By Jim Fagan
Australia’s idyllic lifestyle was under direct threat for the first time in our lifetime from an aggressive and expansionist China, Air Marshall Geoff Shepherd AO said at the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Verrierdale on Sunday.
“Cyber intrusions, trade retaliations, culture bending and the like means that all of us are effectively on the front line.”
The former chief of the Royal Australian Air Force, who was guest speaker, said: “Our lifestyle and our right to exist as a pluralist and liberal democracy is not automatically guaranteed.”
“Australians today face very different challenges than those faced by preceding generations.
“Wokeness, cancel culture, climate activism, the erosion of our democracy and escalating grey-zone warfare are not anywhere near as yet threatening as the carnage of WW1 nor the fight against facism in WW11.
“These are our today challenges, difficult though they may be to visualise while we live safe and in peace in this beautiful area.”
Air Marshall Shepherd said Australia also celebrated ANZAC day under the shadow of serious public and official concern, and even some disgust, at the alleged behaviour of some of our Special Forces over than more a decade in Afghanistan.
“The Government and Defence will rightly and scrupulously examine all allegations of war crimes over more than a decade in Afghanistan and, if proven, will take appropriate action. I have no doubt of that.
“Our Australian servicemen and servicewomen have never sought, nor glorified war and all its horrors.
“The gallant actions and sacrifices of many hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors and aviators must not be besmirched by the alleged actions of a few.
“But consider this, we first went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 – it has been our longest conflict. A conflict largely ignored by us here comfortably at home.
”This was a dirty and ambiguous war amongst the long-traumatised peoples of that very divided country.
“There were no clear front lines, no uniformed or even identifiable enemy; an enemy who did not abide by any of the hard-won civilised rules that attempt to govern and ameliorate warfare.
“Successive Governments of both political persuasions repeatedly redeployed the Special Forces to that conflict – why?
“Because it was seen by Governments that the Special Forces carried less risk – less casualties, less body-bags to come home and thus less public pushback.
“The regular Army was not deployed in formed fighting units, nor were other viable military options accepted by Governments of the day. The Special Forces were always the fall-back choice.”
Air Marshall Shepherd said: “So we had young men, mostly in their 20’s, being deployed up to seven or eight times over more than a decade of their lives in a vicious and unconventional war.
“A war that saw regular and intense combat and which involved, as a former Chief of Army told me, killing terrorists in industrial quantities.
“Even off-mission they were isolated in protected forts where the risk of internal attack from their Afghani allies was always present.
“Today’s delicate zeitgeist through social and regular media condemns them for boorish and sexist pranks more worthy of a football club’s Mad Monday.
“Careers and reputations are being destroyed in this naive and overly-politically correct pile-on without due process being afforded.
“All this without regard for the harm, the moral desensitising and the mental damage we, through our elected Governments, have done to these young men.”
Air Marshall Shepherd said Australia needed to consciously try to understand what it really meant to commit our forces to armed conflict.
“Whilst always upholding the enduring values of honourable conduct, we should not judge our warriors through the lens of our cosy, safe and somewhat-cosseted daily lives here at home.
“We will have need of these hard soldiers again.”
Air Marshall Shepherd lives in Eumundi and also spoke at the Eumundi Anzac Day Observance.
