Category Archives: Defence
DVA under siege
Grant Martin, a sailor during the war to evict Iraq from Kuwait wants PTSD recognized and a pension to compensate.
“I have to sleep in a separate bed from my wife because of violent fits and throwing punches all the time,” he said. “You’re on a knife edge all the time. You can’t sleep, you can’t relax, you can’t concentrate, it feels like your head’s going to fall off.”
All this angst because when serving on HMAS Canberra on Operation DAMASK VI following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (November 1992 to March 1993), someone did, or didn’t issue a missile alert indicating that the Iraq military might launch a scud missile aimed at someone, somewhere.
The initial report found there was “no evidence” to support Mr Martin’s claim the Canberra took evasive action after the missile threat was announced. In contrast, the tribunal’s final decision found “there was a missile alert … (Mr Martin) perceived a very real threat from the announced missile attack”.
His subsequent illness was “war-caused”, the tribunal found, and he was “entitled to receive a pension in respect of incapacity associated with those conditions”.
Hmmm
Sorry, not eligible
A FEDERAL Court judge has backed calls for a slain commando to join his comrades on the Australian War Memorial’s Roll of Honour, despite his being killed in a botched training exercise between deployments to Afghanistan.
What sort of idiot is the Judge. If he doesn’t understand the basic tenets of the country he lives in then what is he doing on the bench?
I feel sorry for the mother, what parent wouldn’t, but wanting her son’s name on a roll of honour that is only for those killed at war is not the answer.
Diggers being diggers
ONE of Australia’s leading combat battalions employed topless waitresses to serve drinks during an “Oktoberfest” party held at the unit’s Townsville base.
OMG the horror! Hetrosexual behaviour – have to put a stop to that!
The event, at which the four civilian women were encouraged to remove their clothes in defiance of direct orders from the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, is the latest in a line of recent military scandals.
OK, that’s a bit different then – the Corporal should be charged and punished but we shouldn’t be reading about it. A minor disciplinary matter makes the national press because of an agenda that is not necessarily in the interests of the Army.
He was charged;
During a disciplinary hearing, Colonel Bassingthwaighte found the corporal guilty of this breach, stripped him of his rank and sentenced him to 14 days detention.
but it was thrown out.
After serving his time in a cell at Sydney’s Holsworthy Barracks, the corporal lodged a petition against his conviction with a senior army officer independent of 2RAR. This review found flaws with the legal advice provided to the battalion’s commanding officer, including that he should not have been able to pass judgment on a charge of disobeying his own order. The corporal’s sentence was quashed and his rank reinstated.
I would hazard a guess that the Corporal has peaked and I can’t see him making sergeant any time soon. Not because he was involved with girls taking their tops off; not that he disobeyed a lawful command; but because he took the Commanding Officer to court and won on a legality that smells of political correctness.
That’s strange and puts aside hundreds of years of military discipline. I would have a few charges from my wild youth that I should be able to have set aside based on this finding. A lot of minor administrative matters within a battalion are detailed in what was known as Routine Orders and it was a chargeable offence to disobey Routine Orders. These orders were signed by the CO.
Is this still the case – maybe a current serving soldier could comment.
Was the senior army officer independent of 2RAR within the Corporal’s chain of command and if not, does this now set a precedence where every soldier charged and disciplined by his Commanding Officer has the right to complain to any passing officer and have offences set aside.
Not good.
Seems to me that lawyers are making it harder for Officers and NCOs to apply discipline and and that can only be bad for a professional army.
A century ago
Don’t you just love the consistency of the ABC. They have never heard a rumour about Aussie diggers behaving badly that they didn’t broadcast. Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Australian attack on PNG with the aim of silencing the German radio station there in what was then German New Guinea.
THE ABC claims that Australian troops in World War I took part in a “mass execution” of German troops following the battle of Bita Paka in New Guinea.
The broadcaster’s Radio National Breakfast program has obtained a single tape recording of a witness to the alleged slaughter, which the ABC says “appears to confirm the rumours” of prisoner executions.
Well good luck with that one ABC – all the article and recording prove is your anti-defence stand.
Involved in that stoush and the early attacks on German radio stations in the SW Pacific was HMAS Sydney. Sydney supported the landing and went on to sink the German cruiser Emden further north.
