I believe every single job in the ADF is now available to Women, the last holdouts being the Arms Corps' in the army, finally fell a few years ago.
Me too and still my favourite recruitment add.
I joined because I would be "The pride of the fleet"
I joined expecting to being generally dry, at home frequently and reasonably content. I may have been wet, homesick and frightened going through Recruit School at Cerberus for a little while. Then, somewhat warmer, closer to home and quite jolly going through Creswell. Overall, looking back, I would not change any of it!
The only problem with that location is that it has the fastest tidal stream (+4.5kts on top springs) in the harbour.
Yes, I saw how strong the tide is. I was wondering if the light colour piles on the outside of the jetty are for attaching pontoons so that the Arafuras could berth and have a constant mooring line length. I would assume that they have thought through the issue as they have a lot of experience with these tides as well as cyclonic storm surges.
They did a survey including tides but I doubt if they allowed for the large swell found there after a period of constant wet season westerlies/norwesterlies.
This is due in part to not having a continous construction arrangement in place. Failure to order new hulls necessiated the FFGUP programme when the CFA DDG's were paid off and has put the RAN in the position where the ANZAC's have to be upgraded. Same goes for the Collins Class.
Greg Tunny, former MD of ASC produced a paper for the national ship building enquiry back in the mid to late 2000s.
An old warship should be sunk, not cut up. It's sad.
Waste of perfectly good steel. Better for her to live on in new objects people can use.
Is there an added cost though to the frigate program of its production cycle in avoiding the "wall of death "though? Then stepping up of productivity to less than eighteen months per ship build you are likely to reduce the costs of the program and even retire the previous frigate class earlier, certainly having a complete class finished in a shorter period could likely avoid some of the obsolescent between first and last batch? and certainly be in a better position to bring in a replacement class for the Hobart class whilst avoiding "wall of death" lets face it the ships are needed sooner than later
The Valley of Death as it has been called was referring to periods of time when there were breaks in naval ship construction in Australia. As a result of these breaks in naval shipbuilding (which lasted several years, more than once...) the various yards' skilled workforces were reduced or disbanded. This loss of a skilled workforce is part of why it had been so expensive to get some of the naval construction programmes going in Oz, as a skilled workforce kept needing to be re-raised/re-trained.
As a simple observation one would think there is plenty of on going construction work if we constantly rebuild our fleet going forward.
IMO it would require more than 'just' a commitment to doing all builds locally. I suspect that in many respects, the planning necessary to actually achieve all-local builds would be both more important, and much more difficult to carry out. I also am not all that enthused about requiring all builds to be local, in large measure due to it likely increasing the costs (in some cases likely by a significant margin) whilst limiting flexibility and capacity.
