The ADF actually sent 6 personnel when they were asked for an Anzac frigate. They have only one that is really ready for deployment, the rest are either without crews or are in dock.
To be honest I think there was a big flap when the request came through and it was admitted in private that the Anzac would perhaps be useless, possibly due to crew training and possibly due to the limited missile fit, and I suspect that some of the top-brass could envisage a damaged or sunk boat that would not look good.
The Collins submarine fleet have never had more than 2 at sea at any one time in their service life. They are either laid up with technical issues or a full complement cannot be press-ganged together.
The whole thing is a shambles.
Regarding the MHR90s: the first 'crash' was some form of precautionary landing due to vibration from the tail rotor into the edge of the sea on a beach. The chopper was not damaged as far as I could see and was recovered.
I don't know what happened as I haven't seen a report.
The recent MHR90 crash off PNG caused loss of life but again I haven't seen a report.
The reason given for not sending the 47 MHR90s to Ukraine was that they are not safe. I guess that the Ukrainians would view a medevac in an MH90 as slightly better odds than bouncing around in an IFA 'blenderbus' on muddy tracks whilst bleeding profusely.
The ADF has not had a good track record with helicopters:
They planned to make a patrol boat in partnership with Malaysia but the project never got in the water, partly because the ship turned out to be too small to carry the Blackhawks that were also to be used on the Anzac frigates.
So even though the offshore patrol boat project was abandoned they still went ahead and bought a heap of smaller Kaman Seasprite airframes (11?) from Davis Monthan boneyard, that were ex-Vietnam and 40 years old, and cut the number of Blackhawks that were on order for the Anzacs (Seahawks actually).
The ADF played about with the Seasprites for years in the early 2000s and I don't think one ever had air under its skids. Eventually they returned some of them to Kaman and I think gave some to NZ.
Australia was asked by its ANZUS/AUKUS partner to help with the pirating occurring at this moment in the Red Sea by sending a warship to protect commerce. The current government's response was to decline the commitment and instead send two naval personnel to Bahrain. Yes, that's right, TWO personnel instead of a ship, boy I bet the Yanks and for that matter the rest of the free world gave a sigh of relief when that was announced!
The pathetic reason for that craven decision was that "Australia's interests are in the Indo-pacific region". So there!
The actual reality is there is no warship in RAN service that can defend itself from cheap drones and there is no personnel available to crew a ship for distant long term deployment, and that not only the navy but the entire ADF is severely undermanned for pretty well much the same reasons you have posted above. Not only in its tiny navy is already one Anzac class frigate mothballed because of lack of crew (Collin's class subs have the same problem), at least another two may be also stored because no one's joining up and those that are serving are discontented with what's on offer and are looking to get out.
So Australia's gearing up to go nuclear and desperately needs all the assistance it can get from not only the USN but also the RN, and when the call goes out for help in a real crisis such as off Yemen, which by the way is an important trade route to and from Australia, the current idiot government can't even stand up.
If Trump is re-elected this year many if not most Australians know that the Aukus programme, in its current form, will be scrapped without a doubt and but that the blame or reason will not be anyone's but Australia's.
Then there is the Taipan helicopter debacle. The Australian version of the MHR-90 has been scrapped from army service, so all 45 or so are grounded. But there are no replacements, the US has only delivered three Blackhawks since and instead of finding a buyer for the Taipan's or gifting them, the current morons in Canberra are going to cut them up and bury them! YES, THAT'S RIGHT!! Ukraine is begging for Australia to donate them so they can be used for medical evac and have declared they will carry the cost to get them servicable...but no. It is better for the Australian taxpayer to have these perfectly good helicopters chopped up and buried, even dismantled for parts is out of the question. And the reason they are being scrapped? Because of a crash last year that was most probably the direct result of pilot error and not at all anything to do with the reliability of the machine.