In the 80’s I owned an antique militaria business and one day a guy came in with a wooden plate. He said it was made by wounded Gallipoli veterans in therapy classes in Concord hospital, NSW. It was a wooden plate with ‘soldering iron” art. Not good art, but art nonetheless. The wood came from the wooden decks of the Emden as she was salvaged by the Australian authroities
He eventually gave me the plate as he said I had better claim to it than he did. I told him that I had two great uncles in the first convoy from Albany in 1914 and they would have heard of the battle as HMAS Sydney was on convoy duties when it dealt with the Emden in November 1914. My father served on the second HMAS Sydney during WW2 and I came home from my asian stoush on the 3rd HMAS Sydney.
My story got me bit of history and I have piece of the Emden in my study at home.
The plate and the inscription.
Yesterday, a service was held on board the minehunter HMAS Yarra in the waters off Rabaul to honour the 35 men who disappeared along with Australia’s first submarine AE1.
Same expedition, same battle. The submarine vanished without trace days after the Battle of Bita Paka and no sign has been found since. Well, not quite.
According to News.com the RAN have found it. According to an admiral quoted in the article it hasn’t. Either way we must be almost able to close that part of our WW1 history.
AE1 had a sister ship, named, withoutout an iota of originality as…wait for it…AE2
My wife’s cousin CDRE Terry Roach AM RAN Rtd was heavily involved in finding the AE2, the other submarine that had been sunk in the Gallipoli campaign. I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the expedition that found the sub over a beer at a family BBQ. It’s a great story.
From the AE2 website;
HMAS AE2 was the first Allied submarine to penetrate the Dardanelles in 1915 as part of the Gallipoli Campaign, on the very morning the ANZAC soldiers landed at Anzac Cove. After five hectic days “running amok”, she finally fell to Turkish gunfire and was scuttled. Her crew was captured and spent the rest of the war as Turkish POWs. AE2 lay, unseen, until in 1998 she was discovered, intact, in 73m of water in the Sea of Marmara. The SIA aims to ensure the protection, preservation and promotion of AE2, to contribute to an informed debate on her future and ensure that AE2’s contribution to the Gallipoli campaign is duly recognised by telling the story of her brave crew.
While good men and women commemorate the loss of men at war the ABC maintains its charter of denigrating the same men.
As a friend of mine says of the ABC; Sack ‘em, burn down the buildings and salt the ground.
Shorten hits Peak Stupid
Bill Shorten has no shame – during the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle the government gutted the Defence budget in a vain attempt to balance Swan’s budget. The budget didn’t balance and Defence aquisition programmes were put back years.
Now he has the temerity to attack Abbott over the fact that a Japanese sub is one of many being considered to replace the Collins class fleet. His populist statements at Adelaide yesterday reflect his fighting for the unions, including the criminal based CFMEU, that were involved in the Collins class subs and has nothing to do with the defence of the country.
One union idiot shouted “Last time we had Jap subs, they were in bloody Sydney Harbour” referring to the midget submarine attack in 1942. I hasten to add that neither Shorten, nor his audience were even born then. It was another century and another Japan. Today’s Japan is a major defence and trade partner who, with the US and Australia, constitute the main Pacific area defence pact.
Shorten goes onto say; “This is a government with a short memory,” he said. “In the Second World War, 366 merchant ships were sunk off Australia.”
Short memory! From Wikipedia;
The 28 Japanese and German submarines that operated in Australian waters between 1942 and 1945 sank a total of 30 ships with a combined tonnage of 151,000 long tons (153,000 t); 654 people, including 200 Australian merchant seamen, were killed on board the ships attacked by submarines.
Even when he gives a speech he can’t get it right. There were 18 more ships sunk but they were as a result of surface raiders, both German and Japanese, but I presumed Shortens populist spray was directed at the Japanese only.
German….hmmn. Their submarines are also in the mix for selection. The cost of 12 German submarines would cost us $20 billion, The Japanese Soryu Class submarine would come at a similar cost while should Australia go Shorten’s way it would cost us $50 billion.
$30 billion cheaper – you would have to consider it and think what you could do with that money. Maybe it could go to paying off some of the debt Shorten’s mob have left us.
Due to the fact that the ALP killed Defence planning with their budget cuts we have a potential problem of having gap with no submarines at all. For this reason, and considering costs, something the ALP never did, the Japanese solution looks like a winner.
Quicker and cheaper potentially eliminating the no-submarine gap.
The decision is due later this year and I’m sure that a lot of the work will be done in Australia if the project goes ahead but from my point of view, the less union involvement the better.
