strategic reform - a cook's view

In another time, another world, the words 'strategic reform program' would probably send me to sleep. Defence's overall plan for SRP (we do love a good acronym to throw around like confetti) has been the talk of the town for the past few months, and with its implementation will come various changes, most of which will no doubt irritate the old boys' club.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert on reform, let alone strategic reform, or even Defence strategic reform. However, I've been around for long enough to acknowledge that the kind of people that bang on about 'the good old days' and how they're over, are exactly the sort of people that wouldn't necessarily hold back, yet wouldn't exactly embrace changes to the status quo. No matter how strategic they may or may not appear to be.

What I found particularly amusing the other day is that one of the agencies responsible for supervising the implementation of SRP is Defence funded, and has supposedly fudged budget predictions to show false or exaggerated numbers relating to proposed savings. I don't know how you'd be able to prove either way whether proposed savings are realistic or not, because it's essentially all conjecture. I think that if actual changes were rolled out and then the data relating to real savings came out from that, it would be slightly more encouraging to the general public.

Defence is a massive organisation in Australia, and as with any business, the little savings that can be made every day don't seem as important or noticeable as slashes to departmental budgets or staff cuts. I believe that we've probably gone for too long thinking in this mindset, and because we're such a large group of people, we have the numbers that mean if the majority of individuals take some positive action most days, it really can make a difference.

With all that said, I have a few suggestions that could contribute to savings for Defence. I don't imagine they'll actually get considered let alone implemented, but you know, I've been saying for a while that if I had my own military, I would run things quite differently. :)

1. Once a month, across all Defence establishments, run a vegetarian-only day. If my base is a typical example of meals that are offered in accordance to SUPMAN (Defence policy on food entitlements), every meal period has a choice of five meat dishes and one vegetarian dish. One of those meat dishes is usually a roast of some kind. Meat is expensive, and not a compulsory requirement for one's daily nutritional intake. Even if the roast choice was changed so that the slab of meat could be used for the equivalent of two or three other dishes, there would be significant savings, as well as a greater appreciation for when a roast dish is available.
2. Remove valuable Defence members from inflight kitchens, and outsource the provision of sandwiches, morning teas, inflight meals, barbecue packs, etc. to civilian contractors. The amount of money that is invested in training deployable catering staff which is then wasted by tying them up with tasks that civilians are capable of doing is indicative of the irrationality that governs certain Defence resources.
3. Buy in enough raw ingredients to produce sweets for all meals. At the moment we don't usually have the staff time available for constant large-scale sweets production, but if you compare the cost of having a permanent sweets position versus buying in frozen sweets to cut up and garnish, the former may actually be cheaper in the long run. One of my colleagues believes we should just spend the money on buying in individual frozen sweets that don't require cutting/garnishing/plating, but his method saves Defence catering time, while my idea cuts down on the cost spent on sweets.
4. While I'm on the sweets thing, perhaps there should be a review of what SUPMAN has to say about having sweets available for lunch and dinner. Is cake really an essential part of one's daily diet? Even back in rookies, when we were exercising most days of the week, we were advised to take it easy with the dessert bar. Imagine what some people are like once they have moved into more sedentary roles, and still have the same access to sweets and ice cream? I don't think it would kill anyone to have a sweets-free day once in a while, or to only have sweets available with lunch or dinner, but not both.

These are only a few ideas that relate to catering, which I've managed to come up with straight off the bat. I'll mull over a few more that may apply to more than just my section, but I figure that any change to what people eat or are allowed to eat would no doubt be unpopular. Unless they somehow find a way to feed people more.

I think that the key to improving things in the catering section is to increase the quality of the food, work on realistically altering people's expectations of what's available in 2010 and beyond, and then meet or exceed them.

Sparrow, Barrie, ze militoire and me

I'm in the middle of a book entitled Killing: Misadventures in Violence by Jeff Sparrow, who I saw at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Sparrow gave an intriguing talk about Why We Enjoy Killing, which was partial allusion to some of the themes he explored in his book, and also an incredibly passionate source of food for thought in these times of war and seemingly inescapable violence.

