G'day folks!
Anymore photos out there!
Regards,
RLI
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G'day folks!
Anymore photos out there!
Regards,
RLI
I don't have many photos as my ex kept most of them.
Taken at Wagga when I was doing my refrigeration course in 1977. I am in the top row on the right.
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/h...agga1977-1.jpg
Rockhamption on Exercise K81
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/h...pton1981-2.jpg
Being presented with my National medal 1990 (for 15 years of "undetected crime")
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/h...verton1990.jpg
16 years in the Army 12 as a grunt (5/7 RAR, 8/9 RAR, TSP Duntroon, 25/49RQR) stuffed knees and back made me transfer to RAAOC as a stinging clerk, I then transferred to the RAAF in 1999 and I'm still going coming up to 30 years.
G'evening Corks!Quote:
Originally Posted by Corks
Congrats on your service mate! Good Battalions both 5/7 RAR, 8/9 RAR.
Regards,
RLI
X2, to one and all. Have a safe one.Quote:
Originally Posted by RLI
Take care out there.
Rossco
Cheers Paul, the same to you and yours and to fellow members.
G'day men,
Listen in! I thought you might like the following below!
Regards,
RLI
On Geopolitical Generals
December 5, 2012 | 1005 GMT
By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst
Now everyone knows that CIA Director David Petraeus was unfaithful to his wife and that former top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal made improper remarks to a journalist. Therefore, these two Army generals were removed from their jobs -- Petraeus recently and McChrystal two years ago -- and publicly humiliated.
Let me add some perspective regarding the careers of these two men.
In December 2006, just before Petraeus took command of all U.S. forces in Iraq and when McChrystal was in charge of counterterrorism there, Baghdad was sustaining 140 suicide bombs per month, with dozens killed in many attacks. In December 2007, largely because of the efforts of both men, that figure was reduced to five per month. The civilian lives saved as a consequence numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands per year. That's real humanitarianism -- unlike the faux humanitarianism often heard at international meetings.
Now let me add some perspective on three other Army generals, who had clean public records and thus were never humiliated to nearly the same extent by the media: Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez and George Casey. According to Thomas E. Ricks' new book, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, among other sources, Franks did not plan sufficiently for the post-invasion stabilization of Iraq, Sanchez allowed an insurgency to start and mushroom there and Casey allowed that insurgency to continue without taking creative countermeasures. Franks and Sanchez were arguably guilty of incompetence according to Ricks and others, and Casey was by almost all accounts a mediocrity in over his head as commander in Baghdad. The 140 suicide bombs per month in Baghdad with which Petraeus and McChrystal had to contend were the product of the failed generalships of Franks, Sanchez and Casey.
Petraeus, by contrast, conceived (with help from the Marines) of an alternative kind of war (counterinsurgency), implemented it in the midst of an ongoing conflict and taught his army how to employ it. In the process, he made better use of McChrystal's skills than had previous American commanders. As a consequence, with the arguable exceptions of generals Matthew Ridgway in Korea and Creighton Abrams in Vietnam, Petraeus ranks as perhaps the greatest American Army general since George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in World War II.
The result: Petraeus was brought down by what, according to the New York Times, might well have been an invasion of privacy by the FBI, even as McChrystal had his reputation irreparably damaged by an aggressive Rolling Stone reporter.
In other words, we erect gods and we get -- sorry -- human beings. Not only that, we get human beings under severe stress who are, by nature of their chemistry and circumstances, imperfect.
Let's examine the stress that Petraeus and McChrystal were under in the course of their careers. Whereas the Greatest Generation was on the whole deployed in a war theater for less than three years, Petraeus and McChrystal were deployed longer in a cumulative sense: almost half a decade when you include visits to the region, in addition to their deployments. Moreover, because they were deployed in Muslim countries, they had no access to even an occasional glass of beer on base. Eisenhower spent the war in London allegedly with a mistress -- his chauffeur and secretary, Kay Summersby. That was not frowned upon.