Just a couple of points Fabio
A letter to the The Australian’s editor
….There is no military threat to Australia, and as a fiscal conservative, I think it obscene to spend $12 billion on unnecessary fighter jets when the nation is broke.
Fabio Scalia, Windsor, Vic
Just a couple of points Fabio; the country isn’t broke, we just have to recover from the ALP spendathon, and
there is no military threat to Australia because we do things like spend billions on high level defence equipment.
Nu Ship Canberra
A great video tour through Nuship Canberra which will dramatically increase Australia’s defence capabilities, and impact the Army as much as the RAN:
That is great news for Australia and the ADF but elsewhere, after 6 years of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle, the news is all bad.
Alan Dupont, in The Weekend Australian underscores the problems Abbott faces repairing the damage the ALP did to our economy.
Perhaps the best way to understand the seriousness of defence’s budgetary problem is to benchmark against Force 2030, trumpeted by the Rudd government in the 2009 white paper as “capable of meeting every contingency the Australian Defence Force may be required to meet in the coming two decades”. Capable it may have been but funded it was not.
The subsequent savage cuts inflicted on Defence by Labor in pursuit of an illusory budget surplus effectively removed $18 billion from Force 2030 in the space of four short years, equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the annual defence budget.
I recall Rudd coming up with his 12 submarines as a blatant try at sounding like he and his party new what they were doing in matters military. Everyone who had any skin in the game just looked at each other, rolled their eyes and dug in waiting for the election to get rid of the idiot.
The logistics of our current submarine fleet have two on patrol, two on build-up or wind-down and two on maintenance and we can just manage the manpower and dollars to keep that moving and Rudd wanted to double the trouble.
Capable it may have been but funded it was not – like most of their ideas – NBN, NDIS and Gonski to name a few.
The public needs to be reminded every day that the reason Abbott and Hockey are about to drop hard times on the country through the 2014 budget is because of the huge, obscene debt ramped up by the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle.
Snowdon still causing grief
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa takes a barely veiled swipe at the Australian Prime Minister on Monday after US Traitor Snowdon raised new revelations that, in early 2013, the Australian Signals Directorate had spied on trade talks between the United States and Indonesia.
He should have taken a barely veiled swipe at Gillard as the event happened during her tenure but I gues that doesn’t matter. He took the barely veiled swipe during a joint press conference with US Secretary of State and ardent commo, John Kerry, who said;
”We take this issue very seriously, which is why President Obama laid out a series of concrete and substantial reforms,” Mr Kerry said.
”The United States doesn’t collect intelligence for the competitive advantage of US companies, or US commercial sectors.”
The only concrete and substantial reform Obama needs to get involved in is to put pressure on Putin to send Snowdon back or, send in a Seal snatch team and get the bastard under lock and key to shut him up. He is doing severe damage to the West aided and abetted by The Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, ABC and SBS and other forces for the destabilization of the western system.
Its gone on long enough.
Your turn in the barrell
A FEMALE submariner has been sent home from Singapore and is under investigation after an alleged indecent assault on another female crew member while on shore leave in Darwin. The incident occurred early this month while both women were at a bar in Darwin and is alleged to have involved inappropriate behaviour including groping and sexual advances.
Wow! Another “sailor trying to have sex after deployment” story.
Above the fold and on the front page of The Australian means the editor thought Stewart Cameron’s story was important enough to beat all other incidences of assault, murder, corruption, slavery, forced prostitution and whatever else us imperfect people do on any given day.
According to the Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA) in 2005 an estimated 44,000 Australians were subject to sexual assault. Thus we can expect at least 120 people were subject to assault today but only one gets headline treatment.
I’m glad Stewart wasn’t around when I was young and learning the difference between appropriate and inappropriate as with his nose for sexual impropriety within the ADF he’d be straight onto me.
Seems a bit weird to me.
Maori Farewell
A video of the passionate haka performed by the comrades of three fallen New Zealand soldiers has gone viral, with tens of thousands of people around the world watching the clip.
The 2nd and 1st Battalion Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment performed the moving tribute for Corporal Luke Tamatea, 31, Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, 26, and Private Richard Harris, 21, at their funeral service at the Burnham Military Camp in Christchurch on Saturday.
The trio were killed instantly when a roadside bomb destroyed their Humvee in Afghanistan’s northeast Bamiyan Province on August 18.
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