks with his Chinese military counterparts. Australian defense experts, commenting on the new cruise missile purchase, certainly assume that they will stand by the Americans.

If you can foresee Australian forces operating alongside U.S. forces, say in the event of a collapse of the armistice in Korea or the hostilities between Taiwan and China, the type of missiles that are being sought as a result of this project would be the sort of equipment you would need to operate Australian aircraft in that environment and keep the pilots comparatively safe, says Derek Woolner, of the Canberra-based Defense Studies Forum of the University of New South Wales.

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