Exactly, Firefly!
The English need their cannonfodder 
We have to do that here, too, but only when we’re walking our dogs. 
(P.S. With our dog’s poo, not our poo because we’d get into trouble if we pooed in the street.)
He’s only interested in Army Reserve (=TA in UK) at the moment. This suits me as I want him to complete his apprenticeship before he carries out one of his current ideas of joining the army or being a cop. At least he’ll have a trade to fall back on.
Royal Engineers Tradesman? They do take carpenters after all…
[QUOTE=Rising Sun*;154552]Same here.
Not just the kids.
Nothing looks tackier than some fat sheila in her fifties or sixties with a fresh tattoo, usually on the tit, neck, shoulder or above the bum, where the top of her thong sits on a ridge of wobbly flesh.
One wonders why RS even looks at such things. Must be something missing in his life;)
The easiest way to avoid such sights is to turn and run when you see a fat sheila heading in your direction.
digger
Problem is that I see them when they’re walking away from me in shopping centres and so on. Often with another generation or two of their charming pedigreed pups in tow.
[quote=“Rising_Sun,post:25,topic:4752”]
You’ll just have to stop trolling through the gathering places of the bush pigs mate;) It’s hard I know, they seem to be everywhere these days.
digger:)
So much for my cynicism about the recruiters trying to herd my son into the pioneers.
He’s run into a few blokes who wanted to be riflemen in the regular army who also passed all their tests only to be told at the end that there were no vacancies for riflemen.
The Army really must be full. 
Be glad it’s only full…ours is full of it!
Zing…
What’s the Australian Army’s maximum size, if it has one?
I dunno, but apparently we’ve just about reached it.
I think the regular army establishment is somewhere around 25,000, plus about 15,000 reserves, give or take a few thousand in each case.
We feel that this immense force of trained killers is sufficient to cause potential enemies such as Indonesia (population around 200 million versus ours of a little over 20 million) and China (with a slightly larger population that Indonesia’s ) to keep their distance.
Or the government realizes that Australia is fucked if either of them chooses to invade, and rather saves some money and invests them in Chinese Flags…
:mrgreen:
Seriously, we wouldn’t have a chance against China but we’d have a good chance against Indonesia. Raw population numbers aren’t the whole story.
But would Australia be left alone to deal with Chinese agression?
If it suited the interests of the few powers which could challenge China, of course! That’s the nature of politics and national self-interest. We’d do the same if the positions were reversed. 
And none of those powers supply China with raw materials like Australia does, so they’re not likely to be under any pressure on that front.
China is one of those countries from which my focus has been distracted for some time. Of course, I’m aware of its economic rise, and that it has a huge standing army. However, what threat could it really pose to Australia, realistically, does it have the resources to mount an attack on Australia? Would Inodonesia side with China against Australia, or would Indonesia side with Australia against China? If your most potential enemy is the neighbour which is economically strongest - how does China figure in such a scenario?
Probably, if it really wanted to. Its navy would cream ours. For example, we have six conventional subs and can’t crew all of them while China has eight to ten nuclear subs and fifty to sixty conventional ones. China doesn’t yet have an aircraft carrier but is going to build several so it has a problem in defending its ships from our land based aircraft, but if it was determined and had the transport shipping it should be able to land a force much larger than our army (which is barely a division in total numbers and much less on organisation) on a beachhead on plenty of our mostly undefended coastline in the north and west, where the resources it wants are.
Although it has the troops I don’t know if it has the merchant shipping to support them, so it might end up in a similar situation to Japan in WWII. But if it has the shipping and it wanted to apply everything it had to a landing in Australia, which assumes that it can take substantial naval forces from other applications against potential threats to China, then it might be able to land and consolidate here. The major obstacle to that is that we can bring air forces to bear on their shipping and landing but, unless China takes, or is given, landing grounds in Indonesia or perhaps some islands to our west or north, it can’t bring air forces to bear on us, which puts it at a significant disadvantage.
The real question is: Does China want to attack Australia? And the current answer is certainly: No. China has a long history of being focused on its internal security rather than being an aggressor, although in its very distant past it was aggressively expansionist. The only risk to Australia would be if it denied resources to China, notably minerals upon which China depends for its economic expansion, which in very extreme circumstances might reproduce the circumstances which impelled Japan into WWII. But, at present, that is in the realm of very tenuous speculation.
It depends upon what is in Indonesia’s national interest.
If China was going to march through Indonesia to get here as the Japanese did, then Australia and Indonesia would undoubtedly make common cause against China.
If China was going to bypass Indonesia to get here, who knows? That would depend upon Indonesia’s assessment of the risk to it of being sandwiched by China to its north and south, in the same way that if China invaded Indonesia with no immediate threat to us we might still want to support Indonesia rather than allow China to gain a foothold in the region from which to threaten our trade routes and potentially our mainland.
Indonesia’s deep mistrust of Communism is in stark contrast to their attitude in the 1960’s.
Perhaps if China made an offer too good to refuse, then the Indonesians might join in. I agree our air force could probably severly dent any Indonesian aggression and probably will for many years to come.
China is a different story, but I doubt they will have the qualities needed for such an adventure for at least a decade or two.
digger
Well, if your army is full ours is apparently too big!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/5145091/TA-to-lose-10000-troops.html
I would have thought the TA serves functions other than just being integrated with the regulars in overseas operations, and not least as a training cadre for rapid expansion and or second line force in time of military crisis.
True madness. Every Op Ive been on in the last ten years has had a heavy sprinkling of reserves, not only were they dedicated, at times they were more professional than the regulars around them, bringing huge experience from Civvy life.
Truly feels like a money saving exercise.