Title taken from comment below the video.
Major-General Chris Smith DSC, AM, CSC, Deputy Chief of the Australian Army, delivered the keynote speech at last year’s Chief of Army’s History Conference.
Smith – and apparently a few others beside him – have escaped the downgrading of our armed forces. Our people in uniform have been used for various forms of social experimentation. As have those in many Western nations.
Smith’s prime concern is the misuse of language to gloss over the essential fact pointed out in the title.
A key symptom of this neglect is the Army’s use of abstract, jargon-heavy, managerial language. Terms like “decision superiority” and “delivering effects” obscure the violent reality of war and disconnect soldiers from the true nature of their profession. This abstraction fosters complacency, intellectual shallowness, and hubris, reinforced by ignorance of military history. It encourages the belief that modern warfare is uniquely complex and that experience offers little guidance.
More speeches from the conference here.




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