It was particularly interesting to hear Sparrow talk about the inevitability of war/violence after attending the preceding talk by Rear Admiral Chris Barrie, which presented and outlined a proposition to bring back conscription. One of Sparrow's points that resonated with me from his talk at the Festival was that a country such as the US has spent literally billions of dollars funding their efforts in the War On Terror, a war which implicitly has no real end/solution in sight. He posited the idea that if the US decided instead to use this money to provide potable water to everyone on the entire planet, it would probably do a lot more to win hearts and minds than any sort of nation-building action that has taken place thus far. Would something like this ever actually happen? Probably not, because despite the clear logic behind taking such a purely positive action with a vast sum of money/resources, there are too many people/organisations that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing and simplifying what Sparrow was saying, and leaving out everything that he said before he reached this point in his talk. Another pertinent point of his was that if you took everything that was said about the Iraq War by even the most conservative of opinions (it will be controlled, it will be short, it will be targeted/specific and minimise any effect on civilians), you could spin it around 180 degrees to get what actually happened/is happening. Not that I know anything about Operation Iraqi Freedom in general or particular, apart from the fact that the ADF's contribution in Iraq (Operation Catalyst) ended in July this year, and that's only because I chose to read my email carefully that day.

I don't know if it was the mood I was in that weekend, from the come-down of being in the soapbox finals (after ranting about women in the military and having more than a healthy dig at Greg Sheridan, no less), or from spending a rainy couple of days in Sydney by myself... but I felt a bit strange about being who I am, and where I was. On one hand, I was getting all fired up about how conscription (no matter how innovative and 'fair' Barrie's new program may have seemed) would possibly be to the detriment of the next generation of young Australians, while I was a serving member that didn't feel compelled enough to care about international affairs, to know anything apart from ADF press releases about what part we had to play in wars on the other side of the world.

I remember when I first started talking to people about enlisting, and how I'd end up having by-the-by conversations with people about their reasons for not following a similar path to me:

Oh, I couldn't possibly join the military...

• I'm a total pacifist. The idea of being told to fight in someone else's war goes against everything I believe in.
• I don't think I could just do whatever I was told to do. The idea of blindly following orders because I had to, scares the bejeezus out of me.
• I question everything too much. I don't think I'd last too long in a military environment without speaking up about something that wasn't adequately explained or justified.
• I'm too much of a control freak. The idea of submitting to anonymous authority figures and the decisions they make is the last thing I'd want to do.

Personally, I think I am a combination of all of these points. By signing on the dotted line, I accept that I have agreed to serve Queen and country for four years of my life, and to remain on call to serve further if someone higher up sees fit. I didn't enlist because I am pro-violence or in favour of any war - rather, if all shit hits the fan, I'd rather be in uniform and doing my bit for my nation than taking a back seat and bitching about how war's good for absolutely nothin'. Don't get me wrong, I am not foolish enough to believe that the ADF's participation in wars around the world is anything like that of countries like the US, nor do I think Australians in general have any real concept of what it would be like to have war/violence as a constant feature of one's culture.

For the record, I do question things, and I am a bit of a control freak. I don't know how I manage to avoid getting into trouble more often for having this sort of attitude, but after not getting kicked out thus far for the things I have said and done, I can probably safely say that it is possible to survive within the ranks (as lowly as I may be?!) without becoming a mindless drone. There have been many times in my life when the authority that I have answered to has been a lot less defined or structured, and I believe I have been more damaged through the control I have given to others during my civilian life, rather than in the time I've spent in uniform.

If anything, prior to my enlistment, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to get on a soapbox and rant about women in the military (or anything similar that would get me into the finals and voicing my thoughts in front of hundreds of strangers). I wouldn't have formed opinions about the ADF and conscription to ask serious questions of Rear Admiral Barrie after his talk. I may not have even come across Jeff Sparrow (apart from perhaps through the Overland literary journal that he edits), let alone his book on killing. I definitely wouldn't have cared to pay more than accidental attention to the ADF's involvement in Iraq.