What should concern us regarding Petraeus was the possibility of a security breach; his private life should be, well, private -- the Army code of conduct notwithstanding. What should have outraged us about the McChrystal affair was the very fact of the removal of a brilliant commander because he had dropped his guard with a reporter from a left-wing journal.
Here's when you should ask, What would Abraham Lincoln have done? When told that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess, Lincoln remarked: "Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to my other generals." Lincoln was not interested in personal foibles in this case; he was only interested in winning a war. Our leaders and public should be, too. Gen. George McClellan was disloyal to Lincoln, but Lincoln might have forgiven McClellan even that if the general could have fought better than he did.
History is replete with the imperfections of great and extremely competent men. Richard Nixon made derogatory remarks about blacks and Jews; he was also a brilliant strategist who reopened America's relations with communist China, leveraged that relationship to counter the Soviet Union and re-established relations with Egypt and Syria after saving Israel with arms deliveries during the Yom Kippur War. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, was a morally perfect man. He was also the president under whose watch Nicaragua and Ethiopia were substantially lost to the West -- with eventual catastrophic consequences for human rights in the case of Ethiopia. Also under Carter's watch the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and a U. S. military operation in Iran went down in failure. The late Richard Holbrooke could be on a personal level extremely unpleasant, as I myself experienced close-up. He was also a brilliant diplomat who ended a war in the Balkans.
The issue here is not personalities. It is power. In a world of power and geopolitics, the best practitioners -- whether a Petraeus or a McChrystal or a Nixon or a Holbrooke -- are men who can get things done. Men who can get things done have the ability to take over a room, to force all the attention on themselves, give orders and have them actually carried out. And the orders they give are creative, morally based and well thought-through.
My purpose here is not to justify what Petraeus and McChrystal did. I am only saying that if the United States is to perform credibly as a great power it does not have the luxury to be ruled by the sensationalist standards of the media, in which incidents involving personal shortcomings are turned into soap operas. In such cases, assuming the person is not a serial offender in a way that impairs his professional competence, the country must forgive in order to allow its most able agents of authority to get on with the job.
Geopolitics -- the battle of space and power -- focuses on impersonal forces like geography, demography, economics and technology. But the actors in all cases are individuals. Individuals do matter. The Iraq War may well have been a mistake, but it was a mistake made worse by bad generalship and made better later on by good generalship -- that of Petraeus and McChrystal.
Be careful about demanding moral perfection from our leaders, civilian and military. In our personal lives we may be governed by a private morality in which someone like Petraeus can be found wanting. But in the public life of a nation, leaders must be judged by what they accomplish on behalf of the citizenry as a whole: that is, what they accomplish for the greater good. Geopolitics is a world governed by a morality of public results rather than a morality of private intentions. For if it is moral perfection that you want, you'll often get mediocrity and occasional incompetence as a result.
EDITORIAL:
Defence Minister declares war on the services
by Peter Westmore
News Weekly, December 8, 2012
At a time when Australia’s defence forces are being stretched to breaking point by savage budget cuts, the increased problems of border security, delays to vital defence acquisitions and the growth of military forces in other parts of our region, the Defence Minister Stephen Smith has again taken the axe to his own department.
Mr Smith has foreshadowed that the cost of a tribunal into sexual, physical and mental abuse in the defence forces, and a compensation scheme for victims going back decades, would be met out of the existing defence budget.
For loyal, hard-working defence personnel who are willing to put their lives on the line for their country, to be told that these costs would be met from the existing defence budget is both unfair and utterly demoralising.
To be told, “If any organisation sees on its watch inappropriate or bad conduct, in the end there is a price to pay”, was positively insulting.
This is just the latest episode in Mr Smith’s counter-productive attempt to change defence culture by penalising the innocent.
It was only a few months ago that the secretary of the Defence Department, Duncan Lewis, a former senior army officer, resigned from his post after just a year in the job, without any plausible explanation.
But the deputy leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, said the departure of Mr Lewis was another blow to defence force morale and described suggestions he resigned over budget cuts as “deeply concerning”. “This … minister is at war with the defence department,” she said.
