A U-S sailor has been committed to stand trial in the Northern Territory Supreme Court after allegedly raping a woman in Darwin last year. The Darwin Magistrates Court has heard from two witnesses who spent time with the sailor at a city nightclub.

The following day she reaffirmed that she had been raped, her friend said. "She said she was fighting him ... he finally took (his penis) out after about five to 10 seconds and said, `please forgive me, you're such a beautiful girl, I have a family'," the friend's statement to police read.

The former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has launched a wide-ranging attack on Australia’s “complacent” foreign policy, accusing the government of being harmfully dependent on the US. In a speech delivered at Melbourne University, Fraser said he was “ashamed” that Australia was led into the Iraq war on “falsehoods” and criticised the current deployment of American troops in Darwin. Around 2,500 American troops began rotating through Darwin for training last year, with US marines set to bring equipment such as amphibious assault craft, jets and helicopters to Australia, in a bid to enhance the US military position in the region.

They aren’t going to say ‘Canberra, we don’t like what people are doing here and we want to attack them and we want to use those forces you’ve so conveniently housed in Darwin.’ They’ll do it and we’ll read about it in the newspapers. Our prime minister will be told about it after the attack is made. Because that’s the way these things work. That, for me, is a total denial of Australian sovereignty and if we were ever independent, it’s a denial of Australian independence.

The US military has flown two Boeing B-52 bombers into Darwin ahead of multi-national war games hosted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

The B-52s, weighing more than 125,000 kilograms each, will form the tactical backbone of a training exercise dubbed Pitch Black, according to military officials.

Two teams made up of men and women from the US armed forces have also arrived in the Top End to take part in the exercise.

The simulated conflict will involve long-range tactics in the vast, empty airspace between Darwin and Katherine.

US Marines began arriving in the Territory on a six-month rotational basis in mid-2012 and have since undertaken joint training exercises with the ADF.

According to a statement, the rotations of US military equipment and personnel in the Pacific region "enhance US ability to train, exercise and operate with Australia and with other allies and partners across the region, further enabling the US to work together with these nations to respond more quickly to a wide range of challenges, including humanitarian crises and disaster relief, as well as promoting security cooperation efforts across the region".

Decisions on future rotations remain under discussion, the statement adds.

Australians prefer to see the isolated and exotic city of Darwin through stories about cyclones, crocodiles, Aboriginal art, spicy market food and unlimited road speeds; a place that lets you go to the supermarket in bare feet and look normal. This way, we don’t have to notice the most significant militarisation effort in Australia’s post-war history, which is happening under our noses. The militarisation of the north is unknown to most of us and thanks to this ignorance, the new Cold War brewing in the Asia Pacific region, and Darwin’s place in it, is rarely being debated.

The city is now a "lily pad" (the base America has when it doesn’t need to build a mini-city, just permanent access to a subordinate state’s geographic and strategic resources), adding to the largest empire of "not-really-bases" the world has ever known.