At time of writing, we do not know whether there is any truth to the allegations which have been made about the Fijian colonel who has recently been seconded to the senior ranks of the Australian Army. But we can be sure that not many Australians who are prepared to force a rifle barrel up someone’s bottom would feel obliged to put it on their CV or mention it in a job interview. Quite a lot of Australians, on the other hand, would admit to being prepared to point a rifle barrel at someone’s head and pull the trigger. Because that is a requirement of every Australian who decides to serve with our armed forces. Which begs an interesting question: Which soldier would you be more afraid of, the one who is prepared to shoot his country’s enemies on the battlefield, or the one who is prepared to force a rifle barrel up his compatriots’ bottoms in peacetime?

‘I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy,’ the Duke of Wellington is reputed to have said after inspecting his troops before Waterloo, ‘but, by God, they frighten me.’ The reputation for unbridled savagery British soldiers and sailors enjoyed by then, and which was as vital to the expansion of the Empire as the skill of their commanders, was the product of centuries of domestic and international conflict. Contrary to the invasion narrative spruiked by today’s educators, the first Australian soldiers had no such legacy and learned the importance of being feared the hard way. The 600 Australian conscripts and volunteers who died in the Transvaal and Highveld may have deserved the epithet ‘Lions led by donkeys’ as richly as any of their British comrades, but in the trenches of the first world war the opportunities for leonine behaviour were limited, and if Australian soldiers distinguished themselves at places like Gallipoli and Fromelles it was mainly in their stoic acceptance of the cannon-fodder role assigned to them by their imperial masters.

Their diminutive numbers meant that Australian soldiers played a no more decisive part in subsequent wars. But these at least allowed them to show qualities which made them a disproportionately formidable opponent. Field Marshall Rommel was amongst the first people to observe this. ‘If I had to take hell,’ he told his staff after the Second Battle of El Alamein, ‘I would use Australians to take it and New Zealanders to hold it.’ And if young Aussies felt more at home in the heat and dust of North Africa than the ice and mud of Northern Europe, they adapted even better to the swamps and forests of Southeast Asia. Not least because much of the fighting there was close quarters between small, independently mobile groups rather than battalions and artillery facing each other across flat, open country. The legendary courage, resourcefulness and sheer ferocity which Australian soldiers displayed against a much larger Japanese invasion force on the Kokoda Track was reprised to equal effect in Korea and Vietnam, where, thanks to their willingness to do things like crawl alone into tunnels armed only with a flashlight and a knife, a vanishingly small Australian contingent was more feared by the Vietcong than the ubiquitous GIs.

Unless Australia’s birth rate returns to what it was at Federation, or unless we make national service a condition of citizenship, we will never have a large army. But the job it must do – to defend the world’s largest coastline – will never get smaller. There are only two ways we can compensate for this shortfall in manpower (and yes, it is men not women we need more of). One is to purchase sophisticated weaponry. But it will be twenty years before we start taking delivery of our nuclear submarines, and the assumption that our largest regional adversary (aka trading partner) will wait for that to happen before chugging into the Gulf of Carpentaria is just shy of madness. In the meantime, the only way we can be sure of any long-term regional safety is by maintaining and strengthening our existing American and European alliances. That means being willing to not just raise our hands in solidarity with them at UN conferences, but to put boots on the ground beside them when conversations fail. The few soldiers Australia was able to send to Afghanistan earned the respect of all their British and American comrades because they put the fear of God into the Taleban, and none more so than the soldiers of our SAS. At the time, we recognised their bravery and self-sacrifice with medals. In the years since, we have allowed our press and courts to undermine their achievements and devalue their international currency. Embedding the odd Fijian with a penchant for anal rape in the senior ranks of our military may not make Australia’s future foes quake in their boots. But it might give them more pause for thought than increasing the ethnic and gender diversity of our armed forces or (and if you think I’m joking Google it) training wedge-tailed eagles to attack their drones.