ISSUE 136 : May/Jun - 1999 - Australian Defence Force Journal

6AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE JOURNAL NO. 136 MAY/JUNE 1999“Unwatched, a peacetime military willdegenerate into a bureaucracy designed byMegalomaniacs to be a vehicle to satisfy theirego’s. Tactical prowess will be allowed to besubordinate to bureaucratic manoeuvre,leadership will become an intangible used toconceal a lack of depth, and loyalty will be usedas censorship to enable the unfettered impositionof careerist initiatives”Major Pat Stogran, PPCLI, 15 Jul 97IntroductionThe personal circumstances of Major Stogran areirrelevant, as is the fact that the intended target ofhis insightfullness was the Armed Forces of is ownnation. The above passage, however, is entirelyappropriate for the current circumstances that prevailacross the Army. At junior officer level there is apalpable sense that the Army has shrugged off anysemblance of its perceived corps values and hasindeed lost its way. The result of this is the belief thatthe Army has begun an inexorable slide intoirrelevance. It was widely lampooned in the Author’sprevious unit that the Army was akin to an old car, onblocks, slowly rusting away in a paddock, a depictionof which is included as Figure 1.As stated in the Author’s Note, this articlerepresents one junior officer’s perception on theprevailing attitude of his fellows. If the readerfundamentally disagrees with the above perception,the validity of this objection being questionable atbest if the reader is not currently a junior officer, thenthis article will have no bearing. This reader shouldproceed no further, rather, they should ensconce theirself in the belief that their ongoing toil is valuable andvalued, unconcerned by the reality that they are thereason for the inclusion of “inexorable” in the aboveparagraph. If this reader gets the impression that theauthor is laughing at them, they are entirely correct.This article will expose the Army’s increasinglydilapidated appearance from the perspective of ajunior officer. Three primary indicators will be usedto attest to the Army’s waning fortunes. Firstly,Army’s share of the Defence Budget, secondly,personnel issues and finally, Army’s muddled“vision” for the future. All three issues areintrinsically linked and their cumulative effects arespeeding the Army towards oblivion.Money Is The Root Of All EvilNowhere is the decline of the Army more obviousthan in the percentage of the annual Defence Budgetthat it manages to secure for itself, particularly in thearea of Capital Equipment Procurement. Armyapologists will attempt to sight the unsympatheticDefence Policies of successive Governments forhaving the effect of syphoning funds into projects forthe Navy and Airforce in order to allow them to denythe air-sea gap. It will be the contention of this article,however, that outside of a vague notion of providingfor Australia’s defence, Australia’s electedofficialdom have neither the capability nor theinclination to actually dictate what the 10 plus billiondollars allocated to the Defence Budget are actuallyspent on. 1 If the role played by politicians inspending the Defence dollar is minimal then surelythe relative success of the Navy and Airforce is due inno small part to both the quality of their personnel andtheir ability to quantify and articulate a vision for thefuture.Figure 1“Total defence spending for the coming financialyear has been set at $10 945.5m, up $589.2m fromoutlays in the current financial year.” 2 The previousstatement is obviously in relation to FY 98/99. TheArmy Program Actual Outcome for 1997-98 was $1268.3m, 3 in comparison with Navy $721.3m 4 andAirforce $695.0m. 5 Not surprisingly this reflects thehigher total numbers in Army, Service PersonnelRunning Costs alone accounted for $1 098.4m. 6 As a