David Horner | |
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Born | Adelaide, South Australia | 12 March 1948
Awards | Churchill Fellowship (1977) Member of the Order of Australia (2009) Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (2015) Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History (2015) St Ermin's Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award (2015) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of New South Wales (MA [Hons]) Australian National University (PhD) |
Thesis | Australia and Allied Strategy in the Pacific, 1941–1946 (1980) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert O'Neill |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Australian National University |
Main interests | Australian military history Strategic studies |
Notable works | The Official History of ASIO Official History of Australian Peacekeeping,Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations |
David Murray Horner, AM , FASSA (born 12 March 1948) is an Australian military historian and academic.
Horner was born in Adelaide,South Australia,on 12 March 1948. [1] He was raised in a military household—his father,Murray Horner,had served in New Guinea during the Second World War. Like Murray,David Horner attended Prince Alfred College. [2] Horner was a prefect and served on numerous committees including the yearbook,debating,cadets,and student christian movement. [3]
later joined the Citizen Military Forces—and joined the Australian Army after completing school in 1966. On graduating from the Royal Military College,Duntroon in 1969,he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Infantry Corps. In 1971,Horner served an eight-month tour in Vietnam as a platoon commander in the 3rd Battalion,Royal Australian Regiment. [1] [4] He was a visiting fellow with the Department of History at the Australian Defence Force Academy from 1985 to 1988,and a member of the directing staff at the Joint Services Staff College in 1988 to 1990. [5] Horner retired from the full-time army in 1991 on gaining a position with the Australian National University (ANU) and transferred to the Australian Army Reserve,with which he served for more than a decade. He was the inaugural commanding officer of the Land Warfare Studies Centre (1998–2002),and retired with the rank of colonel. [6]
Horner has a Diploma of Military Studies from Duntroon,a Master of Arts (Honours) from the University of New South Wales,and graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy from the ANU in 1980. His doctoral thesis,supervised by Robert O'Neill and completed while a serving major in the army,concerned Australian and Allied strategy in the Pacific War and formed the basis for his second book,High Command:Australia and Allied Strategy,1939–1945 (1982). [7] [8]
Horner was appointed to a position at the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in 1990. [4] In 1998 he was described as "one of Australia's most respected military historians", [9] and in 1999 was made Professor of Australian Defence History at the ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (later the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs); [10] a role he served in until 2014. [7]
In 2004 Horner was appointed the Official Historian and general editor for the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping,Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations ,a six-volume history covering Australia's involvement in international peacekeeping operations from 1947 to 2006. Horner authored or co-authored the second and third volumes:Australia and the 'New World Order' (2011) and,with John Connor,The Good International Citizen (2014). A team led by Horner also won a tender to write the official history of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). [4] The three-volume series,which traces the first forty years of ASIO's history from 1949 to 1989,was led by Horner's The Spy Catchers (2014). [11] John Blaxland's The Protest Years followed in 2015, [12] and Blaxland and Rhys Crawley's The Secret Cold War in 2016. [13] The Spy Catchers jointly won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History,was sole winner of the St Ermin's Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award,and was long-listed for the Council for the Humanities,Arts and Social Sciences Australia Prize for a Book in 2015. [10] [11] Horner also undertook a feasibility study in 2012 into what eventually became the Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor . [14]
Horner has written or edited 32 books and more than 75 journal articles,reports and chapters in books. [5] In 2009,he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for his "service to higher education in the area of Australian military history and heritage as a researcher,author and academic." [5] Horner retired from full-time academia in 2014,and was appointed an emeritus professor at the ANU. [10] He was made a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2015. [7]
The International Force East Timor (INTERFET) was a multinational non-United Nations peacemaking task force, organised and led by Australia in accordance with United Nations resolutions to address the humanitarian and security crisis that took place in East Timor from 1999–2000 until the arrival of UN peacekeepers. INTERFET was commanded by an Australian military officer, Major General Peter Cosgrove.
Australia was a member of the international coalition which contributed military forces to the 1991 Gulf War, also known as Operation Desert Storm. More than 1,800 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel were deployed to the Persian Gulf from August 1990 to September 1991, while contingents from the Royal Australian Navy circulated through the region in support of the sanctions against Iraq until November 2001. In August 1990, two frigates HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Darwin and the replenishment ship HMAS Success left for the Persian Gulf. HMAS Success had no air defences, so the Army 16th Air Defence Regiment was embarked. On 3 December 1990, HMAS Brisbane and HMAS Sydney (IV) relieved HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Darwin. On 26 January 1991, HMAS Westralia replaced HMAS Success. A Navy clearance diving team was also deployed for explosive ordnance disposal and demolition tasks. Australian ships were in danger of sea mines and possible air attacks. In a number of recorded incidents, HMAS Brisbane encountered free floating mines, on one occasion narrowly avoiding a collision. Both HMA Ships Brisbane and Sydney encountered significant air threat warnings from Iran and Iraq throughout the initial period of the commencement of the Desert Storm Campaign. The detection of land based Silkworm anti-ship missiles from Iran throughout the campaign also added to the challenges for both crews as well as the multi-national Naval Forces.
Operation Morris Dance was an Australian military operation conducted in May 1987 in response to the first of the 1987 Fijian coups d'état.
Robert John O'Neill, was an Australian historian and academic. He served as the chair of the International Academic Advisory Committee at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, was director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London, from 1982 to 1987, and was Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford from 1987 to 2000.
