RAA Liaison Letter – 2025 / 2026 Edition 95 Professional Papers Introduction DCA warns ADF has become 'detached' from violent nature of war By foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic, ABC News, Friday 27 February THE DEPUTY CHIEF OF ARMY DELIVERED AN EXCORIATING ADDRESS TO A MAJOR CONFERENCE LAST YEAR, DECLARING THAT "MANAGERIAL AND ADVERTISING LOGIC AND DOUBLE SPEAK" HAD "POLLUTED" THE PROFESSION. HE ALSO WARNED THE ARMY HAD EMBRACED "NONSENSICAL AND THEORETICALLY IMPLAUSIBLE CONCEPTS" AND BECOME "DETACHED" FROM THE INHERENTLY VIOLENT NATURE OF WAR. The speech was given at the Chief of Army's History Conference in November but recently started to circulate more widely after being uploaded to a YouTube channel run by the army's professional development platform - where it has already drawn praise from several veterans. The deputy chief took aim at complacency, poor discipline and a lack of moral courage within the Army, warning that many within it lacked a basic understanding of the nature and history of war, while spruiking recent moves to strengthen the intellectual foundations of the officer corps. He opened by taking aim at the "gibberish" that he said had become pervasive within the army, suggesting it was used to obscure ignorance. "According to a recent Army document, the world isn't just a 'dangerous place'. It's a 'complex and challenging strategic environment'," he said. "We don't talk about 'problems'. We have 'challenges and issues to meet, face and overcome'. We speak with unnecessary jargon and gibberish. "It epitomises how Western militaries, including ours, have allowed modern managerial and advertising logic and double speak to pollute the profession." Major General Smith told the audience this problem was not cosmetic but hinted "at something rotten at the professional core" of the ADF. "Putting aside the unavoidable creep of managerial speak and postmodernism into everyday language, in the Australian Army's case, I think it derives from ignorance, which manifests as a form of hubris," he said. The deputy chief did not directly criticise either the current or previous federal governments during his speech and stressed that many of the deep-seated problems had been around for years or even decades. But the wide-ranging speech is still a devastating indictment of the ADF and the Army from one of its most senior representatives. "The postman delivers and the florist delivers. Major General Smith said officers' knowledge of warfare and "what makes armies tick" was "abject", which then manifested "an unquestioning acceptance of things like managerial language and postmodern abstract thinking". "It also manifests as nonsensical and theoretically implausible concepts like decision superiority and information dominance," he said. The deputy chief warned there was a "whole school of thinking in the Army and more broadly" that war was "about influence" rather than the use of force - in part because of historical ignorance. "To someone with no foundation in the study of war, war's nature is elusive," he said. "I'm not convinced the Australian Army understands, even at a base level, war's violent nature, let alone the implications of that fact.” "I think this ignorance is not a new phenomenon. I think it's a decades-long thing and its consequences are very real and very serious." He lashed the way the Australian Army and Defence used euphemisms such as "deliver effects". "We don't deliver effects. We seek out, close with, kill, capture, seize, hold and repel attacks," he said. "The postman delivers and the florist delivers. "It's important because the abstraction of our language disconnects us from the realities of what the army does. "For example, delivering effects conjures up images of neat warfare in which packages of destruction are politely divided [and] delivered to compliant and passive targets."
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjE4NTMz