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Old 06-30-2019, 06:23 PM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Western Australia
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Yeah...
I remember in the 70's-80's that the attitude towards air defence seemed to be "that's the job of the air force". The feeling towards that idea was most colourfully expressed by one of my training sergeants when he said something along the lines of "if the air force can't stop them, we're fucked".

Then only about a decade later we were deploying Army air defence units on RAN ships to bolster their air defence (I think it may have been for East Timor but I can't remember, it could just have easily been the Persian Gulf) - because even the RAN wasn't given sufficient air defence!
And all that shows once again, that there are some circumstances were you cannot expect the Air Force to be providing air defence.

It's a holdover from WW2 I think - too many politicians believing that Australian defence policy consisted of expecting the enemy to attack Australia over hundreds of miles of sea and not thinking that Australian military forces could/would be deployed to regions beyond RAAF control.
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