I had numerous reservations of my own about enlisting, and about becoming a part of something much, much, bigger than myself for the first time in my short and somewhat sheltered life. Although I can understand why it is generally believed that there's more bad than good about joining the military, I'd like to say that it has made me a better person. You could say that I'm spouting just what the ADF wants me to, but let me also add that although the ADF can be a great option for certain people, it's definitely not for everyone. I think I had a point to make about the relation between making hundreds of sandwiches and holding a gun to someone's head, but that might have to wait until I've finished the book...

do something, before we all get taken over by Asians!

As part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas over the weekend, Rear Admiral Chris Barrie spoke about the prospect of bringing back conscription. He opened with an introduction that was pretty much along the same lines as this opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, then continued to flesh out some of the finer details of his proposed scheme, and what made it different to the conscription programs of the past.

Mr Barrie has been retired from the Navy for about five or six years now, but listening to him speak showed that forty years of service still manages to shape his words a certain way. In the first part of his talk, there was mention of all manner of statistics and numbers drawn from various reports, to support a somewhat bleak view of what Australia could be like by 2050 if we go on about our merry way. That way being the maintenance of voluntary participation in military, emergency, and community service jobs, and addressing the lack of skilled workers in civilian employment by hiring appropriate employees from overseas. While our Asian neighbours continue to increase in population and improve their standards of living through increased industrialisation and our old pal capitalism, Australia will struggle under the increasing burden of an ageing population and a lack of production from the nation's brood mares, neigh, women.

So I guess what Barrie was trying to say (to the predominantly older middle-class white intelligentsia gathered in the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House on NRL Grand Final day) is something along the lines of we're going to hell in a handbasket unless we sort out today's young people with a good dose of national service. For every old person in the Australian community some time in the frightening pre-apocalyptic future, there'd only be 2.4 young people in the workforce that would be able to provide some sort of care or service. Clearly not enough slaves to do the bidding of all the pensioners of Australia! But I digress. The question of whether China is a real threat to us and our way of life, or if we're really going to be okay with Indonesians having a better lifestyle than us in the future, or the possibility that Australia will lose its identity amongst a mass of immigrating cultures, is swept aside and rolled up into the phrase Australia's positioning in the Asia-Pacific region by 2050. Or something like that.

How does Barrie's AUSSIE (Australian Universal Service Scheme - Individual Experience?) conscription program intend to address this? Well, the idea is that by taking part in various tasks of a community/nation serving nature, Australia's young people will gain points towards the completion of the scheme. For example, every young man and woman will be required to sign up and work towards 1000 points of 'service' within ten years. This service is not necessarily military, and the jobs that are available will be flexible and varied enough so that some Australians may wish to continue employment in various fields, even once their 1000 points are completed. Rewards and incentives such as gaining a passport (true citizenship à la Starship Troopers, anyone?), wiping off HECS debts, or achieving advanced standing within public service and military career paths could also be incorporated with the scheme.

I agree with Barrie that Defence is always going to have a problem with recruiting the numbers it requires to make up for natural attrition, as well as to expand in the areas it needs to as the forces grow in the future. There will also be no doubt that the strain on resources required by the ageing populous will only continue to increase. The idea of implementing a universal conscription scheme that incorporates services to the community in multiple forms other than in merely a military environment is definitely worthy of public debate. I appreciate that by making 'conscription' universal rather than selective is quite different to how troops were signed up in the past, and I also believe that by offering a range of jobs to suit people's varying preferences and aptitudes, most people can be accommodated for.

However:

• I believe there is an inherent danger in employing people in the military if it is not entirely of their own volition.


• I question the effectiveness of a group of young people that have been coerced in any way to serve in such positions, and I worry about the consequences of trying to get AUSSIE troops to work alongside people that have voluntarily chosen military jobs.


• Instead of throwing $500 million at Defence Force Recruiting to figure out how to entice more people to enlist in the forces, why can't the ADF work on retaining as much staff as possible, and taking constructive steps towards making it an appealing enough workplace that people actually might want to work in without all the flashbangwaheynowwhizzery?


