Oh Gosh, Brian, I see that I missed a long post by you on this thread, and I will happily respond to it right now. I was scrolling back a couple of pages because I was certain that I posted that link about the Tiger gunship, but I could not find it. Can't explain that. Anyhoo, here it is, right here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv2go0VYdso
Incidentally, on this youtube link, you will notice that one of the "Australian" Tiger pilots is actually a Chinese. When we go to war with China, I sure hope this pilot remembers in which direction he should be pointing his gunship.
"Train them well, the men who will be fighting at your side.
But never turn your back on them when the battle turns it's tide."
Further to that, I also know that worldwide, all of these crap helicopters our stupid procurement board bought were grounded because in Chad, a French Tiger on operations against the Muslim terrorists you are an apologist for, simply fell out of the sky and killed the French crew. Subsequent to the crash, newspaper reports confirmed the worldwide grounding of Tigers because crash investigators were unable to discover why the Tiger had crashed. The Procurement board bought these crap machines probably because just like you, they just hate the yanks and will not buy American weapons, even though everybody knows US weapons actually work.
Thank you for publishing that photo of a flying Tiger helicopter. I won't bother asking you to authenticate it's flying date, because I am so far ahead of you on points that don't need to make you authenticate everything you say.
Brian Ross wrote
Who cares? If they hidden, they are out of reach of their owners as well, Bogan. What you appear to have missed is that the new laws make possession and use of such weapons illegal. Whenever the Police raid a property for drugs or stolen goods they invariably turn up illegal firearms. If they weren't illegal, those firearms would remain in the possession of the criminals. So silly, hey to pass laws that make it easier for the Police to charge possessors and confiscate weapons.
Brian, I was almost called up to serve in the Vietnam War as a....
Luckless, voteless conscript, damned to do or die,
In paddy field and brothel, and all for Marshal Ki"
And like 50,000 vote less young Australians who refused to be conscripted, I was not going to go. I learned then, that just because something is illegal, does not mean that it is immoral. And just because something is legal, it does not mean that it is moral. Today, almost all Australians will admit that the Vietnam War was a huge mistake and that 500 young Australian men died for nothing. We were right, and the government of the day was criminally wrong. The deaths do not include the thousands of brave and patriotic young Vietnamese boys who died, and also the Vietnamese civilians who died because of our involvement.
I have always been pro military, and I think I understand soldiers, and how soldiers think. I was once in the CMF, and I know that young soldiers in my troop were driving up to Queensland to purchase L1A1 SLR's which were illegal in NSW but could be purchased without a licence in disposal stores in Queensland. I* know they were doing it because they bragged about it. With our own battalion owning a single Centurion tank (probably because they wanted the troopers to know what one looked like) and nothing else except a few trucks and six Ferret armoured cars, everybody knew that if a real war ever came we would be flat out finding enough rifles to hand around. The 107 other un modernised Centurions the Army owned (we still had valves in the radio's fer Christ's sake) would all have gone to the regs.
The reason why violence and massacres are occurring today has nothing to do with firearm availability. If it had, then massacres would have been common events during that time in Australia's history when our firearm laws were almost non existent.
Brian Ross wrote
Oh, dearie, dearie, me. How many firearms do you think the ADF has, Bogan?
The last I heard anything about that was twenty years ago, and the figure was 70,000 Steyr rifles. And the government was going to close down the factory in Lithgow which produced them. I don't know if the factory was closed, but I did hear that the government intended to produce another 20,000, probably so that they could sell them to our potential enemies. They could have made a motza selling the rifles at our international air ports to the (according to the "moderate" Australian Islamic Council) "thousands" of "Australian" Muslims who wanted to go fight for ISIS and get bombed by the RAAF.
They probably dropped all of our old SLR's in the ocean off the North Coast of NSW, like they did with the Owen Guns. With a bit of luck, the fishing boats dredged them up in their nets like they did with the Owen guns, and they sold them to the deplorables. You know the deplorables? , The "brutes" the public think are heroes "when the guns begin to shoot." Just as well Evelyn Owen did not invent and manufacture the Owen Gun after the gun buyback. Or John Howard would have had him banged up in Long Bay instead of him being regarded today as a great Australian.
Brian Ross wrote
We have far more than we had in 1941, I can assure you of that.
If you are correct, then for the first time in debating you for 10 years, I hope that you are right.
Brian Ross wrote
We have considerably more military equipment than we owned in 1965 when we went off to Vietnam.
