.

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Bobby. wrote on Oct 18^th, 2013 at 7:31am:



Good thing you don't resort to ad hominum attacks lest you look like a hypocrite 


As a civilian you are used to other people cleaning up after you, in the military we clean up after ourselves.





To answer OC, yeah 10 years, RAAF aircraft technician, F111s and Helicopter Gunships

BO64,


Thanks,  Amberley I presume.

I have an (ex) son in law that spent a lot of time at Oakey.  Started off as  Fitter and Turner and ended up as a Captain.

I had a glorious career in the army.

Went into Pucka as a private in the 20th National Service Battalion in August 1958,  came out a private in late October,  same year. I narrowly escaped demotion!

Both the Army and I were VERY pleased that day!  They DID teach me how to drive a truck!


OC

The question is counter-intuitive, but not so unreasonable as at first it would seem.

Except for when the Japanese threatened Australia with invasion, all our subsequent involvements in wars around the world have been totally unnecessary, and simply at the behest of the USA.

Needless to say, our current involvement in Afghanistan is entirely self-defeating, and absurd as a strategy for defending the people of Australia.

Young men ~ many with young families ~ have been dying over there, with meanwhile the Australian government has been busily engaged in accepting healthy young Afghan men of military age as refugees and migrants.

It's time to pull the plug on this whole nonsense of young Australians being flown way over to the northern hemisphere to play in real war games from which a guaranteed percentage will return in coffins.

Let the Yanks fight their own paranoid overseas wars in future without our help.

Enough is enough.

In reality Australia needs only a very basic, skeletal, and mostly symbolic military defence force, with 90% of our current military hardware mothballed against a future time when these may be needed.

***

The irony is breathtaking.

The only threat within cooee of Australia, now and in the foreseeable future, is that from Islamic terrorism born-and-bred within our own borders ~ and yet our government has Australian soldiers chasing shadows in some godforsaken backwater Middle Eastern country while at the same time sponsoring the influx of tens of thousands of Muslim each year to come increase the likelihood of mass-slaughter in our own homeland.

We are governed by idiots.

Herbert,

Slightly OT,  but my ex son in law has just come back from Afghanistan, his son and daughter have both done 2 tours of the place,  and were mad keen to go.

Grandson has a VERY low opinion of the Aghans,  and reckons they are not worth fighting for.

Grand-Daughter has just finished a year as ADC to General Hurley.



OC

BigOl64 wrote on Oct 18^th, 2013 at 10:05am:



Don't tell me you were one of the poor sods who had to clean out the F111 fuel tanks?

They were all poisoned.