• Military stuff aside... why should a whole generation of young Australians be forced into service jobs that for the most part involve taking care of a generation that wasn't forward-thinking enough to find a less uh... Communist(?) way of tackling the messed up babies-to-oldies-ratio problem?


• If it takes about ten years to clock up these 1000 points of service, with the potential to keep a whole generation locked in to various jobs in the local community (especially if you can't get a passport!), will we end up with a mass of socially retarded, cultureless, unchallenged thirtysomething Australians left to write some pages in our nation's glittering history?

Perhaps the true danger behind Barrie's idea lies in the inevitability of such a program being hatched by those who have been shrouded in matters of Defence and politics for too long. This can only mean that the return of conscription in this sense will no doubt be fundamentally flawed, to the detriment of yet another generation of Australians.

nine out of ten feminists recommend...

...knowing what a feminist is before claiming to be one.

According to Wikipedia:

Themes explored in feminist theory include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression and patriarchy.

I think that's what I'll be getting at when I rant about something to do with Greg Sheridan's view that equality for women in war is lunacy:

All societies have recognised that they therefore need warriors. The warriors are not barbarians. They are brave, skilled, disciplined individuals who risk their lives for something bigger than themselves. The overwhelming majority of people who have lived, and the overwhelming majority of people and societies today, recognise that the warriors are men. This is something that most people know, even if they deny it.

As with so many issues, normal people are smarter here than intellectuals. Is there a home in Australia in which, if attacked by a burglar, the husband would not respond first?

Hello discrimination - surely society at large doesn't really believe you need a penis in order to be a brave, skilled, disciplined individual that risks their life for the greater good? I'm guessing that Sheridan's view of what it takes to be a real warrior in this day and age is whatever image he's got in his head from reading too many SAS books/novels, and he's willing to look past all of the women that have fought/died for their cause and/or country.

As for stereotyping, well it seems that the overwhelming majority has no choice but to agree with Sheridan's logic, which supports that warriors are men. I wouldn't want to seem bitter or anything, but I'd like to point out my doubts as to whether despite his job as foreign editor, Sheridan really knows what most people out of the general population (living or dead!) typically identify as warriors. Assuming he is correct in that I know that I recognise society's warriors as men, even if I deny it, I can't really begin to question whether the glorification of men on the frontline throughout the course of history has anything to do with the fact that women haven't been allowed anywhere near such roles until quite recently, can I?

I'm not too clear on the boundaries of definition for objectification and oppression, but I can't help but twitch a little when I read the last sentence quoted above, referring to a husband's first response. The underlying implication that a woman's place in the home is not only as a wife, but as the second responder, or even worse, the passive bystander whilst the man of the household does all the dirty work of counterattacking burglars (and what mighty warrior work you do, husbands of Australia!) bothers me too much for me to not mention.

I might have winged a distinction in statistics earlier this year, but I don't know what the real facts are on what the typical Australian household is made up of, how many burglaries occur whilst people are still at home, or whether more males than females are first to respond to a break-in. I could probably look these up, after spending a couple of captivating hours researching on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, but I think I've sacrificed too much time to it already for my marketing subject last study period. But I digress. It wouldn't have taken a seasoned professional (such as Sheridan) particularly long to figure out whether The Husband™ is really the ultimate first responder to crime in an Australian household.

As for patriarchy, well...

Many practical considerations arise from the special nature of military culture and the extreme demands of battle. In close combat male soldiers will try to protect female soldiers. This is a law of human nature. The unit's effectiveness will suffer.

A military unit is bound by common identity, by deep traditions of comradely bonding. The romantic liaisons that inevitably develop in mixed gender units militate against the absolute teamwork, group identity and lack of favouritism that characterise military units in combat. A lack of knowledge of military culture leads to a lack of respect for it and then to policies that compromise effectiveness.

I guess the mother of all patriarchies would be inherent in present Australian military culture. After all this time without anywhere near a 50% female representation in the ranks, is it any wonder? Doesn't it make sense to send young boys and their fathers to war whilst girls stayed back to learn how to babysit and sew, whilst their mothers manufactured and packed parachutes, and filled in jobs that were left empty from all the conscriptions? To a certain degree, this situation is difficult to get around, you know, the whole preservation of the species thing. I've got to say though, lumping all women into the 'stay home and breed for the nation' category without giving them the option to not have children, and fight alongside men for their freedoms is almost insulting in 2009.

