Cultural revolution redux

As I may have mentioned once or twice in the past, my boss Barney (Air Marshal Barney Stoush, the VCDF) is renowned among Russell Hill’s corridor cognoscenti for his dry but ready wit during bureaucratic flaps.

This especially comes to the fore when the mills of bureaucracy grind particularly slowly or noisily, our political masters again fall prey to the delusion that one of their current obsessions is an original thought that has never failed before, or some allegedly new doctrinal innovation in the ADF is trumpeted as an absolute war-winner but is merely just new wine in old bottles labelled with PowerPoint. 

The current pursuit of one billion dollars in annual ‘savings’ for the next decade from the Defence allocation has hit two of these hot buttons.

Barney, of course, was not taken in for a minute by the promise that capability development and operations were ostensibly quarantined from the chase.

‘Just watch’, he counselled the Chief-of-Staff and me quietly, ‘how the bureaucratic classifications and descriptions of various longstanding functions and activities will now mutate to cancel out common-sense’s inoculable or prophylactic effect’. 

After surreptitiously checking my dictionary I found he was unerringly correct as usual.

This latest mutation of the Salem virus was soon raging on all six floors in R1.

Even the most isolated and remote corners of far-off R2 and R3 provided none of their usual immunity to the infection and its frenzy for ‘cuts’, 'cuts' and yet more 'cuts'. 

Within the first few days various second-order, but undoubtedly operational and capability-related, functions were adjudged as merely administrative at the stroke of a pen; with no thought to the hard-won lessons of experience, both operational and bureaucratic.

The murderously orphaned functions were then thrown on the block for arbitrary slicing and dicing.

Even more tenuously argued proposals soon followed – especially as there was no shortage of ambitious candidates keen to join the Senior Evasion Service – and plenty who scented the air and threw options and themselves forward whenever they encountered a Minister, Secretary or CDF.  

Returning from one particularly bloody committee session of the most high, Barney described the proceedings in his customary pithy fashion.

"The parade of willing officials proposing cuts was redolent with the atmosphere of a Maoist self-criticism session at the height of the Cultural Revolution – but without the degree of personal restraint shown by the Red Guards",' he noted. 

Born in the 1980s, and largely educated by post-modernists, I nodded vaguely at the factual allusion – with the result that the Chief-of-Staff added yet another history book to my weekend professional reading list.

Barney, a firm believer in humour as the second line of defence against stupidity, then sharpened his point about the resurgence of ultra-Maoist cultural practices.

Hunting up the old high-collared ceremonial jacket he wore when defence adviser in New Delhi many years ago, he prominently hung it on his office hat stand, surmounted by a flat cap and a little red binder.  

The first two or three bureaucratic butcher boys, popping in to brief the VCDF on their latest sinew slicing forays, missed it entirely.

Feedback via the brew-crew rumour mill revealed that the next enthusiastic butcher boy to visit was just as insensitive to subtlety.

He apparently thought the prominently displayed jacket was something to do with the annual gripping controversy, fought by heated emails to and fro across all six floors, as to whether the colder weather temperature setting in R1 should be 19.5, 20 or 20.5 degrees Celsius.  

It was not until the third or fourth visit by a keen knife-wielding functionary that Barney was actually asked about the significance of the ancient jacket and its symbolic accoutrements.

The question had come at the end of a briefing where Barney was told that all overseas exchange postings were now regarded as both administrative and expensive and therefore a prime target for savage cuts. 

Now a positively seething Barney is a rare sight.

Like all fighter pilots he is famous for his equable and even temperament, but he struck and he struck hard.

Pointing to the rounded edges and shape of the jacket’s Victorian-era high collar, Barney noted its strong resemblance to the Mao suits worn by victims during Cultural Revolution self-criticism sessions.

Building on the analogy he pointed out China’s inwards-looking marked decline as a result of such measures.

He further reminded his questioner that overseas postings, in fact, saved money, lives and national reputation.

‘How else’, Barney boomed, ‘could we ensure comprehensive inter-operability with allies and friends, operationally benchmark ADF professionalism effectively, and acquire key professional experiences and qualifications simply not available or feasible within our own resources’.

‘Moreover’, he slammed, ‘overseas postings generally achieved all this at a fraction of the financial and operational costs of the alternatives’. 

Both his rage and his unrelenting stream of logic were a wonder to behold.

After the butcher boy in question had fled the power suite, disarmed and in some terror, Barney throttled back, applied the flaps and made a text-book three-point landing.

His usual introspection soon followed, coupled with his penchant for ably passing on lessons to the successor generations.

‘Self-inflicted jerk injuries to the knee’, he mused at last, ‘need surgeons, not butchers, and men not boys’.