TIME TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

TIME TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX
By Sasha Uzunov
copyright 2008

The Australian Army’s new Chief, Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie, has recently called for a dramatic change in the way our army fights in a modern and complicated world. This is long overdue, but we will have to wait and see if that ever materialises or just gets buried away in some report.

General Gillespie has acknowledged the need to peel away the layers of headquarters and bureaucracy that hinder the chain of command’s ability to direct soldiers in battle. This makes excellent sense.

For the record, General Gillespie is held in high esteem by many.

The Chief of the army has also acknowledged that the “enemy” the Taliban has cleverly adapted the use of modern technology such as the internet to wage war. However, his claim that “our operations will often be less about killing the enemy than about making them irrelevant to the population,” is pie in the sky stuff unless we make some dramatic changes in our Army.

I do not believe that the Generals or politicians would be prepared to do that.

Let me explain, General Gillespie has acknowledged that soldiers will have more to do on the battlefield overseas.

That is they will have to undertake humanitarian assistance, nation building, and so on. We will need to have flexible soldiers. But where will these flexible soldiers come from? Army training can only do so much.

You have a 19 year old who enlists in the Army and his life experience is limited and yet he maybe required going to Afghanistan and assisting in that country’s restructuring. Or a 20 year old who is commissioned as an officer lead men into battle.

The current professional army does not allow for flexibility. I am not talking about changing the traditional chain of command structure or hierarchy. No army can function as a democracy, unfortunately. It is the nature of the beast.

What I am saying is a fully professional army consists of enlisted men and officers who, if they play the game, get promoted and move up the career ladder. Therefore, you do not encourage flexibility or initiative or the ability to think outside the box.

One way to overcome this is to have officers first serve two years as enlisted men before they can be lead men, the way they do in the Israeli Army. But our traditional military system inherited from the British is unlikely to change. There would be too much resistance because officers have a privileged role in our army.

Moreover, we need to encourage people from a wide variety of professional backgrounds to join the army. At present the system, known as Direct Entry Officer or Specialist Service Officer takes lawyers, dentists, doctors, engineers, journalists directly out of civilian life and puts them in fields related to their professions. This is a great idea.

However, we need flexible soldiers who will have to do the fighting. We need warrior-scholars, as opposed to a lawyer in uniform. We need to get people into infantry corps, the frontline troops.

How do we do that? One way, and this is highly controversial, is to re-introduce conscription. You might say why do you want people who do not want to be in uniform? They are precisely the people we need. It sounds crazy but a person who does not want to be in the Army is not interested in playing the career/promotion game and is more likely to speak his mind, within the boundaries of course. These are the people we need to fight these complicated new wars.

Let me give you an example of someone thinking outside the box. Colonel David H. Hackworth, US Army’s most decorated soldier from Vietnam, once proposed to the Pentagon that it hire a caving specialist (speleologist) who claimed he could locate all of the Viet Cong underground tunnels. But the Pentagon Generals with their narrow minded view knocked back the idea. It is one of the great what ifs of that controversial war.

Whilst the Taliban modify, adapt, change, organise, we just talk and pass ideas around.

(end)

links:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24248144-31477,00.html

http://www.theage.com.au/national/new-army-chief-flags-shakeup-to-fight-modern-war-20080827-4424.html

SANITY PREVAILS

After some confusion over who paid and who did not pay, we are happy to report that the mess has been cleared up over the medals for Long Tan veterans, as reported earlier.

cheers
Sasha Uzunov

Hoons attack Melbourne Naval monument

MATTHEW FLINDERS STATUE VANDALISED UNDER POLICE NOSES

Photo taken: Saturday 30 August 2008 at 11.30am, Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

A prominent Melbourne city monument, the Matthew Flinders statue, has been vandalised late last week right under the noses of Victoria Police.

The statue is situated outside St Paul's Cathedral on Swanston Street and around just around the corner is a Victoria Police station in Flinders Lane.

Matthew Flinders was a famous British naval explorer (1774-1814) who became the first European to circumnavigate Australia in 1803.

The vandals left a possible calling card or clue by daubing the figure "3047" a possible reference to a suburb in Melbourne, which is Broadmeadows !

Photo is copyright Sasha Uzunov 2008.

AUSSIE DEFENCE BECOMES OLD CANADIAN JOKE

AUSSIE DEFENCE BECOMES OLD CANADIAN JOKE
By Sasha Uzunov copyright 2008

There used to be a long running joke within the Australian Army about Canada's touchy feely military that had gone soft because of years of peacekeeping.

Canada's National Defence Department (DND) became the butt of jokes when it employed an expensive California guru to run meditation sessions and bongo drum classes for senior bureaucrats during the 1991 Gulf War whilst Canadian soldiers were complaining about a lack of proper equipment.

Ex-Canadian soldier turned award winning journalist Scott Taylor initially drew a lot of heat from the media establishment when he published his ground breaking book, Tarnished Brass--Crime and Corruption in the Canadian Military, which exposed the guru incident as well as other scandals.