The real kick in the teeth from these telling paragraphs from Sheridan is the overall message that with his thorough understanding of military culture, women are a hindrance to the effectiveness of military units in combat. Who would have thought that despite modern training techniques, improvements in battle equipment, and access to wartime intelligence that our forebears could only dream of... the most highly developed of our military warriors could be so easily compromised by a female in the ranks?

Perhaps after seeing the group dynamics of typical military units today, it is difficult for people like Sheridan to imagine the existence of a hoo-ah sisterhood. Despite the ADF discussing the possibility of providing women with more job opportunities if they can meet the physical and psychological requirements, they are working against years of ingrained thought regarding what a woman's place is and/or should be in times of war. Although I see no point in debating which gender would be more effective in close quarter combat for as long as women are actively discouraged or prohibited from the frontline (the word of the day is moot, kids!) I would be interested to see if there was some kind of research into whether 'comradely bonding' is strictly the territory of heterosexual males in the peak of conflict.

So I guess what I'm saying is... does this make me a feminist? :)

zen and the art of sandwich making

My paperwork has been submitted for my competency log stuff, which means I'll be a Leading Aircraftwoman soon. I'm rostered on to work a weekend in a couple of weeks, which is the real sign of promotion. A whole kitchen to myself for five meals! What's the worst that could happen? I'd better not dwell on that too long, because I'll get too nervous.

It's strange, knowing that it's been just over two years since enlistment, and I've broken the back of my service obligation. When I first signed up I thought that four years was an eternity in a job I had no real idea how to do or what to expect. I guess I'm not all the way there yet, and I feel like I've spent a year just learning how to do what I do comfortably enough to tell people with confidence that I'm a cook.

Yet when I speak to the people that have started a year or more after me, and watch the way the new cooks work, I can notice the difference between them and myself. I've been wearing the same rank as them for all this time, but it seems that suddenly they're asking me for help and instruction, and more often than not it's my name on the board where it says 'Duty Cook'.

The other LACs have been joking about how I'm more likely to get a reprieve from sandwich bar, now that I've moved up in the world. I don't know why making salads and sandwiches comes with such a stigma, perhaps because there's little to no cooking involved, or because you have to deal with customers face to face at the Officers' Mess, as opposed to hiding out the back if you're doing cook to order stuff or even just plating up the food. Working on sandwich bar actually makes me miss the buzz I get from dealing directly with customers, the same sort of energy I'd pick up on when I was waiting tables. It's too easy to forget that you're feeding fellow humans, rather than just producing food that gets taken away on plates by the stewards.

I still find it more stressful being duty cook than not, even though it shouldn't be anything to stress about. I guess it's that feeling of not being able to relax entirely until the whole shift is done and dusted. Anything that goes wrong on your watch is your responsibility, and I've already had my share of things go wrong that have not necessarily been under my control, but should have been. On the other hand, it's also tricky to hand over the reins and delegate tasks without worrying about whether they're going to get done properly. I'd still rather bite off more than I can chew and screw things up myself, than have nothing on my plate and be left worrying about whether everyone else can handle the things I've handballed to them.

I've realised that I went through a similar phase when I became a shift supervisor in waiterland. There were the benefits of being able to get other people to do my bidding, but sometimes it was just easier and less frustrating to do something for myself, because I knew I could get it done efficiently and effectively the first time around. I think I'd be a terrible teacher... I simply don't have the patience and tolerance every hour of every working day of the week. I'm at a weird in-between phase right now, where all the other LACs are far more established in their rank than I am, and I am nowhere near the calibre of the ACs that have all just started in the mess this year. Although I enjoy taking charge of a shift and being responsible for its smooth running, sometimes what I'd really prefer is the gentle art of following rather than leading.

I have a feeling that as time goes on, and more ACs come through the mess, I am going to miss making sandwiches.