THE ONCE AND FUTURE ARMY, A History of the Citizen Military Forces, 1947-1974
Dayton
McCarthy
Published
by Oxford University Press 2003
As reviewer of this book, I should admit to a
personal interest in the subject.
From 1970 to 1979, I was an active member of the Citizen Military Forces
(CMF) and later the Army Reserve (ARes).
That said, this is an interesting and useful summary
of the vicissitudes of the CMF from 1947 to 1974, when it became the ARes,
concluding with a positive assessment of the future value of the ARes after the
changes in the late 1990s. Three
themes run through the book: the role
(or at times lack thereof) for the CMF/ARes, the ongoing rivalry and
lack of understanding between the regulars and the citizen soldiers, and the
inability of politicians to make considered, durable decisions about the tasks
they require of the nation’s citizen soldiers.
Dr McCarthy shows clearly how, after a hesitant
post-World War II start, the 1950s were the high tide of the CMF, with a
notionally clear role, as an expeditionary force in waiting, and numbers
assured by the flow of national service trainees. However, he also identifies the real hollowness of this
role, with political reluctance to remove the impediments to overseas
deployment in the Defence Act effectively negating it. Ministers simply assumed, apparently,
that the necessary legal changes could be made if conflict started, when public
opposition would presumably be muted by the need to fight a third world war.
This period, however, also saw the start of the move
away from reliance on citizen soldiers, as the need for readily deployable
forces placed the emphasis more on regular soldiers (albeit concerns about
their high cost and the need to minimise the impact of maintaining a large permanent
force on the civilian work force surfaced intermittently).
What stands out in the re-raising of the CMF in 1947
was the Army’s wish to maintain the traditions of earlier citizen force/militia
and Australian Imperial Force (AIF) units. Clearly, the senior regular soldiers of the day understood
the value of such traditions and regional loyalties to their local infantry
battalions and light horse regiments.
This contrasts starkly with the Pentropic period, when, from all
accounts, active measures were taken to hide, if not to destroy, those
traditions. That attitude seems to
have started when regular officers who had not achieved high rank during World
War II reached senior positions in the mid 1950s, and continues to the
present. Dr McCarthy refers to the
slights these regulars had suffered in the inter-war years and during the war,
and their determination that in the future regulars, not citizen soldiers,
would command the Army’s formations.
The earlier slights might explain, but they cannot excuse, the
denigration of proud traditions.
Dr McCarthy covers the Pentropic experiment in
detail. In this he is not alone,
as both Professor Jeffrey Grey and Dr Albert Palazzo also covered it in recent
books (both entitled The Australian Army). Despite this wide research, the key
question remains unanswered: why
Pentropic? None of these authors
offers any convincing reason for the Army to have taken on an experimental
organisation, without trials or evident deep thought, against the advice of its
own Staff College (among others).
Even the CGS noted that ‘no-one can be sure at this stage how
[Pentropic] should be handled tactically in the field’. Dr McCarthy refers to the Pentropic
organisation’s ‘dubious and inauspicious roots’ as a ‘discarded failure in the
USA before Australia officially adopted it’. He notes that the US rejected the pentanna organization for
much the same reasons that became glaringly apparent in Australia later, once
exercises with the new organization took place.
All three authors reject the suggestion that this
was an anti-CMF ‘plot’. Perhaps
so, but even if it was not, the implementation could only be described as
appalling in its effect on the CMF, as concerns about unit traditions were
dismissed in a ‘cavalier manner’.
Professor Grey accepted that ‘the criticism that the pentropic division
destroyed the links between the CMF and local communities was valid’, while Dr
Palazzo described the process as having with ‘little regard for the
sensitivities of the citizen soldier’, and implemented with ‘callous
indifference to [the] effect on their CMF counterparts’. Dr McCarthy refers to the ‘seeming
indifference to the future of [CMF] units’.
If the views of these three authors are accepted,
and the Pentropic reorganisation was not an anti-CMF plot, then it can only be
described as the ham-fisted implementation of a militarily bad idea. That this was done on the advice of
Australia’s most senior regular soldiers, who knew at the time that there would
be adverse effects on the CMF (and therefore on national defence capability),
reflects poorly on them.
Pentropic may not have been an attempt to destroy
the CMF, but did cause it major damage.
However, Dr McCarthy shows that the worst damage followed afterwards, as
the resulted of Government decisions.
Despite having made changes to the Defence Act that could have allowed
the CMF to be called out for service in Vietnam, a new national service scheme
was introduced, providing personnel for the Regular Army, not the CMF. This led to conscripted national
servicemen serving in Vietnam, while volunteer CMF personnel languished in
Australia (although a proposal was made for a volunteer CMF battalion to serve
in Vietnam). Because the Menzies
Government was not willing to call out the CMF, but instead called up
non-volunteers for Vietnam (a decision that eventually rebounded on it), any
‘One Army’ concept that might have been developing was destroyed.
