Calling Out The Troops

A recognised expert on military call-out law, Associate Professor Michael Head, examines the troop call-out legislation introduced in 2000 and 2006, and reviews the ongoing Constitutional and legal uncertainties.This book raises a number of crucial issues that have received little public attention. The Australian Defence Force can be deployed on such vague grounds as 'domestic violence' and 'Commonwealth interests'. Military commanders are given sweeping powers, including to use lethal force, shoot down civilian aircraft, interrogate people, raid premises and seize documents.Furthermore, other powers may still exist - under the common law or the Australian Constitution - to invoke 'military aid to civil power' or even martial law. The Governor-General remains the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and the vice-regal powers over the military are unclear.While this book will be of particular interest to students, scholars and practitioners of law, as well as military lawyers and experts, it is also directed to members of the public, with the aim of stimulating much-needed debate.Part One reviews the contours, context and historical origins of the callout laws, and the underlying militarisation of aspects of society. Part Two examines the details of the laws and explores the legal and Constitutional questions. Part Three outlines the global parallels and probes the political implications.

COLBY AWARD WINNER • “One of the most important books to come out of the Afghanistan war.”—Foreign Policy “A saga of courage and futility, of valor and error and heartbreak.”—Rick Atkinson, author of the Liberation Trilogy and The British Are Coming Of the many battlefields on which U.S. troops and intelligence operatives fought in Afghanistan, one remote corner of the country stands as a microcosm of the American campaign: the Pech and its tributary valleys in Kunar and Nuristan. The area’s rugged, steep terrain and thick forests made it a natural hiding spot for local insurgents and international terrorists alike, and it came to represent both the valor and futility of America’s two-decade-long Afghan war. Drawing on reporting trips, hundreds of interviews, and documentary research, Wesley Morgan reveals the history of the war in this iconic region, captures the culture and reality of the conflict through both American and Afghan eyes, and reports on the snowballing missteps—some kept secret from even the troops fighting there—that doomed the American mission. The Hardest Place is the story of one of the twenty-first century’s most unforgiving battlefields and a portrait of the American military that fought there.