Because all this crap is being highlighted in the media and this government is being exposed as virtually criminally incompetent, to plug the dyke they have announced to make up the shortfall in personnel in the ADF they will offer foreign recruitment opportunities, targeting mainly Micro and Polynesia but just about anywhere they can find anybody to fill the gaps in reward for citizenship. Last year this government let in 590,000 immigrants for a pop. of 26 mill, so OF COURSE, that's the solution!
Is it any real wonder at this time that Russia, Nth Korea, Iran and China see unlimited opportunities and are acting upon them? Even the once trusted and competent allies have fallen into almost total hopeless military decline.
There is no political leadership!
German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has made what I consider an unhelpful contribution towards our preparations for World War Three. He said that Russia would be ready to launch an attack upon Nato in “five to eight years”. It is this uncharacteristic lack of precision that worries me, given that in the previous two world wars the Americans failed to set their alarm clocks and arrived at the venue (usually, but not always, Belgium. If it’s Belgium next time we’re in big trouble) terribly late, just as we were kind of winning. They surely do not need another excuse to do so next time.
If Herr Pistorius had confined his observations to “five years”, it might have sharpened the minds of our American allies a little and they could have hastened their important programme to ensure that their armed forces are sufficiently diverse from a race, religion and gender perspective — something that will surely terrify Vladimir Putin, who has been gravely remiss in such matters.
Our armed forces have followed the American lead, I am delighted to say, so that when western Europe is a charred desert glowing with caesium-137, we can at least be comfortable that our military preparations had been approved by Stonewall and BLM and the United Nations special rapporteur on ensuring the Armageddon is properly diverse and decolonised. Suck that up, Vlad.
The general gist of the various chilling pronouncements from Nato and defence ministers across Europe — including Sweden’s and our own Churchill-in-waiting, Grant Shapps — is that perhaps we ought to take the prospect of fairly imminent war more seriously. We have been assuaged by peaceable affluence for too long. The problem, though, is that few of us can be arsed. A rather large minority of our fellow countrymen find nothing remotely commendable in the history and traditions of our nation. This includes, alas, pretty much the entire civil service. Fight to defend what, they might be asking themselves as the sirens wail — imperialism and inequality?
Remove them from the equation and you are left with the people who usually do the bulk of the fighting when our country is in trouble: young, working-class, white men. They, surely, will still be up for a punch-up with Ivan, no? A bit of gently irradiated aggro? It would seem not. And who, now, would blame them?
There is a recruiting crisis in the military of both the US and the UK. In particular there has been a massive drop in the number of white recruits to the US army, which finds itself 10,000 short. The number of white men signing up has dropped from 44,000 to 25,000 in under five years. The problem in the UK is even worse, across all three branches of our armed services. As The Times reported yesterday, our army has shrunk by 40 per cent since 2010 and now stands below 70,000 — people simply are not joining up. So grave is the crisis that the army has taken men away from soldiering and shoved them into recruitment offices to drum up business. The top brass are thinking of relaxing their ban on tattoos and asthma, those twin signifiers of social impoverishment.
The Royal Navy and the RAF have fared similarly and it is not a huge mystery why. All branches of the armed services, here and in America, have been at pains to display how marvellously progressive they are and have targeted advertising at those members of our communities who are not white, working-class males. Now, that may indeed have had the effect of increasing the number of black, middle-class servicewomen. But by how much? Nowhere near enough to cover the shortfall from the traditional reservoir of soldiering.
And if you are a white, working-class male, would you really consider joining the RAF after that dreadful debacle when it was found to have discriminated directly against people from your demographic? Or when all the adverts are directed towards everybody but you? Or when Shapps, alone in his own little world, suggests that the answer to the recruitment crisis lies in hiring women? Might you not think: stuff this for a game of soldiers? We’ll leave it to them, then?
It is much as Kipling had it more than 100 years ago: “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’/ But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;/ An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;/ An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!”
Or is it Lieutenant Commander Chris Easterbrook? Commander of MCM2 Crew 5?
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