You'll be pleased to know that from my (somewhat limited experience) there is quite a lot of Australian soldiers of all levels who have utter contempt for warmongers.
Yah, that is reassuring - my very limited experience with Aussie soldiers is only with them out partying, and they tended to party hard but not party stupid (aka a football player). I think that as a nation, we really went down the right path for our circumstances when we went with a smaller professional army.
Nelson seems to have more of a clue than Hill did, and I'm all for maintaining/increasing interoperability with the Yanks, but let them supply the predominantly grunt classical land-forces army and let us provide supplimentary specialists/special-forces (good real-world training, morality issues aside). Although the yanks seem to be realising that they need a higher proportion of specialists to cannon-fodder, which is one reassuring element to Iraq/Afghanistan/Wherever-they-invade-next.
In some ways I've got a degree of trepidation on behalf of our armed forces, because I think the public has strong inclinations towards heading down the "they're so special we should never get them dirty by using them" path, although thankfully we still seem to have popular support for the relatively pure peacekeeping style missions of Timor, the Solomons and (god forbid) potentially Papua New Guinea. The fact the public remembers the Vietnam War and doesn't remember things like the Malayan "Emergency" (*cough* war) is also concerning.
That said, it really is one field where it's very hard for someone without any form of prior involvement to judge the situation - dunno if you've noticed, but I tend to quite deliberately stay away from specific commentary on composition of the army etc...
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Date: 2006-10-07 04:29 am (UTC)Yah, that is reassuring - my very limited experience with Aussie soldiers is only with them out partying, and they tended to party hard but not party stupid (aka a football player). I think that as a nation, we really went down the right path for our circumstances when we went with a smaller professional army.
Nelson seems to have more of a clue than Hill did, and I'm all for maintaining/increasing interoperability with the Yanks, but let them supply the predominantly grunt classical land-forces army and let us provide supplimentary specialists/special-forces (good real-world training, morality issues aside). Although the yanks seem to be realising that they need a higher proportion of specialists to cannon-fodder, which is one reassuring element to Iraq/Afghanistan/Wherever-they-invade-next.
In some ways I've got a degree of trepidation on behalf of our armed forces, because I think the public has strong inclinations towards heading down the "they're so special we should never get them dirty by using them" path, although thankfully we still seem to have popular support for the relatively pure peacekeeping style missions of Timor, the Solomons and (god forbid) potentially Papua New Guinea. The fact the public remembers the Vietnam War and doesn't remember things like the Malayan "Emergency" (*cough* war) is also concerning.
That said, it really is one field where it's very hard for someone without any form of prior involvement to judge the situation - dunno if you've noticed, but I tend to quite deliberately stay away from specific commentary on composition of the army etc...