Earlier, Mr Smith had fumbled the misconduct by junior cadets at the Australian Defence Force Academy by effectively sacking its head, Commandant Bruce Kafer. When an independent inquiry found that Kafer had behaved properly, Smith could not bring himself to admit to his mistake, nor to apologise to Kafer on his reinstatement.
Earlier still, Mr Smith, in a petty display of petulance towards the leadership of the defence forces, delayed inordinately the appointments of new Chief of the Defence Force General David Hurley and the service chiefs.
What really exercises the minister’s imagination is his determination to “reform” defence culture, by which he means opening up combat roles to women and accelerating the promotion of women to senior positions in the defence forces.
An inevitable consequence of these policies, particularly on naval vessels where women are now deployed, has been the growth of a vile culture of sexual exploitation of women.
There is a need for a continued effort by both civilians and the military to counter a culture of brutality in the defence forces, where people are being trained to kill.
But it requires a constant effort to cultivate a culture of courage and respect for one’s mates, with the co-operation of the defence chiefs, not the imposition of the feminist agenda on the defence forces — as Mr Smith has done.
It is no secret that, after the fall of Kevin Rudd as prime minister, Stephen Smith would have much preferred to continue as foreign minister, or even serve as attorney-general, rather than become defence minister. His appointment as defence minister in 2010 followed the coup against Mr Rudd, and Julia Gillard’s need to appoint Mr Rudd as foreign minister.
The position of attorney-general went to a colleague of Gillard’s, Nicola Roxon.
Defence inevitably suffered. The 2009 Defence White Paper called for 12 long-range submarines, 100 Joint Strike Fighters, three air warfare destroyers, two big amphibious ships and a slightly bigger, better-equipped army.
It envisaged that Australia needed to protect its own sea-lanes and deploy its forces in conditions similar to those in Afghanistan and East Timor, or in local conflict situations where the great powers might not become involved.
All this has now been effectively mothballed if not abandoned as a result of the government’s budget cuts and its determination to produce a budget surplus in May next year.
Having previously shown little if any interest in defence issues, Smith set about implementing the ALP’s agenda of cutting defence spending and imposing the ALP’s social agenda on the defence forces, to the applause of the left — particularly in the media — and with the approval of the Prime Minister.
It may well be that Stephen Smith’s actions as defence minister have served well his ambitions; but their effects have been extremely damaging to the armed forces. He has spread demoralisation among people who are seriously committed to the defence of Australia, and caused a collapse in support for the civilian leadership of the defence force.
While Julia Gillard remains Prime Minister and Mr Smith is defence minister, these issues will remain unresolved. Only a new government can deal with these issues.
Regards,
RLI
my granddad served in ww2 and help in the clean up of hiroshima i will get a hold of a few photos he took over there and post a few up.. my dad was also in the army as an engineer forget which regiment but he funnily enough helped in the cleanup of darwin after cyclone tracy. i applied to join as an apprentice mechanic but failed the maths tests at the time.
massive amount of respect for any man/woman who fights for their country and more than happy to shout them a beer at the pub
cheers Lads
G'evening 93 Patrol,Quote:
Originally Posted by 93patrol
Mate, you have some family history there! Good onya mate!
Regards,
RLI
getting ready for ANZAC day 2012 Perth.
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...mmofff/125.jpg
Admittedly not ADF per se but getting ready to put on the camo skins again. Going in as a cadet instructor
Tap, Tap Taparoo
G'day Timmo,Quote:
Originally Posted by Timmo
Congrats on your magnificent service mate!
Wishing both you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Safe and Prosperous New Year!
Regards,
RLI
As I mentioned Dad served WW11 up at Darwin with the 13/30 sqadron which shared personel, He was a radio operator during the Bombing of Darwin, at the 40 mile airstrip Sth of Darwin
Extremely proud of him born 1919 passed 2003. Just wish I could get his service medals for my boys 26/21," we will remember them"
Shite I miss him and mum, especially this time of year
I would have thought that any compensation that has to be paid to any assault victims should be paid out of the guilty persons super annuation and entitlements... Then, and only then topped up by the Guv (which is you and me).
