Australia to shut down its navy for two months

[Bravo Zulu]

Move aims to make force more family friendly and attract recruits
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
By Rod McGuirk, The Associated Press

CANBERRA, Australia -- Australia's navy gets a big Christmas gift this year: two months paid vacation for most sailors that will ease the effects of a recruiting slump, but make the service Down Under look something like a part-time operation.

The navy hopes that, by making life on the sea more family-friendly, it will attract the extra 2,000 sailors it needs to achieve its target strength of 15,000.

Critics say the so-called shut down -- which inspired this front-page newspaper headline yesterday: "Navy Closes For Christmas" -- will worry Australia's major defense ally, the United States.

"Mothballing your ships for two months sends totally the wrong message to our region and to our allies," opposition defense spokesman David Johnston told The Associated Press. "I've never heard of anything like this. I'm flabbergasted."

All 55 navy ships and submarines that are not on operational deployments have been ordered home for Christmas, and the number of sailors who stay aboard docked ships as sentries will be reduced to skeleton crews. It is not clear how many sailors will take extra time off.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08324/928966-82.stm

[Hardrada]

1. All your seasick sailors they are rolling home...

Baby blue.

[ORDagnabbit]

2. what if the war pigs had a war and nobody came?

[baldguy]

5. Peace would break out?

What a horrifying thought!

[flvegan]

3. How convenient. They have a fight coming next month.

The Japanese whalers and Sea Shepherd will be in their waters during those two months. Guess it'll be easier for them to fail to enforce their own laws if they shut down.

Hey, when you have something that reeks of international incident every year happening once again, just shut your oceangoing military down. No problem.

[spoony]

7. That was my immediate thought.

Just let the phones ring, hang a "gone fishin'" (or would it be whalin'?) sign on the door and ignore the gross abuses going on in their waters. Bleck.

[flvegan]

9. Japan is rumored to be sending a gunship as well.

And there's no Greenpeace down there this year, either, to at least chronicle in picture format what's happening.

Sea Shepherd is very, very alone it seems. I have faith in them, but I doubt they saw this coming.

[spoony]

10. Yeah, I can't really understand why Greenpeace won't work with them

I'm absolutely hooked on Whale Wars and am gift shopping at the Sea Shepherd shop to try to support them. If they're really going to be facing military or paramilitary thuggery, I can only hope they'll capture it all on video to further embarrass the TRUE "terrorists" of those waters.

[flvegan]

11. Money.

Nothing against Greenpeace across the board, but a lot of this comes down to money/donations. Greenpeace does things one way, and it's not worthless, but Sea Shepherd goes to the ends of the earth. When it comes to whales, why support Greenpeace and their campaign of taking pictures rather than Sea Shepherd's campaign of keeping whalers from killing whales?

Greenpeace had a chance at redemption last year, when they could have disrupted refueling the whaling fleet, yet they did nothing. They could have ended it there. That's the difference between direct action and being a bunch of poseurs.

It's sad. Imagine a campaign where Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd worked in total harmony against whaling. I'm disappointed that with their budget, all Greenpeace can do is send the Esperanza to the front lines to bear witness to the killing of whales. Meanwhile, with a tiny proportion of the budget, Sea Shepherd invokes fear amongst the whalers such that they flee. They stop killing and run.

Hell, give Capt. Watson 3 ships and a tanker to refuel...and whaling season ends.

If only I were disgustingly wealthy...

[grantdevine]

4. Good. They're f@#$ing useless anyway. n/t

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

6. So if I needed to blockade Australia's major ports, that would be the time to do it?

[SwissTony]

8. Can't find any mention of this on the websites

of major Oz newspapers or the Navy website itself. Wasn't mentioned on the TV last night or this morning.

[Sherman A1]

12. Good thing there is no piracy issue

for them to help with