Grappler Truth Teller Feller wrote on Apr 24
th, 2017 at 7:13pm:
BigOl64 wrote on Apr 24
th, 2017 at 7:07pm:
Neferti wrote on Apr 24
th, 2017 at 6:52pm:
National Service should be re-introduced. A year or so in Army would soon sort out the chaff from the straw. Girls included.
I have never been a fan of the ADF being a dumping ground for society's dregs.
Those who volunteer are still hard bastards, but I don't see a lot of benefit in dragging the lazy and the stupid through the system for a couple of years.
After the Vietnam experience, the decision was made that an all-volunteer force was needed. Even in WW II it was the all-volunteer units that performed best. National service has its merits in teaching some basics to a large number who may then be called upon in an emergency, but is costly to run and a drain on trained and experienced personnel.
Conscription is only useful in an existential crisis such as occurred in WWII. The conscripts in WWII perform as well as, and in some cases better than their companion AIF units. 39 Battalion at Kokoda and Battle of the Bridgeheads springs to mind, while 48 Battalion was the most awarded unit in the Australian Army. To claim that Conscripts performed badly is not true.
As for what happened after Vietnam, the Army got what it wanted - a professional force and it sidelined the CMF/ARes, only for it to discover that it needed the "stretch" that the trained diggers from the ARes gave to them when times got tough and their commitments many and varied, ranging from East Timor through The Solomons and thence to Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Politicians became frightened at the division they perceived in Australian society that Conscription had brought about. They didn't understand that it wasn't Conscription, as such which caused the division but the serving of Conscripts overseas in South Vietnam. The Australian public supported Conscription in poll after poll during the 1960s, it was the overseas service which divided them. So they gave the Army want it had wanted since before WWII - a professional military force. Before then, Australia had relied upon a volunteer force, backed by a citiziens' militia. That worked adequately, although strained, by the evens of the Western Front in WWI. WWII experience was that the concept needed reorganisation and reinforcement. Korea was all volunteers, Vietnam proved that Conscripts were as good as Regulars.