Dr McCarthy describes the slow decline of the CMF
across the Vietnam years, as the lack of a role led to declining resources,
which led to less ability to fulfil any real role, and so in decreasing
circles. He covers the proposal
for a volunteer CMF battalion to serve in Vietnam, and the observer scheme. While the latter scheme was a ‘signal
success’, the reasons for the rejection of the former proposal by the Military
Board are not given (other than the weak ‘it would not get Ministerial
approval’, presumably because the Military Board would advise the Minister not
to approve it). The result of that
decision, leading to the apparent lack of a ‘wartime’ role for the CMF, as well
as the service of many CMF men as volunteers with the Regular Army, may have
been the genesis for the current practice of using reserves as fillers in
regular units, not in their own identifiable units.
As the CMF reached its nadir, the new Labor
Government commissioned the Millar Review. As Dr McCarthy recounts, this was seen as giving new hope to
the CMF. Millar found that the CMF
was a ‘national asset’ which it ‘would be disastrous to discard’. He emphasised the importance of both
regional sentiment and well planned training, and made practical proposals for
improvement. Again, the
implementation was insensitive to the CMF’s regional connections. Dr McCarthy considers that the CMF/ARes
was a short-term loser from the next reorganisation, following the Millar
Report, but the Report provided a blueprint guaranteeing its relevance in the
1970s and 1980s. However, he notes
that the ARes continued to languish in terms of roles and opportunities until
events at the end of the twentieth century thrust it back into the spotlight.
Dr McCarthy provides an interesting analysis on the
theme of the ability of part-time soldiers to comprehend the business of war
adequately. The question (at least
as regards the future) is essentially unanswerable, short of a major conflict
in which it might be tested, and Dr McCarthy accepts that both sides of the
debate can be argued or refuted.
He also cites research showing that the average CMF recruit was more
likely to have a better education standard and more stable employment record
than an ARA recruit. Probably at
least in part as a result of this, he notes that, among the other ranks, those
who were not promoted relatively soon tended to be driven away by the
repetitive (and therefore boring) nature of the training. Others (as do regulars) found that the
pressures of family life caused them to separate.
Overall, Dr McCarthy concludes that, among both the
officers and the other ranks, the CMF was a fairly representative slice of
society. He also emphasises that a
unique source of strength and support for CMF (and ARes) service is the local
identification of CMF and ARes units.
This is something that seems to be generally unappreciated by regulars,
who are used to frequent postings to units with no regional
identification. (But do not the
individual battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment attract their own
special loyalties?). Whenever
regular soldiers who are seeking administrative tidiness ignore this unique
factor of regional loyalty, the CMF and ARes suffer.
Dr McCarthy concludes on
(almost) a positive note. He feels
that the lessons of history may have been heeded, and the ARes has a sound
future. Reserves can now be called
out for a variety of tasks (although politicians would rather they
volunteered). Their employment is
protected, while their employers receive support in their absence, and their
military qualifications now receive civil recognition (but curiously, their civil
qualifications are not recognised by the Army). However, the ambiguous relationship between citizen soldier
and regular remains, and regulars do still not understand the strong regional
loyalty of citizen soldiers.
Recruiting remains a problem, and a system that focuses on concentrated
(and extended) blocks of training brings new pressures to bear on the
‘non-Army’ life of ARes members.
What Dr McCarthy considers
that what he describes as a ‘studied disinterest’ in Reserve issues became, and
seems to remain, institutionalised among regular military bureaucrats, leading
to adverse decisions affecting reserves.
On the other side, he sees continuing difficulties being encountered by
reserves in adapting to the Army’s changing needs. Neither side is perfect!
Concluding, Dr McCarthy sees
citizen soldiers having a valuable future serving beside their regular
counterparts as part of ‘One Army’.
However, he is unsure if they will serve in their own units, as recently
recommended by a Parliamentary committee, or as part of Regular Army units, as
in the recent deployment of a reserve company to East Timor. If the latter, then simply to use
Reserve units as pools of personnel risks repeating the error made in 1941,
when three units (the 39th, 49th and 53rd Battalions) were raised for service
in Port Moresby. As David Horner
notes:
The way in which these units
were formed demonstrates the lack of appreciation of the value of regimental
pride. They were formed … by
obtaining batches of men from a number of units.[1]
Horner quotes Gavin Long (the official historian) as
suggesting that the Cabinet was responsible for the organisational deficiencies
of the militia battalions during the early campaigns in New Guinea. However, it seems more likely that the
failure was in the Army system.
Events detailed by Dr McCarthy during the Pentropic reorganisation,
implementation of the Millar Review, and beyond to Timor, suggest the lesson
has not yet been learned.
[1] Crisis of
Command, Australian Generalship and the Japanese Threat, 1941-1943, D.M.
Horner, ANU Press, 1978, page 81
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