If these assaults are happening, and I am sure that they are, they must be stopped....... And the perpetrators punished....
Not sure if you're aware of this book mate, it was written by my wife's uncle, Jack Mulholland, who sadly passed away this year.Quote:
Originally Posted by threedogs
There's also an interview recorded by the ABC in February this year of Jack and a Japanese fighter pilot of the time.
We have a spare copy of his book that I'd be happy to send to you if you have trouble getting a copy. However it's packed away in one of 50 some boxes we have already packed ready for our move next year so you'd have to wait for a bit :)
Hey Guys,
Not a service man myself, but had two great uncles(twin boys) who spent their 16th birthday on the Gallipoli peninsula, and appreciate every day, what they stood for.
If you are interested in a great read, look for a copy of They Dared Mightily(Lionel Wigmore) - it's a history of V.C.s awarded over the years(with how they were awarded), inspiring stuff and bloody scary as I sit back and think where I was as a teen and what these blokes did a million miles from home and just kids.
Merry Christmas and a Happy and Safe New Year to all our past and current serving MEN and WOMEN.
Mark
Cheers buddy merry xmas to you too...................Quote:
Originally Posted by RLI
To all the service men and women, here and overseas, have a merry Xmas and safe new year.
Listen in!
G'evening Lounge Lizards!
Wishing all Services a Merry Christmas and a Safe and Prosperous New Year. Especially all troops serving overseas this Christmas!
Regards,
RLI and family
Thanks for what you've all done and are doing so we CAN enjoy chrissie!!
Merry Tapped Out Xmas
May they all have a safe and merry Xmas.
well done lad and ladies we will be hoisting a few for you Merry Christmas
Darwin, back to work Monday, not doing much Sub1 WO in Febuary then Sub2 in may hope to be made up at end of year.
G'day Timmo,Quote:
Originally Posted by Timmo
All the best with your Sub 1&2 for courses! WO!
Regards,
RLI
G'day Lounge lizards!
I have cut & pasted this from Russ81 thread titled "Assistance needed" I thought this was relevant to this thread!
PS, if you can, can you please help with this great cause! Read the following below!
Regards,
RLI
"Assistance needed!
With less than a week to go, I thought it a fitting time to remind everyone about the event on Australia Day.
We are raising money and awareness for the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
Registration ($10 per person over 16) opens at 7am near movies by burswood, Charles Paterson Park. At 7.45 we will head off around the river collecting donations and conclude with a BBQ at GO Edwards park.
Currently we have raised over $500 and have between 50-100 people participating on the day, please come down and get involved or help out by donating at http://www.everydayhero.com.au/stomp_perth
Hope to see you there
Russ"
good luck on sub courses Timmo, Old man was a WO1 on discharge, pretty full on courses.
sent the application off today to put the green skins back on as a cadet instructor, will see what happens from here
G'day folks,
I found this article in the Sydney Morning Herald today!
Free speech appeal fails over critical letters to Diggers
A SELF-STYLED Muslim imam accused of sending offensive letters to the families of dead Diggers has had his appeal against the charge dismissed.
Man Haron Monis, also known as Sheikh Haron, and his co-appellant, Amirah Droudis, are accused of sending letters to the widows and family members of several soldiers, referring to the dead men in what one judge described as ''a denigrating and derogatory fashion''.
Their pre-trial application was for the dismissal of the charge that it was a crime to use a postal or similar service in a way that reasonable people would regard as offensive.
The men's lawyers had argued that the material was ''purely political'' in nature, and were protected as political speech.
The High Court decision, published on Wednesday morning, said the co-accused had allegedly sent letters (and in one case a recorded message) to the relatives of Australian soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan and to the mother of an Austrade official killed in Indonesia.
