The army is on the move….

It’s all about us preparing for war with China. Longer runways and new hangars/accom to house US stealth bombers, new docks/bases for Brit and then US nuclear subs, new training for army to fight conventional warfare instead of small unit anti terror actions, a greater push to source equipment from suppliers here.

Someone in the know reckons 2027 and it’ll be on. The country won’t be ready, but you can be.

That "someone" would be Xi. That's what he's told his military drones - be ready by 2027.

Trivia ??

The US election year (2024 coming up) process starts with early election year events some states having caucuses and other preliminary gatherings and preparations

It seems Biden and crew is doing things to change the order of states events, and how the states handle there individual events... Many people are not happy with this...

It would seem the Biden camp knows something or feels there is something in it for them by disrupting the usual schedule of events...

I remember a decade or so ago there was always army stuff on the Hume Highway around Seymour. Puckapunyal army base is in that area and you used to see trucks and those 4 & 6 wheel Landrovers with big L plates on them out on training runs. Haven't seen anything for years. I have an acquaintance who works at that base and said things have been getting wound back - dont know for sure.
A week ago I was driving up that way and I saw 5 maybe 6 huge Rheinmetall MAN armoured trucks on the Hume heading North. Looked like they were right off the boat and brand spanking new - really impressive piece of kit. I was really surprised to see how much armour plate is on the cabin of these things.
There was no training marks on the vehicles, I suspect they were on their way north and may of had nothing to do with Puckapunyal.

I remember seeing a bus full of MP’s travelling south near Waterfall many years ago. I remember thinking if Imran them off the road I’d be a hero to every private soldier in the army, never have to buy a beer again.

My respect for you just went down by about a thousand points. I thought you were better than that.

The only way you can restore it is by making sure you at LEAST make them gutter-hop next time. Gosh. 🤣



In all seriousness, a lot of the smaller exercises were dialled back for a few reasons over the years. One was pressure from above to pinch pennies and reduce overheads. Exercises are expensive to run and number crunchers find them annoying to justify. Not to mention the public obviously had/have no concept of operational readiness and explaining that you need X amount for training and development in whitepapers doesn't necessarily come across as "We need to teach the kids to live in them mud and fight successfully". Civies just don't get that concept, it seems like a waste of money. Until you need it of course.

Another reason is that we've really dialled up on the joint exercises. They generally need a lot more practice because the coordination between a huge portion of the services at one time is pretty difficult to maintain. You need the ex to run for a decent period of time so that you can see cracks starting to form. You need to practice working with Allied partners or regional partners where you have different command structures or different goal outcomes to achieve for the training period. But a large joint exercise is extremely expensive to run. So again, it all comes down to pennies and dimes and where do you take them from first?

Domestic exs always come in after large international joint ops ones so that's part of the reason you'll see less and less roadtrains of jaded digs heading out to roll in the dirt for a few weeks. They'll still be running exs of course, it's not like they'll stop. But they might do them in a far smaller ex area, or prefer local ones where before they'd have travelled for a few hours to make sure everyone's in as unfamiliar environment as possible. They also would be scaled right back. Instead of a whole unit running several different training scenarios they'll take 3/4 of the unit and only run one or two. That means reducing an ex from 3-4 weeks for a large annual unit ex to a 1-2 week stint instead.

Each unit will do things differently of course and some will demand big shows of drama parading through town because the current CO is a flog and wants to show off their wardog credentials to the locals. Some will can domestic exs entirely in favour of sending more folks on national or international training because they see that as a bigger value-add to the capability. But it's a lot harder for them to get away with grandstanding these days because finance comes out of the woodwork when you even want to order a new pair of boots let alone wanting to take most of the unit away for a few weeks to practice what you preach.