Defence analysis
with
Ross Eastgate is a military historian, writer and journalist specialising in defence. A graduate of Duntroon and the Army Command and Staff College, he has served in the Middle East, PNG and East Timor.
OLD soldiers will caution you when exercising in the bush not to stir your tea with smooth sticks, those without bark.
Without wishing to be accused of living in a glass house, it seems everyone is an expert about how the ADF could be better equipped and managed.
The level of assumed knowledge often seems inversely proportionate to rank held while serving.
Those who have never served think it is an issue too important to be entrusted to those who have.
Thus former generals have no idea what is best, but former acting temporary lance-corporals, particularly those with a chip on their shoulders and a perceived grudge to settle, are experts.
Sandhurst graduate Winston Churchill served in the cavalry because his parliamentarian father, afflicted by a mind-destroying social disease, felt the infantry far too expensive for the penurious son of parents of equally limited means.
Consequently, Churchill had to soldier in India where the cost of polo ponies and servants was more affordable.
Churchill held the view battles were won by soldiers seizing and
holding ground, then destroying the enemy in detail.
He felt the other services detracted from the battle.
Churchill rued the day America’s Wright brothers pioneered manned flight, shrinking the known world and also battlefields.
His decision to send the Prince of Wales and Repulse to Malaya without an escorting aircraft carrier proved disastrously expensive.
He held a more enlightened view to women serving. His daughter Mary commanded antiaircraft artillery batteries in the UK and Europe.
Churchill was, however, a keen supporter of marines, a capability also employed by the US, the Netherlands and Argentina among others.
Serving aboard ships they have the capacity to seize and to hold ground as required as an extension of naval operations while conventional forces were deployed.
Although their roles have been modified somewhat, they base their traditions and customs on the navy, for example taking their turn in the barrel as required.
Some years ago a single-minded senior RAAF officer argued his service could adequately defend Australia’s air sea gap with combat aircraft deployed to remote bases across the north, essentially making the navy and the army superfluous to needs, particularly the RAN Fleet Air Arm.
His view having prevailed, Australia lost some strategic capabilities it now struggles to replace adequately.
The army has specific strategic and tactical tasks which it must prepare and train for, rather than as an asset to be routinely deployed in support of the civil authorities.
Nor should it ever be a freely available experimental test bed to satisfy the long-term career ambitions of senior medical officers.
Recently a populist national radio host suggested the army should be mobilised to cull Australia’s feral pests, no doubt a great way to fill otherwise wasted time between operational deployments.
Opinions are free and of relative worth.
The reason old soldiers caution about stirring your tea in the bush with smooth sticks, those without bark, is because wombats have already used them to wipe their bums.