Defence force members!

[PMC]

G'day folks!

Anymore photos out there!

Regards,

RLI

[raafy]

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.



Rockhamption on Exercise K81



Being presented with my National medal 1990 (for 15 years of "undetected crime")

[Corks]

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.

[PMC]

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!

Congrats on your service mate! Good Battalions both 5/7 RAR, 8/9 RAR.

Regards,

RLI

[DX grunt]

G'evening Men!

Listen in, to all my fellow brothers in arms!

Wishing you and your family a merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous new year!

Regards

Paul (RLI)

X2, to one and all. Have a safe one.

Take care out there.

Rossco

[Stropp]

Cheers Paul, the same to you and yours and to fellow members.

[PMC]

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.

[PMC]

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

[93patrol]

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

[PMC]

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,

Mate, you have some family history there! Good onya mate!

Regards,

RLI