The problem being, that our armed forces were already woefully underequipped at the time of Vietnam, and they are arguably only a bit better today. Our tank force went from 200 Centurions, to 108 Leopards, to 40 M1A1's. How you see any "improvement" is beyond me. All of our artillery is wheeled. We do not have a SAM defence at all, mobile or other wise, much less something as vital as ABM defences, which are especially needed now that North Korea has directly threatened our country with an ICBM strike.
Brian, ONE Russian Armoured division consists of 325 tanks, and a whole range of armoured fighting vehicles which don't even exist in the Australian Army. These include SP artillery, SP AA guns, SP AA guided missiles, SP radar equipment, SP heavy rocket artillery, and IFV's, all of them tracked.
In 1945, Australia had the 4th biggest air force in the world. Our Air force then went from 150 Mirages, to 75 grossly overpriced and clapped out Hornets, and the last I heard, we will buy 40-60 even more grossly over priced F-35's. I think we have given up on the idea of buying bombers now that the F-111's are in the bin. Great improvement.
In WW2, with just 7 million people, our navy consisted of 2 heavy cruisers, 2 or 3 modern light cruisers, one WW1 light cruiser, six WW2 destroyers, plus smaller "sloops" and "corvettes". Today we have no cruisers at all. No destroyers. And (if I remember correctly) seven to ten frigates. Another great improvement. Oh, and we do have 5 clapped out obsolete diesel eclectic submersible pork barrel "submarines" (we have to keep the SA Labor trade unionists happy) instead of nukes, which we can't find crews for anyway. Probably because our seamen don't want to fight modern nuclear submarines with obsolete DE submersibles.
Brian Ross wrote
You would not believe how big the War Stock holdings are. The Australian Army has more than three to four times it's present requirements in virtually every piece of equipment (except MBTs).
You are right, I would not believe it. Last I heard, the Australian Army did not even have a long range anti tank weapon comparable to the US TOW system. We had a dozen medium range MILAN's, which must be good weapons because the Sovs copied them. That's probably enough to equip one lousy infantry brigade. And we also had a dozen of those Swedish short range, laser guided, man portable, short range AA missiles, hardly enough to defend 3.5 million square miles of Australian territory. The only good thing Australia has defence ways, is that at least the deplorable population has some rifles stashed, or we will be repelling any future enemy invaders with frying pans. Or, like Britain in WW2, pleading to US sportsmen to donate their rifles so we can defend ourselves. Although, what with our penchant for importing our future enemies into our country as "immigrants", I don't know what good any of that is going to do, anyway.
Brian Ross wrote
Oh, dearie, dearie me, the old Brisbane Line myth. Not again. There never was a strategy based on the idea of a line of defence going from approximately Brisbane to Adelaide. This was proved post-war in the Royal Commission which was created to investigate Eddie Ward's claims on the matter.
We have argued this one out previously. The Brisbane Line did exist and the one thing that even a Royal commission can't explain is the massive RAAF bomber base at Tucumwal, who's only possible reason for existence in that fly blown place was to be a key part of the Brisbane Line, and to defend the south east of Australia. US Army Air Force General Kenney toured the base in 1942 and said "Great base you have here, move it 2000 miles closer to the enemy."
Brian Ross wrote
Australia lack rifles in 1941-42. By 1944 all inadequacies had been made up. The weapons displayed in the Singleton Infantry Museum date from approximately 1941-42 not 1944.
Oh, did they? When Australians at the time believed, with good reason, that were facing immediate invasion from Japan, and we had nothing to stop it? Thank you, thank you, Brian Ross for that. Who's side are you on?
Brian Ross wrote
Indeed, we had more than sufficient firearms by 1943 that we were equipping the New Zealand Army and the Pacific Islands Regiment - a foreign force made up of Pacific Islanders and sending SMGs to the UK forces in Burma.
News to me. My book on the Owen gun recounts how the defence procurement people were absolutely determined to trash this gun to the extent of thinking up impossible design requirements, and then deliberately fudging the results when the gun was tested twice and came through with flying colours. The book states that the gun was so good that even the yanks wanted to buy it for the Pacific War. I have never heard of anybody in WW2 using this gun except the Australian army (and the Japanese army who used captured Owens). However, the gun was used by the British Army in Malaya during the Malayan emergency, when the Chinese minority tried to take over Malaya on behalf of Red China. And, I am sure the Chinese minority will do the same thing sometime in the future in Australia, too. Isn't multiculturalism great?
Brian Ross wrote
The Japanese Army decided not to invade Australia because they were over-committed in China and the Imperial Japanese Navy who was in favour of invading Australia could not assure the IJA of the necessary supplies and protection while they were attempting to occupy a continent about 1.5x the size of mainland China. The IJA did not have the forces available. There was no reference to Australians being a "warrior race" or any other such bullshit.
