I’ve been reading a lot about the Defence Strategic Review, although I doubt I’ll be writing much about it for the lentil-eating peace-mongers at SideBoob.
It speaks to my profoundly pessimistic view of the future, however. The main thing that struck me immediately was the massive repurposing of the Army, but for what exactly wasn’t explained. Not in detail at least.
As best I can tell what they intend to do with them is drop small teams with long range strike platforms like HIMARS into the Indonesian archipelago to interdict any Chinese move south.
It’s an interesting theory, and technically doable. You can load a HIMARS onto a Hercules and fly it all over the island chain. Assuming the Indonesians are cool with that, of course.
It would complicate PLA expeditionary planning enormously.
Of course, they could also just swing out into the deep Pacific.
It’s a controversial plan, especially with army types. But interestingly it mirrors the force structure and doctrinal changes in the USMC, which are also highly controversial.
The service’s first announcement in 2020 made sweeping changes that included shedding tanks from the ranks, swapping loads of conventional artillery for rockets and reducing the overall manpower from its 2020 level of 186,000 to 174,000 by 2030…
The Marine Corps’ second round of changes to how it fights shows moves in command, aviation, logistics and ground combat and shifts that might see stateside Marine reservists operating drones for active units overseas, ditching weapons companies from infantry battalions, and a host of other moves.
So long as we are protected from The Enemy™ and The Poors® don't get any money, it's all sweet.
I remember questioning a Federal MP that is local to me about ADF spending under the LNP and the best reason he could come up with (or perhaps was allowed to say) for what they were doing was basically we had a close call in WWII, so we're not going to let that happen again, at which point any conversation degenerated to Japanese Subs from all the usual suspects.
The art of warfare chages, so maybe the definitions of combatants should change also.
Do we still have the Light Horse etc?
The military in "Aliens" were the "Colonial Marines", so perhaps in a highly mobile and multi-platform force structure to suit unknown threats, that all of those who have our grateful task of going into harms way, will be or should be called Marines.
Which on reading reminded me of my pop, who was career army, saying back in the iraq war1 "can't believe they splash all this info on the news, back in my day . . . . "
Take a look at your AD/Reserve ratio and utilization. There's a lot that can be done there at a low cost.
So long as we are protected from The Enemy™ and The Poors® don't get any money, it's all sweet.
I remember questioning a Federal MP that is local to me about ADF spending under the LNP and the best reason he could come up with (or perhaps was allowed to say) for what they were doing was basically we had a close call in WWII, so we're not going to let that happen again, at which point any conversation degenerated to Japanese Subs from all the usual suspects.
The art of warfare chages, so maybe the definitions of combatants should change also.
Do we still have the Light Horse etc?
The military in "Aliens" were the "Colonial Marines", so perhaps in a highly mobile and multi-platform force structure to suit unknown threats, that all of those who have our grateful task of going into harms way, will be or should be called Marines.
A small team island hopping strategy ... to quote the article.... to what end? Sounds vague . Echos of meat grinders like Guadalcanal come to mind
How much of this is just to protect the peacenik lefties from bad PR- "We always knew that Albolazyy would be bad for Australia's National Security".
Reminds me of this on the abc news site: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-25/defence-strategic-review-australia-shifting-security-crucial/102260954
Which on reading reminded me of my pop, who was career army, saying back in the iraq war1 "can't believe they splash all this info on the news, back in my day . . . . "