9 January 2009

Our taxes at work at Summernats - the Australian "Armygeddon"

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Rare Spares Australia has given us this peek into the the Defence Force’s presence at the summernats –

    The Australian Regular Army has released or should I say unleashed it’s latest recruiting tool – Armygeddon. A Blown 7Ltr 6 wheel drive landrover that produces 700 HP and can do 6,5,4,3 and 2 wheel burnouts. This video captures the NEW look ARMYGEDDON lighting up the tarmac at the 2009 Street Machine Summernats 22 produly sponsored by Rare Spares.

    The Armys six wheeled, seven litre burnout beast and recruiting tool displayed its true potential during the burn-out competitions at Exhibition Park in Canberra.

The country’s in the very best of hands!

[ED – On the other hand if someone absolutely has to be carted off to Afghanistan to go to their gods like sojers… Who better?]

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Nope.

Absolutely not.

Uh-uh.

Not me.

poptop said :

So the idea is to
– recruit from the Summernats demographic,
– train some of them to use a range of weapons,
– thin the herd in foreign countries and
– re-release them into the wild?

Sounds like the prequel to First Blood.

BTW – lots of Summernats 22 net-videos appearing now. I particularly liked this brief snippet.

Are you implying that only uneducated car loving soldiers can develop post traumatic stress disorder?

shiny flu said :

Truth is, most of middle-high Australia wouldn’t enlist ourselves or our children (whether you have them or not) into the Army. Much like in America, the best people to recruit as pawns are people from lower-to-mid-socio-economic sections of society where employment prospects of the Army (tax free income etc.) seem like heaven.

side note… and Chic Henry doesn’t understand why his event isn’t making profit with his target audience?

Not sure I agree, Shiney Flu. ‘When I worked in the Navy and then Defence as a civvie, recruits came/still come from a diverse range of socio/economic backgrounds. ADF Recruiting targets everybody and they would regularly visit gov’t and private school alike. Unlike the US where recruiters actually drive around the poor neighbourhood’s, troll through Mall’s etc.. looking for the poorer end of town. Things like the GI Bill in the US are especially aimed at enticing ‘poorer’ kids to join up.

An interesting thing happening here in recent years is the amount of soldiers from Duntroon that are graduating with a rack full of medals. Guy’s who could have quite easily qualified for Duntroon previously joined up as grunts, served in a few theatres to get some experience and then decided to apply to Duntroon. Such mobility isn’t too common in the US system either.

That said, Despite enjoying my time in teh services, I wouldn’t bee too keen on my kids joining up. It’ll be their choice but the way the system treats those who are injured while serving is abysmal. A mate of mine who was in the Townsville Blackhawk crash is still fighting for fair compensation, despite the fact that he’ll never walk again.

As both a training (i.e. it was built by apprentices) and advertising tool Armygeddon is value for money.

That said, when I worked in Aero Systems in the Defence we used to laugh that with the Army now recruiting at the Nats, it’ll only be a few years until some poor pilot is scrambled and while running out to an awaiting ARH (Armed Recon. Helicopter) asks his crew chief if the bird is right to fly. And the Chief will go “Yea maaate, it’s fully siiiiiick”.

They should’ve had the Armygeddon. They’d have soon squashed the bugs.

Yes, but Doogie Hauser played a Nazi!

The biggest joke was employing Doogie Houser in a movie.

Starship Troopers is a great film! Quite a clever spoof of army films and space films, and I like the sneaky little jokes Verhoeven peppers the film with. The whole thing is tongue in cheek.

Sorry Holden I should have elaborated. Jakez hit the nail on the head.

Ant, Starship troopers sucked. Why didn’t the humans have arachnid-proof armoured vehicles???

Most army recruits in teh US are southerners. The poor end of yankland. And of them, the majority are hispanics. Now go watch Starship Troopers again (a bloody good movie) and see the bit about enlisting in order to get citizenship. When they made the film, this was just them being wry. Now it’s almost reality.

a lot of families have several generations in the military, and have good incomes.

and many country people are happy for their kids to join the military (or the kids are happy to get out of whoop whoop and get paid.)