The only part of what you wrote that was valid, was that the Jap Army did not want to invade us because they were already over extended. But the Jap Navy did. However, at the time, Australian author and bushman Ion Idriess was working for the Australian Army training Australian soldiers to fight a Japanese invasion force Boer style, which lends credence to my claim.
Brian Ross wrote
I think you're relying far too much on your old firearms magazine articles. I would recommend to you a copy of A.T.Ross. Armed & ready : the industrial development & defence of Australia, 1900-1945, which goes into considerable detail about Australian defence industries.
You are stereotyping gun magazines as unreliable sources of information, Brian. Need I remind you that stereotyping is a PC Cardinal sin? You are in danger of getting expelled from the Social Justice Warrior caste for Conduct Unbecoming An Ideological Zealot.
I got a better idea. Why don't you read Hal Colbatch's "Australia's Secret War" which recounts your left wing union comrades best efforts to sabotage Australia's war effort during WW2, when we were fighting for our national existence, against an enemy who would have mass murdered every male and mass raped every female they could get their hands on? Including socialist wharf labourers, coal miners, and their wives and daughters. Your comrades sabotaged our war effort then, and you are trying to do it right now with disinformation. Are you a Chinese national, Brian? Or do you face Mecca when you pray?
Brian Ross wrote
Chinooks were sold off because of the internecine tussle between the RAAF and Army over who should control them. The RAAF decided they didn't want them and the Army decided they didn't want them. The Government stepped in and told the two services to stop acting like children and the RAAF was forced to accept them. The RAAF's nose had been out of joint because of the wholesale move of the medium helicopter forces from their possession to the Army's in keeping with the revised management of helicopter assets brought about by the 1986 Defence White Paper - something the Army had wanted since the Vietnam War.
The fact remains that these vital aircraft were almost scrapped or sold off before somebody with authority in Defence grew a brain and realised that we needed them. Idiots.
Brian Ross wrote
I have already address your claims WRT the FFGs in another thread. They are old, worn out ships. The RAN has replaced them. QED.
The history of WW2 revealed just how important "obsolete" class A weapons of war are. Britain would have been knocked right out of WW2 if it had not been for FDR (shock, horror) breaking US law and transferring 50 "obsolete" WW1 four stacker Kidd class destroyers to the Royal Navy to act as frigates during the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest and bloodiest naval battle in history. These magnificent "obsolete" ships performed sterling service with the Royal Navy, the US Navy, and (ironically) the Japanese Navy. Had Britain been knocked out of the war by the Axis U boat blockade, Hitler could have won.
These "obsolete" ship were perfect for two missions. They freed up modern fleet assets from doing vital missions such as convoy escort. And they were also vital for very dangerous missions far forward in enemy territory, such as reconnaissance screens, coast watcher resupply, and the rescue of downed aircrew, where it was felt that risking modern fleet units for these tasks was not justifiable.
Australia's own "scrap iron flotilla" of WW1 destroyers did similar sterling work in the Mediterranean, while our two heavy cruisers built just after WW1 (Canberra and Australia) were arguably verging on obsolescence as well. Canberra was sunk at Guadacanal, while your precious socialist New Zealand wharf labour unionist comrades were refusing to load vital transports for Guadalcanal while it was raining. "HMAS Australia" soldiered on to the end of the war, where it attracted kamikazes like fly paper attracts flies. This was probably on account of it's unique three funnels which made the Japs think she was something special. After soaking up three kamikaze hits in one day, one US admiral who witnessed "Australia" getting hit, time after time and still fighting, flashed to "Australia", "Your fine ship can certainly take it. Proud to be associated with you."
Other examples. An "obsolete" SWORDFISH bi-plane put a torpedo into the Bismarck which blew off it's rudder and allowed the Royal navy to finish it off. The SWORDFISH strike on Taranto which put a couple of Italian battleships out of action which changed the naval balance in the Med. Venerable B-52's, 70 years flying and still soldiering on. "Faith, Hope, and Charity" the three "obsolete" Gladiator bi-plane fighters on Malta who held the line against the Italian air force until the Spitfires could get to Malta.
So please tell me how turning our FFG frigates into fishing reefs is a smart thing to do, Brian? Especially since the next war is going to be a "come as you are" war where losses on both sides will be immense because of the accuracy and lethality of precision weapons, and where it will probably be over before any more weapons of war can be constructed.
