RAA Liaison Letter 2024 - 2025 Edition

RAA Liaison Letter 2024 / 2025 Edition 7 is our own home grown desire to undermine the individuality of our Royal Regiment or if it is the “Americanisation” of our military. I am referring the current trend to propose a shopping list of toasts to every imaginable subject that all go to undermine the significance of our Gunner toasts to the Captain General, foreign Heads of State and the Royal Regiment. Keep toasts to any other the other group or individual apart from spouses to “Army” dinners. I love the USA but let’s stop importing their traditions. Let us stick to our own and be proud of them. Next Step Second Lieutenant Oh how the wheel turns … when I joined the Army on 3rd January 1979, the two ways to become a regular Army general service officer, was either become a Royal Military College staff cadet and complete four years academic and military training and graduate as a Lieutenant. Alternately, like myself you could enter the Officer Cadet School Portsea as an officer cadet and complete 12 months military training and graduate as a second lieutenant, unless you had acquired an academic degree from a civilian tertiary university or college of advance education prior to joining. In that case you graduated as a lieutenant with the same seniority as your Duntroon colleagues who graduated at the same time. An interesting aside explained to me by a person who I cannot recall was that the RMC graduation parade was always held prior to OCS graduation parade, the rationale being that the RMC graduate would always have seniority over his OCS colleague. Folklore or Fact? For those of us old enough it does bring up that scene in the movie Zulu where the two lieutenants are debating their seniority and who should be in command of the defence of Rorke’s Drift. On graduation, I expected to serve three years as a second lieutenant before I was promoted to lieutenant. This meant that with my year of officer cadet training I became a lieutenant at the same time as an RMC graduate who commenced training at the same time as me in 1979. With the establishment of ADFA this all changed and from an Army perspective the decision was made to close OCS and transition its training role to RMC. The difference in this change was that the duration of training would be 18 months, and all graduates would be lieutenants. To make this happen the rank of second Lieutenant was phased out of the regular Army over a few years. I proudly spent two years and two months as a second lieutenant. With the recent decision to reduce the length of the RMC course to one year I think it is time to reintroduce the rank of Second Lieutenant. In a Regiment there was no distinction made between second lieutenant and lieutenant when it came to training courses or appointments. At times this created an interesting dynamic, one that comes to my mind was the situation where the GPO of a gun battery was a third year second lieutenant, whilst the two section commanders were recently graduated RMC lieutenants. I recall one of the section commanders objecting to the fact he was being commanded by a second lieutenant. I am pleased to say this kind of friction was rare and generally everyone simply got on and did their jobs. Museum When I read last year’s Australian Army History Unit report to the Regimental Committee on the museum, the cynic in me immediately thought it would be far more productive if the Army spent less time changing the name of the museum and more time doing! In my experience Army has made an art form out of changing names even just here at Puckapunyal. Despite the letter I received from Mr Peter Armstrong the curator of “Artillery Museum” I still stand with both feet firmly planted in my view that the reality of the current “compromise” museum arrangement is inadequate. Recruiting – My Bug Bear Every second or third day in the news there is a story about the ADF and its inability to go within cooee of reaching its annual recruiting targets. There are far smarter people than me being employed to work on and address this challenge. I think they could not go too far wrong to listen to the likes of General Peter Leahy (Retd) former Chief of Army who recently wrote about what he felt were some of the reasons why there was a problem. He is only one of many intelligent and experienced people, including Andrew Hastie the former Federal Opposition spokesman on Defence, and a former Special Air Service Regiment officer, who have put their head above