''The communications criticised Australia's military involvement in Afghanistan. They opened with expressions of sympathy for the grieving relatives but then proceeded to criticise and condemn the deceased person,'' the decision read.
The High Court was divided 50-50 on whether the constitution prohibits the postal service being used to deliver ''seriously offensive material''.
Under the Judiciary Act, when the High Court is equally divided, the decision that is being appealed is upheld.
The High Court was told in October the letters, which were also sent to various politicians including the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, contained ''expressions of sympathy'' for the soldiers' families.
But they also included passages such as: ''The Australian government represents the Australian nation. The Australian nation has approved the oppressive behaviour of its own government. How? By its silence. Insane people and children are exceptions.''
The High Court Judge Dyson Heydon questioned whether passages expressing sympathy could add to the offensiveness of the letters.
''You cannot offer condolences for the loss of someone's son and speak of the dirty body of a pig or say that Hitler was not inferior to them in moral merit,'' he said.
The barrister David Bennett, who appeared for Mr Droudis, told the court in October the letters were ''purely political'' and should therefore be protected as free speech.
''It is putting an extreme view,'' Mr Bennett said. ''It is putting what is no doubt very much a minority view, but it is purely political and it requires considerable imagination to see how that can be regarded as offensive in any way. That, of course, does not matter. If it is offensive it is offensive because the views are offensive, which is exactly what the freedom is designed to protect.''
The Chief Justice, Robert French, in October suggested the letters could be offensive because of their context and the fact they were addressed to military families. But Mr Bennett said wounding a person's feelings should not invoke a criminal offence.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Folks, i did not join the Army and serve my country with pride and honor to have this type of farken scum-bag be allowed to live in this great country of ours! The act that this sheet wearing, goat stroking fagot has committed is absolutely disgraceful, disrespectful and total un-Australian. Send the farker back to the turd-hole country of origin that this squeezer came from.
PS, and send the bill to the farken dick-brain politician and bureaucrats responsible for allowing this tow-rag scrote into our great country in the first place.
Regards,
RLI
Yeah mate, they are quite happy to live here, enjoying the freedom and lifestyle that our troops continue fight, and die, for and at the same time carry on like that.
They are the worst type of cowards and deserve nothing but a ticket back to whatever poxy bloody hole they crawled out of.
It upsets me so much and I can't put my disgust into words right now......
I am sick of it!!!!!!!
Crooks. The lawyers who have deemed it free speech are also crooks. Absolutely appalling.
I'm a sailor btw. Fix Seahawk helicopters.
Totally agree lonicus these clowns come here and whinge while our boys are back in THIER homeland fighting for THIER better living conditions and then cry that they don't want to go home when all said and done
Just tap it in just tappy tappy tappy
X2........Quote:
Originally Posted by Bloodyaussie
How true........Quote:
Originally Posted by 93patrol
Deport the bastards
The do gooders are ruining our country!
I was SHOCKED when I heard on the news today the Australian Defense Force members were marching in the Sydney Mardi Gra!!!!!!!!
What the FCUK is this country coming to??
I am still stunned and wonder WTF is going on?????????
As was the majority of the ADF....Quote:
Originally Posted by Nisshead
At least 15 ex-servicemen have committed suicide since Christmas in the terrible hidden toll of war
Ruth Lamperd, Patrick Carlyon
Sunday Herald Sun
March 16, 2013
A GOLD Card for a troubled soldier to cover the cost of his medical expenses for life was issued the day after he committed suicide last year. The Digger had returned from a deployment where he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as physical injuries. His widow declined a request for an interview with the Herald Sun, and asked that the Digger's name not be published. But it has been claimed his ongoing battle with the Department of Veterans' Affairs to be upgraded from a White Card - which offers only a limited form of medical cover - compounded his PTSD.
The revelation emerged as a Herald Sun investigation found the veterans community in Brisbane is reeling from 11 suicides since Christmas, including former soldiers returned from Somalia, Rwanda, Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. They take them away, they break them, then they give them back to us.
