stralian

What about a support role, like driving a truck with food for troops?

I don't know where I stand on the issue...just throwing this out there for some thought provoking :P

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Josh_GTiR

I would be fighting for Australia for sure if our freedom and lives depended on it.

I'd be like Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder, but with real bullets.

Zarkov

While I agree with what you are saying Kyle that is not a very fair comparison.

Firebombing and atom bombs were what they had at the time to effectively deal with it.These days we can fire a shell the size of a car from miles away and hit an area the size of a tennis court and we have all the high tech gear to find and pinpoint that tennis court sized place.

Can you honestly say we wouldn`t have done that in Iraq if we still had the same weapons and technology?

-LJ-

Yes I could do that.

Fadi

We did do something unthinkable in Iraq and we're still doing the unthinkable today. Try depleted uranium for starters...


Fadi.

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kindred

I wanted to know from people who had been in the military if it was ok or if it was bad. Indonesia is off topic and so are peoples views on killing in the military.

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Kyle Aaron

It's not the accuracy of the weapons that's critical there, but the intelligence - knowing which targets are the important ones. We have satellites and all sorts of communications interceptions so that if we want to take out a particular General and his staff, sometimes we can.

The "sometimes" is key. Mistakes are still made - for example, the "chemical weapons factory" in Sudan that turned out to be a milk powder factory, and the "Serb intelligence headquarters" that turned out to be the Chinese Embassy.

In WWII, they dealt with the problem of not being sure where the targets were by carpet-bombing. And they did this in the US-Vietnam war, too. Cambodia alone had a greater tonnage of high explosives dropped on it from the air by the West than did all Europe in WWII. It didn't kill anywhere near as many people because the explosives were dropped in more sparsely-populated places instead of in cities, as with Tokyo and Dresden.

Another difference is that in WWII, the idea was to destroy civilian morale by killing lots of them. The idea was that with enough hundreds of thousands dead the civilians would force their government to peace. Of course, as anyone could tell you before it happened - anyone but a stupid military officer - it doesn't work, in fact it improves civilian morale, in terms of their determination to fight on.

So nowadays the West largely recognises that atrocities, as well as being morally inexcusable, are ineffective, in fact counterproductive as a tactic of war. There are certainly exceptions, such as the former US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. But it's significant that he had been SecDef before - in the final stages of the war with Vietnam. So he had a different mindset.

Being nice to civilians and PWs helps you win the war; murdering and mistreating them helps you lose the war. Again, not all have fully recognised this, but largely that's the practice, and this has substantially decreased the horror and scale of it all.

I think, yes. Immediately after WWII there was an assessment of the effectiveness of "strategic bombing" - killing civilians en masse from the air - which concluded that it was counterproductive, and it was better to focus on individual targets like headquarters, railway junctions, factories and so on.

However, I think the technology that's made a real difference is mass communication - news media, blogging and so on.

The films and stories of the liberated concentration camps and devastated cities of Europe had a strong effect on the civilian attitudes in the West. During the war news was censored, all we saw of bombings was little flashes through the plane's bombsights. Once we saw the effects of atrocities, while it made no difference to the military it made a difference to the civilian population. And since we live in democracies, this made a difference in how future wars were fought.

Being able to see the effects of things makes a big difference. The Americans often blame their defeat in Vietnam on the news media - those pesky journalists showing military and civilian dead, it put the civilians off the war! Thus the much greater control of the media by the US in subsequent conflicts.

The recent Israel-Lebanon war was remarkable for one thing - this was the first time during a war that both sides blogged about it in real time, and the bloggers from each side talked to each-other. You may say, bah, bloggers! What do they matter? - but the point is, the civilians involved in the conflict were able to talk to each-other.

So that stories of civilian deaths on either side, and the grand claims of destruction of enemy weapons each side claim that turned out to be nonsense, these were all exposed quickly and made it into newspapers and so on. And this I believe contributed to a swift end to the war, long before either side had achieved its stated military objectives.

Compare those several weeks with the 18 years of the last Israeli intervention in Lebanon.

So the real technology that's made a difference is mass communication. Once we can see what our weapons do, and talk to the victims of those weapons, we become more reluctant to use them. This has not eliminated war, but has reduced the scale of the suffering.

On topic, it comes back to what I was saying about the sort of life you can expect in the military: because of sensitivity to public opinion, you'll get not much fighting, lots of ordinary government department bureaucratic bull****.

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Ricko

Dreds as most adults considering a career change to the ADF, you understand the shock to the system upon your fist week of being a recruit. Its ALOT easier if you know what you want to do before you enlist.

If the options are there for you, go for Duntroon. Officers can then apply for pilot application.

brendon

Humans in general dont want war. no one wants it. its just we have stupid arrogant greedy leaders of nations with massive egos who are prepared to go to war knowing they just sit behind a desk and talk. majority of the worlds population are entirely against war yet it still happens only because greedy arrogant men think they have something to prove.
if the situation arises then the propoganda and media comes into play and promotes nationalism then people will go crazy and join the army when needed to. its funny how it all works.

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kindred

I cant become a pilot because my eyes are shot. As far as I know you need perfect vision to be a pilot other wise I would have inlisted when I was 18.

The government is not very effective if the military is anything like that we are all screwed when the enemies find out.

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