A series of historic firsts are accelerating initiatives to deepen interoperability among Allies and Partners as Oceania defense forces pursue shared national interests.
In October 2024, New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) Maj. Gen. Hugh McAslan was named Australia’s deputy chief of joint operations, the highest-level posting of a foreign military officer to the Australian Defence Force (ADF), according to a news release.
The announcement reciprocated the mid-2024 appointment of Australian Army Brig. Michael Bassingthwaighte as the first Australian to serve as deputy commander of Joint Forces New Zealand.
The moves build “on more than a century of close military cooperation regionally and globally,” Royal Australian Navy Vice Adm. Justin Jones, chief of joint operations, said in a statement. “Integrating Australian and New Zealand senior military officers into each other’s defence forces is a key step to enhanced interoperability and increasing our ability to deploy together.”
McAslan’s 35-year military career has involved frequent collaboration with Australian counterparts. “My experience working alongside the ADF in operations throughout the world, including in Iraq and Timor-Leste, within the strategic intelligence community, and across the Indo-Pacific region will be invaluable in taking on this new role,” he said in a statement.
The appointment “serves to further strengthen and enhance, at the senior level, the trust and comradery we share with our Australian ally,” said Air Marshal Tony Davies, chief of the NZDF. “We continue to work together to ensure the peace and prosperity we enjoy today in the southwest Pacific.”
Treaty allies for more than 70 years, Australia and New Zealand are committed to strengthening their alliance “to address evolving geostrategic challenges,” the nations’ defense and foreign ministers stated after their meetings in early 2024. They expressed “serious concern” over destabilizing activities in the East China and South China seas, where the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military repeatedly has engaged in unsafe maneuvers and territorial incursions.
The ministers also reiterated their nations’ opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait amid Beijing’s threats to forcibly annex self-governed Taiwan.
In August 2024, more than 1,500 Australian and New Zealand personnel conducted Exercise Diamond Run at the ADF’s Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland. Drills included urban operations, trench warfare, tactical air landing operations, chemical weapons defense, and expeditionary resupply by land and sea, the ADF stated.
Bassingthwaighte served alongside New Zealand forces during joint training in Iraq and as part of an international peacekeeping mission in Timor-Leste. “Building on our mutual history makes the sharing of personnel a natural progression between the NZDF and ADF,” he said in a news release.
The ADF also is expanding its partnership with the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF). In January 2024, PNGDF Lt. Col. Boniface Aruma was appointed deputy commander of the Australian Army’s 3rd Brigade, while two PNGDF members recently became the first international graduates of the ADF Officer Training School’s Initial Officer Course.
“It is significant because it is a game changer in terms of [the] relationship between our countries and Defence Forces,” Col. Siale Diro, Papua New Guinea’s defense attache to Australia, said in a news release. “This … underpins everything; to see human interaction, learning the same values, same way of thinking, the same skills, and of course developing a cohort of lifelong friends.”