Two ex-servicemen from Victoria, one from Sydney and one from Western Australia are also known to have taken their lives since the start of the year. Veterans' advocates say the tragic tally is a fraction of a hidden blight unrecorded by authorities and highlights serious inadequacies in the DVA's bureaucratic claims process, which often stretches veterans' battles for compensation out to two years.
The DVA keeps no figures on suicides of past servicemen and women. It told the Herald Sun that it "aims to deal with all claims as efficiently as possible to ensure minimal impact on the individual".
Do we do enough to look after our war veterans? Vote now and have your say
But another widow who lost her ex-Digger husband to suicide said resources to support ex-soldiers were insufficient. Once soldiers such as her husband left the defence force, they became lost souls, she said.
"They take them away, they break them, then they give them back to us," the widow said.
The Herald Sun is aware of one compensation case, still unresolved after six years, of a veteran paratrooper of 24 years with PTSD; in another case it took four years to reach resolution in the favour of an ex-soldier. The concerning state of veterans' post-war battles comes as it also can be revealed: DOCTORS who treat ex-soldiers for mental illness report only 10 per cent of their patients have a smooth experience through the DVA compensation process. VETERAN support groups are bolstering advocate numbers to handle what they believe will be a deluge of claims for compensation, as veterans of recent conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq start to emerge with chronic mental illnesses. BETWEEN 10-20 per cent of claims for PTSD are turned down initially, but advocates claim 95 per cent of those are approved after appeal to the Veterans Review Board, tribunals and courts.
A VICTORIAN soldier monitoring real-time video from drones on a high-definition screen at a control room in Afghanistan saw two of his mates killed in action, but the DVA refused PTSD status on a technicality - a decision later overturned on appeal. Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans Association advocate Michael Quinn said veterans' psychological illnesses often worsened when they were rejected for valid claims. "On the other side, with a pension or a Gold Card, they often become extremely reclusive and the downhill run is pretty much already started because of what the DVA have put them through," Mr Quinn said. He said the number of cases going to the Veterans Review Board had increased due to budget cutbacks and hasty decisions at the first point of call in the DVA. "Soldiers who come from a high-discipline, high-performing job like service in conflict find it hard to line up with people at Centrelink for money. It's demoralising for them."
Queensland psychiatrist Dr Andrew Khoo treats veterans almost daily. He said the process for making a PTSD claim could be a bureaucratic maze that had become more complicated in the past decade. "Rather than the onus being on DVA to find out if people are not telling the truth, it seems that like the onus is on the guys to prove that they are not lying," Dr Khoo said. "This is the opposite to how it should be."
Brisbane-based military compensation lawyer Brian Briggs, of Slater & Gordon, represents dozens of Diggers with disputed PTSD claims. "The DVA is under-resourced and I'm seeing a blowout in the time for claims to be accepted," Mr Briggs said. Delays had a direct bearing on the treatment options and mental wellbeing of clients left in limbo. Another psychiatrist, who asked not to be named, said servicemen and women caught in limbo waiting to be discharged from the military could turn to drugs and alcohol to fill a void that often ran to a year or more. "The military has not provided a system to know what to do with them in that time," he says.
This view is supported by Angela Smith, widow of Darren Smith, who was killed in an IED blast in June 2010. A friend of many troubled Afghanistan veterans, she said the military had a "responsibility to tackle PTSD head on" - in individual cases - "instead of letting it come to them when it gets to breaking point". The issue isn't going to go away. Dr Khoo said almost 70,000 troops had been deployed since Timor. "I wonder if DVA is going to be prepared for what's coming," he said.
The Australian Defence Force pointed to its suicide prevention and mental health screening programs designed to help curb suicide rates of its forces.
Regards
RLI
Dealing with DVA is the worst process a member can go through, it's like talking to house plants. 90% of them are idiots. The advocates on this board will understand.
G'evening NP99,
I am constantly breaking my balls and eating humble pie trying to deal with DVA regarding my clients claims! It is so frustrating at times and i do all this work voluntary. I use my own fuel and stationary just to get cases filed.
Regards,
RLI