Recently in Afghanistan, we have heard of discontent from our infantry soldiers not being allowed to fight on the front lines whilst our Canadian cousins had finally got their act together. Even when Australians are permitted to fight in Afghanistan, there is no guarantee if they get wounded or seriously injured that they will be evacuated in time.

Questions were also raised over Australia's Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon bringing a mate on a joyride into a war zone at taxpayer expense last year. A fortnight ago the Australian government after 42 years finally recognised our heroes from the epic Vietnam War Battle of Long Tan (August 18, 1966). There were wild rumours that the government was also refusing to pick up the tab for a South Vietnamese bravery citation, which costs $12 a piece.

You could make all sorts of jokes about penny-pinching and bureaucratic red tape. A lot of these so called experts in Canberra spend more on morning tea or cappuccino.

In 1998 the then Chief of Australia's Army Lieutenant General Frank Hickling was so concerned that our army was following the Canadian path that he issued his famous back to basics directive ordering all soldiers sharpen up their war fighting skills. A year later his move had potentially saved the lives of many young Australian soldiers engaged in a conflict with pro-Indonesian militia in East Timor. General Hickling had to fight off opposition from some of Canberra's desk warriors and self-appointed experts who "knew better."

Let us not forget some of the hair-brained schemes to save money from the Defence budget. Highly paid academic and a former Secretary of Defence, Professor Paul Dibb, proposed in 2006 to "civilianise" some trades within the Army. He complained that there were too many Army cooks. But what he failed to understand is first and foremost cooks are trained soldiers who can be used to patrol bases, and secondly how many civilian cooks are prepared to work in a warzone. Maybe if we hired many Gordon Ramsey styled chefs, they could hurl abuse at the Taliban!

Maybe we need to employ some unorthodox methods to beat the Taliban. Here is a suggestion to the Defence Minister why don’t you commission Professor Dibb to go to England and recruit these foul-mouthed cooks who would strike terror into the terrorists.

Let us call it Dibb’s Deli. It would also be televised. Great reality television.

We cannot do any worse; consider the Canadians hired a guru and bongo drummer!

(end)

links:

http://www.espritdecorps.ca/tarnishedbrass.htm
Tarnished Brass - Crime and Corruption in the Canadian Military

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24271772-953,00.html
Govt to pay Long Tan commander's bill for gallantry awards

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:R23ZcbpIv6YJ:blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/restore_adventure_to_army/desc+%22paul+dibb%22+army+cooks&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=23&gl=au
Professor Paul Dibb's Army cooks!

New options to blunt Taliban

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23995986-5000117,00.html

The Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper (Australia)

New options to blunt Taliban
Sasha Uzunov

July 10, 2008 12:00am

THE death of Sean McCarthy in Afghanistan may send the message to allied forces that the time has come to meet insurgent attacks with an unorthodox approach.

The SAS signaller is the sixth Digger killed in action in Afghanistan and unfortunately it seems we can expect more casualties as our Special Forces soldiers bear the brunt of the fighting.

Canada has had 87 deaths, Britain 110 and Germany 25.

The SASR and 4RAR (Commando) are our two Specials Forces units and are a precision tool to be used sparingly, not as a blunt instrument.

Australian infantry soldiers have recently expressed their dissatisfaction at being kept away from the sharp end in Afghanistan.

And the question must be asked: how long can the new Rudd Government use the SAS Regiment and 4RAR (Commando) in an infantry role before they become worn out? When will the Government allow our infantry to do the job they have trained for?

In 1999 the Howard government used the army's elite Special Forces unit, the SAS, to do most of the fighting in East Timor, which should have been performed by the infantry.

The political logic was that the public and media would accept SAS casualties rather than a young infantryman, fresh out of home or from a small country town.

That political priority seems to remain. But political logic does not necessarily make good military sense, and vice-versa.

In East Timor, the pro-Indonesian militia tried to inflict as many casualties as possible on our infantry units, including battalions made up of many reserve soldiers, in the hope that Australia would withdraw.

The moral of the story is, no matter how hard the Australian Government tries to insulate our infantry from combat by using the SAS, the unexpected happens.

But why put more Australian soldiers' lives on the line in Afghanistan when there are alternatives?

I recently interviewed elusive Afghan General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the former warlord who helped the US remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001. Dostum claims he can defeat the Taliban, but his offer has been ignored by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

This former leader of the Northern Alliance claims he has a 5000-man militia just itching to go down south and take on the Taliban.

If a hardened force of 5000 militia were to be introduced to Oruzgan province, it could make an important impact on a determined enemy.

In insurgency or guerilla warfare, there are no set-piece battles where armies face off.
It is about hit and run, hearts and minds, use of roadside bombs and booby traps. To defeat an insurgency you have try the unorthodox.

Famed US army commander Colonel David "Hack" Hackworth made two interesting observations about the Vietnam War, also an insurgency.

He said that to defeat the guerilla, you have to think and act like the guerilla. And he said: "There are two groups who know how to fight the Vietnam War: the Viet Cong and the Australians."
It seems our politicians may have forgotten the lessons learned by our brave soldiers in Vietnam.
Sasha Uzunov is a former Digger and a freelance journalist who's just returned from Afghanistan