Mary S. Barton and James Graham Wilson
In October 1958, the British Chiefs of Staff proposed to hold inter-service exercises to identify vulnerabilities in the defence of the British Commonwealth. The following year, the Royal Air Force (RAF) sponsored the first of them, ‘Triumvirate’, in 1961, which planned for a hypothetical conflict in the Far East. Because Australia and New Zealand were especially vital to British plans, the UK Chiefs of Staff hoped that the combined services of those countries would send representatives to the top-secret ‘Closed Exercise’.
Defence officials in both Australia and New Zealand expressed doubts. Surely the (uninvited) United States would be ‘a most important, if not a preponderant power in these operations’. Australia’s Ministry of Defence registered concern that the exercise would slow progress on their efforts to establish ‘Four Power Planning’ in the Pacific with the United States – a project Australia and New Zealand called ‘Hydration’.
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