NICE ONE WAYNE

We , like so many others where gobsmacked we we learned that our oldest and most revered soldiers were not treated with the respect that they have hard earned.

We have a lot of respect for Wayne Mapp - he is a deep thinker and a gentleman.   So we are delighted to see that he is going to ensure that things are made right for our oldest warriors 

A NATIONS SHAME

We have never treated our soldiers as well as our Australian neighbours. Our ancestors fought side by side in many battles over the decades but somehow we are reluctant to pay homage to the men of another time who fought for freedom.

So yet again we see our nation fall short of what we would expect to be given to our living heroes.

Our oldest soldiers whose memories still burn bright with the terrible tragedy and heartache of war have been treated as second class citizens on a trip to Europe to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the battle of Crete.

We do not feel any animosity towards Wayne Mapp who traveled on the trip as a Minister should . But there is no excuse for not according the old soldiers the same respect and status as Australian soldiers.

We would have been glad to see some of our hard taxpayer earned dollars going to the soldiers to make the trip a good memory.

There are so few left who fought in those great battles, so the cost would have been piffling.

They are our nations heroes - they were great men of their time and even today the least we owe them is our gratitude for the sacrifice they made for us.

May this insult never happen again. While they remain proud - we feel the shame of our country that has not shown these great but humble men the respect they deserve.

HEATHER HAS NOTHING TO OFFER

Its a sad thing to see - an inflated ego... but everytime we see Heather Roy all we see is ego.. She tried to stage a coup - she lost. She is of no use to anyone - ( well maybe Simon Ewing Jarvie does...)

She seems to think that because Defence Minister Wayne Mapp wrote her a lovely letter that she must be really good at her job. Wayne Mapp maybe a bit on the stodgy side but he is an utter, utter gentleman.. A truly lovely cuddly bear of a bloke. And of course he wrote her a lovely note -because he probably thought the silly bint wasn't coming back! It would have been in style of a reference letter for future employment post parliament.

But no - she thinks its because she was really good. Reality and her are truly divorced.

Time to make way for someone else - Disloyalty can never be forgotten nor forgiven.

IS THIS WHY ACT LOST DEFENCE?

Audrey has an interesting take on what has happened that led to Heather Roy being given her marching orders. We think that there is still more to this story.

Why would ACT give up the defence portfolio? They have always had strong support from a powerful group of old Defence hawks. Losing the defence portfolio would not please them.

LAV's DESTINED FOR TRADE ME?

We were delighted when the intellectual and gentlemanly Minister of Defence Wayne Mapp launched a defence review. It was way over due. Now one thing we have heard around the corridors of power is the concern abou the under -utilisation of the LAV's - the Light Armoured Vehicles. There are 105 of the buggers bought for $677 million, and its been suggested that the ignition keys on a fair few of them have neve been turned.

So why was that we here at Roarprawn wondered?

BB asked a mate and an ex soldier - the Chilli Prawn, to shed some light on the issue.

We did not need as many as we purchased. The vision for the Army that gave us that number was contentious and predicated on the fact that we needed to become a mobile Army (which we were not) if our traditional friends would ever want to let us play with them again. The problem is that simply buying enough complicated trucks ( that essentially what they are) does not make that vision a reality, it requires a monumental shift in doctrine, training, structure etc .

Meanwhile, post 9/11 the game changed and all our friends went from being involved in big, mobile Army type operations (think the first Gulf war, where everybody swept across the vast open desert in tanks and LAVs) to being involved in places like Afghan on operations of a very different type and scale where big mobile Armies typically don’t add a lot of value because you are not fighting against a big enemy in fixed positions that can be overwhelmed by mass, you need a big Army but the hardware that goes with it does not necessarily add a lot of value.

There is a paradigm in military planning that says military planners are always fighting the last war – it means that they look at what we should have done better in the last war, get themselves ready to that standard then get caught short by the completely different needs of the next war – such is the case of panning to be able to be a big mobile Army and then serving operationally Timor, Solomons, Sinai, Afghanistan etc.

The stupidity of the premise that we could become a mobile Army was that the cash needed to realise the Army vision would have gutted the air force and navy, no surprise that in the last defence review (and Mapp is right again – we do need another one) a lot of senior retired Army officers said that the Skyhawks should be scrapped (That’s a little known fact…) because we would never use them operationally and the cost to maintain and operate a fighter squadron meant that all other purchasing needs of the Army, Navy and Air Force were being impeded because we were kidding ourselves as a nation that we needed fast jets.

The Skyhawks were a political weapon in that we never used them other than to impress our allies by trotting them out on exercises….so when Helen binned them, she had to prove our commitment to international defence with something other than fast jets on exercises
Hence the entry, stage left, of soldiers deployed on real operations to prove our commitment to the UN (Middle East, Sudan), MFO (Sinai), Australia (Solomons and Timor), USA (Afghan), NATO (Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghan) etc etc.

So the long and short of it is that the LAVS are kit that were designed for the wars of the past not the peackeeping we tend to be involved in now and probably in the future. So expect some cheap LAVs to be offered up for sale post the Defence Review. Hopefully they will prove to be a little easier to sell than the Skyhawks.

MAPP'S DEFENCE MINISTRY NOT SHIP SHAPE

Defence is about to take posession of its new ships
However we don't think it will be plain sailing. Minister Mapp needs to keep digging as to why this has happened . Heads should roll.