In my experience Australia's senior military officers are very good. I spent nine years working for military officers in the Department of Defence. I found them much better bosses than civilian senior public servants. This, I expect, is because military officers are trained to take advice from their staff and to delegate responsibility, as well as being trained in whatever their technical specialisation is.

To suggest, as Bruce Haigh does, that Australian generals lack courage, moral or otherwise, is insulting nonsense. In the Australian legal system, the military operate under orders issued by the civilian government. As with with the public service, the military provides advice to the elected minister responsible, but then is required to follow the orders issued, provided they are lawful. Members of the ADF do not have the option of refusing to carry out orders they find distasteful and have even less latitude to disagree publicly with government policy, than do public servants. If a member of the ADF has a deep moral objection to the orders issued, then they can seek to resign.

Of course, this not to say that behind the scenes there cannot be a "full and frank" exchange of views within government. Also military officers are well versed in the business of waging a bureaucratic campaigns against a policy they did not like. But for the military to publicly oppose government policy would be to undermine the democratic system.

ps: My family has served in uniform overseas for four generations, in five wars. As a civilian at the Defence Department, I only got to go on exercise in a borrowed uniform for a few day: http://www.tomw.net.au/nt/tt97.html ;-)

Good afternoon to you Tom...

I totally agree with everything you've said herein. I'm afraid Bruce HAIGH gets a little carried away with much of what he writes, I guess it's a case of his rapidly fading importance I suspect ?

That aside, I was very impressed with both your vocational background and your technical and academic attainments. The link you kindly shared with us all, was very interesting indeed, I must say. Accordingly, I hope to see you appear again very soon, under your epithet, Tom ?

Monash did not invent the creeping barrage; this was used as early as 1915 by the British and French long before Monash was in a position to use it. Most of Monash's ideas were adopted from the British General Plummer, probably the most effective general of the war on either side.
Plummer's ideas were developments of the efforts of the Russian General Brusilov; the German General, Bruchmuller, the best artillery general of the war, also used developments of Brusilov's tactics at Riga (1917) and in the March-April Offensives of 1918- both of which preceded Hamel.
Nor was Monash seconded to the Americans; elements of the AEF were assigned to Monash for the Hamel battle but immediately withdrawn on completion of the mini-offensive. Indeed, even in knowledgeable circles, Monash is not widely known in America.
It should also not be forgotten that the cream of the German army was long gone by the time of Hamel- the core of the Regular Army German officers were wiped out in 1914-15 and the NCOs in 1916-17. What remained of either was effectively destroyed by the German offensives of 1918

There is a tradition in British & Commonwealth armies for officers not to speak out about government policy they are to implement. This has applied to both Labor and Coalition governments, eg strategic directives (Fortress Australia vs Forward Defense), funding levels and operational deployments.
Haigh charges that the generals have a moral obligation to speak against the use of the ADF in border protection. The logical extension of this argument is that, if the government remains intractable in the use of the ADF for this purpose, and persists in using elements of the ADF to enforce its policies, the general staff would have a moral obligation to remove said government, by force if necessary.
Which is precisely why the tradition of not speaking out on policy exists; it is not the place of soldiers to determine the morality of a democratically elected government. If Haigh and his cohort manage to convince the Australian people that these policies are wrong, it is the place of the voter to remove the government that has instituted these policies.
What I find objectionable about Haigh's article is his projected morality; the automatic assumption that his moral judgements are superior and shared by those who consider themselves moral. This automatically means that those who do not share his range of beliefs are therefore immoral and should not be in the public service.
For the enlightenment of Haigh, Australia's generals (and Navy and Air Force Commanders) are second only to the Americans in conceptualising modern war-figting techniques, commonly but inaccurately referred to as Networked Warfare. In achieving this pre-eminence, they have overcome stingy budgets and a recent government with a conceptualisation of war as being an extension of the ANZACS and Gallipoli (The TV series and Movie, not the actual battles). It may also interest Haigh to know that the recent focus of the ADF, the army in particular, to improving its diversity credentials stems from this process- a smarter army is needed in the future and bastardisation is counter-productive in attracting the sorts of recruits required to operate within the framework of the future ADF.