Truth is, most of middle-high Australia wouldn’t enlist ourselves or our children (whether you have them or not) into the Army. Much like in America, the best people to recruit as pawns are people from lower-to-mid-socio-economic sections of society where employment prospects of the Army (tax free income etc.) seem like heaven.

side note… and Chic Henry doesn’t understand why his event isn’t making profit with his target audience?

Absolutely, it’s cheap advertising. Considering it ends up costing millions of dollars doing media campaigns, this is probably well worth the money spent as it’s actually attracted people to the job.

Mind you, I don’t think “unleashed its latest recruiting tool” is accurate, it’s been around for the last four Summernats.

Here is a link to a Crappy Times article. It has a quote from the CO of the Army Trade School that basically says, 19 or 20 percent of last years motor mechanic apprentices found out about the jobs by seeing Armygeddon at a motor sports event.

Considering it is getting harder to recruit and retain members of the ADF, I say if it works then keep doing it.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/murrumbateman-look-out-theres-incoming/1398438.aspx

Crap! I meant brought!

I’ve also seen in the US how they use online gaming to drive recruitment, so they’re ticking all the right boxes over there as far as getting young males on board. I think the geeks will be a bit pissed when they get to Afghanistan or Iraq, get shot to pieces and realise they can’t ‘respawn’.

http://www.goarmy.com/downloads/games.jsp

Better Summernats fans than me. Surely they would have been more impressed if the army guys bought some explosives and such and showed off their real equipment.

i think you will find this car has been around for a number of years, and has just been given a tart up.

This ‘vehicle’ has been modyfied and maintained by Army mechanical engineering apprentices over the past three or four years, so it probably gives them something interesting to do after sweating over all the other ‘boring’ vehicles they have to work on all day long.

poptop said :

So the idea is to
– recruit from the Summernats demographic,
– train some of them to use a range of weapons,
– thin the herd in foreign countries and
– re-release them into the wild?

Sounds like the prequel to First Blood.

BTW – lots of Summernats 22 net-videos appearing now. I particularly liked this brief snippet.

poptop, the word you should be looking for is cannon fodder. seasoned troops usually survive. new recruits have a limited shelf life.

So the idea is to
– recruit from the Summernats demographic,
– train some of them to use a range of weapons,
– thin the herd in foreign countries and
– re-release them into the wild?

Sounds like the prequel to First Blood.

BTW – lots of Summernats 22 net-videos appearing now. I particularly liked this brief snippet.

neanderthalsis9:31 am 09 Jan 09

It’s a recruiting tool, probably a lot cheaper and I’d be willing to bet more successful than the prime time ads the ADF run. You get many thousand 17 – 35 year old men congregating at summernats, so you have a captive audience of your prime audience(true, they might be bogans but PBI has to come from somewhere).

The Police in QLD had a Commodore kitted out as a drag car for the same purpose, fairly common and widely accepted practice I believe.

Not just defence, isn’t there usually an AFP street machine at the Nats?

Holden Caulfield said :

farnarkler said :

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

How does that affect “our” taxes?

I think it’s meant to be a suggestion that this is an acceptable (and not particularly uncommon) marketing method deployed by other Defence organisations around the world.

Thus if one accepts that the Defence Forces should market themselves, this is an acceptable use of ‘our’ taxes.

Holden Caulfield9:13 am 09 Jan 09

farnarkler said :

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

How does that affect “our” taxes?

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

It’s very smilar to a US Marine recruitment strategy I observed. They brought along to the winter X-Games (in vermont, then) a huge Hummer, painted shiny red paint, with all the blingy add-ons, and the biggest car stereo I’d seen (this was in 2001) thumping away. They got people to do various physical tasks (chin ups, etc) to get Marine schwag (mostly lanyards and things) but any army-aged males and females were quickly bailed up by Marine recruiters, wanting to talk them into joining up. The Hummer was evidently soem kind of bait to the kinds of people who might join the Marines.

Does that little barrier look strong enough to anyone else to prevent this beast from crushing the people in blue standing behind it (not to mention the camera person!)? Did they not have an incident last year when a car hit some people due to inadequate barriers?

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