The apparently likely appointment of Michael Pezzullo as the Defence Department secretary may not be in the national interest, given it could effectively hand both day-to-day and policy control of the organisation to the China hawks.A controversial figure who first worked in Defence as a graduate in 1987, Mr Pezzullo was the principal author of the 2009 defence white paper and has headed what is now the Home Affairs Department since 2014.
His Anzac weekend comments about "the drums of war" drew strong parallels between the troubled China relationship and the decade of appeasement that ended with World War II. Noting "the sorrow of Europeans after the First World War" and their revulsion at the thought of "another terrible bloodbath", Mr Pezzullo said countries such as France and England "did not heed the drums of war which beat through the 1930s - until too late they once again took up arms against Nazism and fascism"....MORE