General Sir John Gordon Noel Wilton, was a senior commander in the Australian Army. He served as Chief of the General Staff (CGS), the Army's professional head, from 1963 until 1966, and as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCOSC), forerunner of the role of Australia's Chief of the Defence Force, from 1966 until 1970. His eight-year tenure as senior officer of first the Army and then the Australian military spanned almost the entire period of the nation's involvement in the Vietnam War.
Australian military involvement in peacekeeping operations has been diverse, and included participation in both United Nations sponsored missions, as well as those as part of ad hoc coalitions. Indeed, Australians have been involved in more conflicts as peacekeepers than as belligerents; however, according to Peter Londey "in comparative international terms, Australia has only been a moderately energetic peacekeeper." Although Australia has had peacekeepers in the field continuously for 60 years – the first occasion being in Indonesia in 1947, when Australians were among the first group of UN military observers – its commitments have generally been limited, consisting of small numbers of high-level and technical support troops or observers and police. David Horner has noted that the pattern changed with the deployment of 600 engineers to Namibia in 1989–90 as the Australian contribution to UNTAG. From the mid-1990s, Australia has been involved in a series of high-profile operations, deploying significantly large units of combat troops in support of a number of missions including those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia and later in East Timor. Australia has been involved in close to 100 separate missions, involving more than 30,000 personnel and 11 Australians have died during these operations.
The Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation was fought from 1962 to 1966 between the British Commonwealth and Indonesia. Indonesia, under President Sukarno, sought to prevent the creation of the new Federation of Malaysia that emerged in 1963, whilst the British Commonwealth sought to safeguard the security of the new state. The war remained a limited one however, and was fought primarily on the island of Borneo, although a number of Indonesian seaborne and airborne incursions into the Malay Peninsula did occur. As part of Australia's continuing military commitment to the security of Malaysia, Australian army, naval and air force units were based there with the Far East Strategic Reserve, mainly in the 28th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade Group.
The Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations is the official history of Australia's military and civilian involvement in peacekeeping since 1947 as well as military operations in the years after the end of the Cold War. The series, comprising six volumes, was jointly produced by the Australian War Memorial and Australian National University, with Professor David Horner serving as its general editor.
Australian involvement in the Malayan Emergency lasted 13 years, between 1950 and 1963, with army, air force and naval units serving. The Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960 in Malaya. The Malayan Emergency was the longest continuous military commitment in Australia's history. Thirty-nine Australians were killed and 27 wounded.
Desmond John Ball was an Australian academic and expert on defence and security. He was credited with successfully advising the United States against nuclear escalation in the 1970s.
Clive Owen Gestern Williams, is a British-born former Australian Army Military Intelligence officer, and academic with research interests in terrorism and counterterrorism, politically motivated violence, insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Joan Errington Beaumont, is an Australian historian and academic, who specialises in foreign policy and the Australian experience of war. She is professor emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
Peter Stanley is a prominent Australian military historian, who specialises in the military-social experience of war in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In a career spanning over three decades, Stanley has worked as an Historian and later Head of the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial (1980–2007), Head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia (2007–13) and, since 2013, as Research Professor at the University of New South Wales in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. Starting in 1977—and as at 2019—Stanley has written 27 books and edited eight others, published two novels and co-authored a booklet, and composed at least 46 chapters in books and anthologies, 59 journal articles, seven encyclopaedia entries and numerous papers. In 2011, his book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (2010) was the joint winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History.
The structure of the Australian Army during World War I included a small force of mostly militia which served in Australia and larger expeditionary forces which were raised for deployment overseas following the outbreak of the conflict in August 1914. The home army consisted of the small regular Permanent Forces, the part-time Citizen Forces, and the Australian Garrison Artillery, which were maintained in Australia to defend the country from attack, while expeditionary forces consisted of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) which occupied German New Guinea from September 1914, and the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) which fought at Gallipoli in 1915, and in the Middle East and on the Western Front in Europe from 1916 to 1918. Following an initial precautionary mobilisation following the outbreak of war, by the end of August 1914 those units of the reserve formations of the home army that had been activated began to stand down. From 1915, only skeleton garrisons were maintained at coastal forts. Meanwhile, as the war continued overseas the AIF sustained heavy losses, and although it expanded considerably during the war, with the voluntary recruitment system unable to replace its casualties by 1918 most of its units were significantly undermanned.
Garth Pratten is an Australian historian in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
Jeffrey Guy Grey was an Australian military historian. He wrote two volumes of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, and several other high-profile works on Australia's military history. He was the first non-American to become the president of the Society for Military History, but is perhaps best known as the author of A Military History of Australia.
Paul Dibb AM is an English-born Australian strategist, academic and former defence intelligence official. He is currently emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre that is part of the Australian National University.
John Charles Blaxland is an Australian historian, academic, and former Australian Army officer. He is a Professor in Intelligence Studies and International Security at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
Peter Geoffrey Edwards, AM is an Australian diplomatic and military historian. Educated at the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford, Edwards worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide before being appointed Official Historian and general editor of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975 in 1982. The nine-volume history was commissioned to cover Australia's involvement in the Malayan Emergency, Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation and Vietnam War. Edwards spent fourteen years at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) writing two of the volumes, while also researching, editing, and dealing with budget limitations and problems with staff turnover. Since leaving the AWM in 1996, Edwards has worked as a senior academic, scholar and historical consultant. In 2006 his book Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins won the Queensland Premier's History Book Award and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Craig Anthony John Stockings is an Australian historian with research interests in military and defence history. Since 2016, Stockings has been Official Historian and general editor of the Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor, based at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Prior to this appointment, Stockings was an officer in the Australian Army and professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, working out of the Australian Defence Force Academy.