Defence battling the enemy within

Unionist says:

08:11am | 18/04/11

Simple things amuse simple people. And looking at your response… very simple indeed. With your type sitting on the fence Gillard will wash the floor with you. That will be the real laugh. There this gay bloke running around surry Hills, Sydney calling himself ‘against the man’ your not the same bloke are you? I bet you are.

CD says:

11:05am | 18/04/11

What’s your point? Why does it matter that in your mind a gay man is running around SH blah blah blah.

Did you hope to gain big bully union men onside with your bigoted comment? Pathetic and typical of your sort.

Flexo says:

11:37am | 18/04/11

Unionist, your response like the ALP government lacks a point, lacks substance and lacks virture.

Unionist says:

12:43pm | 18/04/11

CD says:11:05am; you have an interesting understanding of the word bigot. Please explain how my comment was in anyway bigoted… or was it the fact that a straight bloke said the word ‘gay’ in a sentence. Who is the bigot now??? not me : )

John says:

09:30am | 18/04/11

Yep and you forget to state that this happened in the 80’s and did. I repeat did lead to a review of the ADF. Agains before you comment on the culture of defence or call for change why dont you join and see it first hand.

Do you see any inquiries launched by the govt into the culutre of Universities were, drunkeness, rape, use of date rape drug and violence has increased. I am currently studying at university and do you know how many pub crawls are taking place in one semester. There are seven at the uni I am studying at.

I live in the city and every night as I come home from the gym I drive pass some of these clubs and all I can see is ppl stumbling out of clubs and making idiots of themselves. In some cases they are walking infront of cars without even caring.

Please remeber this idiots in regards to the Skype scandal are not ADF members yet and have no idea about the culture, they are university students and have only been at ADFA for 10 weeks.

Funny how no one seems to have an issue that in 10 weeks this girl has been found to be drunk and consuming alchole and also going AWOL as well and is happy for her to be a future leader.

Note I did my recruits training and was told no alchole for our first 5 weeks and then only on Fri and Sat we could have a drink. We were also told about what would occur if we were caught drinking during period we werent allowed, frat and also if we went AWOL and this was with in our first week.

I have no sympothy for the 6 idiot male cadets and do hope when they are charged with the offence and if found guilty are swiftly kicked out of the defence force.

St. Michael says:

05:28pm | 18/04/11

“So it begs the question, if we refused to the lower the standards when we really needed blokes in uniform…..why the hell would we want to lower standards for Infantry soldiers today?”

Because under national service/conscription the government could afford to pick and choose from a wide pool of “talent” for want of a better word, and didn’t have to pick and choose solely from volunteers.  That’s what happens when a community chooses to comprise its armed forces from somebody else or somebody else’s child.

In passing, as I’ve said before, I agree with one set of suitability standards for all—men and women.  Not to mention maintaining that standard across the serviceman or woman’s career if we’re serious about it.  Don’t pass the standard, don’t go to the front line (or possibly don’t go into the military at all if the entire military can potentially go into combat at any given moment.)

My only point is that this task would be a hell of a lot easier if one didn’t have to entice people into the armed forces with what you’d mistake from TV ads as grown adults’ Boy Scouts or Girl Guides camp.

As for the recruitment rates or whether we’ve got enough people volunteering for the armed forces as a whole—wouldn’t know.  I’ve heard there’s a waiting list, and I’ve not heard of a drain on the mid or lower ranks of quitting servicemen, so you’d assume there’s “enough” people in there right now.  But to get the people you want in the army as opposed to having to work with who bothers to turn up, it takes a no-exceptions national lottery for national service and reserve powers to draft an individual whose skills are not held by the service and who is necessary to the nation’s defence.

Adam says:

07:49pm | 18/04/11

@ TheRealDave - You make some valid points, particularly the one about women getting raped. Anyone with any inkling of military knowledge will tell you this is not something that happens exclusively to women. It is actually quite common for male soldiers captured in middle eastern countries to get raped because their cultural values towards male-male sex are quite different to that of Westerners. Furthermore, even cultures not so open with male-male sex use it as a powerful torture or interrogation technique to break a man’s will. The politicians need to leave these kinds of smokescreens on the sidelines and address the real issues, such as females sub-optimal fitness standards for the jobs they are expected to perform.

Adam says:

08:15pm | 18/04/11

@ St. Michael - I fear you may have been correct when you last said the punch didn’t have the bandwidth to sustain to sustain an entire firefight relating to conscription. They closed off comments to that article before I was able to respond

Anyway, here is a cut and paste of my response:

@ St. Michael - I tend to agree with you when you say patriotism or sense of duty *may* be only one of the reasons a volunteer joins the ADF may be, however, I believe the same argument could be applied to conscripts. One of the reasons conscripts *may* report for duty is civic duty or patriotism. Others include fear of imprisonment, social pressure, etc.

Furthermore, I believe just such conscripts may still wind up on the front line where their lack of civic duty becomes a risk to other ADF personnel’s lives (i.e. when their fear of death outweighs their fear of imprisonment, etc). That’s not to say volunteers lack of civic duty might also get people killed (i.e. when their fear of death outweighs their love of money or career, etc).

I suppose whilst I generally agree a conscript Army could bring many benefits, I think it would erroneous to state “conscripts by definition are there out of a sense of duty overriding other factors”. I say this because I believe that without a fear of consequences (i.e. imprisonment) not many conscripts would report for duty.

That being said, I strongly agree with the idea of making everyone share the burden of protecting the freedoms they so readily take for granted. And those moral parasites (conscientious objectors, pacifists, etc) that refuse to participate should be imprisoned for whatever the term of conscription service is. As the wise wall once said “They deserve freedom only those who are prepared to defend it.”

P.S. Here is a great little article about such moral parasites. I’ve used its arguments to defeat one or two pacifists in my time.

http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/article299.html  (Don’t mind the name, it is a safe link)