NZDF General discussion thread

[Rob c]

Rob: in agreement with you that a nation must at the very least be able to defend its own territory (after all that's the history of mankind and civilizations) plus the rest of your commentary. The only variation I would add is I do think though that we must also have certain useful capabilities that can forward-deploy as part of the baseline. Like how we forward deployed the Services into the SW Pacific in WW2 (including maritime patrol to keep a lookout of our approaches).

I did include the need to contribute to regional defence, but this should not detract from our own defence. The other point I would make is that we cannot assume that China will be the problem in 20 years or more. Remember that Japan was an ally during the first WW1 and in fact escorted NZ and Australian troops to the Middle East during this time. Just over 20 years later we were at war. Also, were will China have bases in 20 years.
Assuming that a certain path will be followed and the conflict will occur in a specified region is a mistake as is assuming that only certain threats will be involved. In our case we do know that any threat can only come by air or sea, outside of that anything is possible.