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The mid-fifties was a time of tremendous upheaval for Australian defence, a quantum realignment of policy was begun. The Korean War aside the post war plan for Australia was more or less to repeat the pattern of both World Wars; send a large, mainly infantry, force to the Middle East to fight alongside the British. To this end the Citizen Militia Forces were kept up to strength with a short term conscription scheme and the Regular Army was fully integrated to create a large Army that would be available at short notice. Similarly the RAAF maintained a fighter wing in Malta to fulfil this obligation while the Citizen Air Force provided training for pilots and ground crew with its Reserve flying squadrons.



By 1955 this plan was changing, the Far East Strategic Reserve based in Malaya and Singapore was created and Australia pledged to commit forces from all three Services. The RAAF fighter wing in Malta was withdrawn and RAAF bolstered combat squadrons at Butterworth in Malaya. The same year a battalion of the Royal Australia Regiment was deployed to Malaya and the RAN stationed several warships at Singapore Naval Base. These forces contributed to the Counter Insurgency campaign known as the Malayan Emergency. With this orientation away from the Middle East and with Korea and now Malaya being fought with regular forces the Army decided to place more emphasis on quality rather than quantity and reduced the CMF intake to 12,000 personnel from 1957 and National Service with the RAAF and RAN was ended. In this general reorientation from the Middle East to the Near North and from mass mobilised Citizen Forces to smaller Regular Forces the appropriateness of the current Defence administrative structure set up in 1940 was questioned and Prime Minister Menzies commissioned distinguished army officer Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead to chair a committee tasked to investigate the Defence group of Departments in 1957.

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