For the past thirty years, events in Southeast Asia have substantially shaped Australian defence policy. Japan became an imminent threat only when it moved into Indo-China, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies. As a result Australians became understandably alarmed, and concentrated their defence programme on this situation rather than events in Europe, the Middle East, or even South Asia. Since World War II, a sense of continuing threat or potential threat from Asia has prompted the raising and maintaining of a regular, standing army, units of which have been deployed almost continuously since 1950 on the Asian mainland – in Korea, Malaya, Singapore and South Vietnam, as well as in northern Borneo. As this is being written, there are still Some 8,000 Australian servicemen in the Vietnam theatre, and nearly 3,000 in Malaysia and Singapore.