Ted Serong: The Life of an Australian Counter-insurgency Expert

Ted Serong was one of the most original and influential of the Australian Army’s planners in the post-war period. He re-established the jungle training centre at Canungra in the 1950s and developed the Australian Army doctrine of counter-insurgency warfare. Yet the extent of his achievements is little known in the country of his birth. This major new biography by Anne Blair explores the fascinating career of the Australian Army’s most mysterious commander. First Edition. #0819

Brigadier Francis Philip Ted” Serong
x, 238 p., [16] p. of plates : maps, ports. ; 24 cm. #070522R
Brigadier Francis Philip “Ted” Serong, DSO, OBE (11 November 1915 – 1 October 2002) was a senior officer of the Australian Army. Born into a Roman Catholic family in 1915, Serong’s opposition to communism led him to join the army, graduating from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1937. During the Second World War he mainly served in training and staff roles, but saw combat against the Japanese at Wewak late in the war. In the post-war period he had a significant influence on the training of the Australian Army, which he helped re-orient to warfare in South East Asia, heading the jungle training centre at Canungra in 1955 and developing the army’s counter-insurgency doctrine. He instructed the armed forces of Burma in jungle warfare in the late 1950s and was a strategic advisor to the Burmese Army from 1960 to 1962.

Serong was appointed to command the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) in 1962. He was later seconded to the Americans and was senior advisor to the South Vietnamese Police Field Force between 1965 and 1968. Leaving the army in 1968, he remained in Vietnam as a security and intelligence adviser to the South Vietnamese government, as well as working for the Rand organisation, Hudson Institute and other corporations, and consulting to the Pentagon and several US presidents. He continued to serve in Vietnam until the fall of Saigon in 1975. He was considered a world authority on counter-insurgency warfare and wrote widely on the subject. In later life he maintained an interest in Australian defence issues and was at times a controversial figure due to his support for several citizens’ militia groups, conspiracy theories and right-wing political causes. He died, aged eighty-six, in 2002.
Serong, Ted. | Australia. Army — Officers — Biography. | Vietnam War, 1961-1975.