Posted on 09/16/2007 6:37:18 PM PDT by fishhound
It's a storm in a D-cup (sorry, couldn't resist).
My view, for what it is worth, is there is little wrong with this - although I can understand why some peoples initial reaction would be one of incredulity.
But the fact is that the Royal Australian Navy (indeed the entire Australian Defence Force) is a highly professional and proficient organisation which relies on attracting the best possible recruits, and on retaining people once quite a lot of money has been spent training them to maintain that high quality. Doing this means offering and delivering real benefits to those who have chosen to serve their country in a military capacity.
And that includes medical benefits. Even if these operations, as indicated, cost tens of thousands of dollars, that is cheap if it lead to the retention of a sailor who might have otherwise left the service - it's cost a lot more to recruit and train another sailor even up to Leading Seaman standard (probably even to Able Seaman standard).
Even if it's not that serious, the fact is, this type of money is worth spending even if it just improves a sailors performance.
And then there are other factors to consider. The Australian Defence Force (Thank God, and touch wood) doesn't currently have to deal with a lot of casualties - but we do have to maintain the infrastructure that would be needed if that ever suddenly changed. In other words, we have medical resources (and in this, I would include mental health resources) sitting around without that much to do.
It is both appropriate and useful in terms of maintaining proficiency and ensuring procedures work as they should, for these people to be doing something. It is also appropriate for the Navy to be developing and maintaining relationships with civilian practitioners, it may need to utilise in the future.
The relationship the Navy's medical bureaucracy develops with a cosmetic surgeon now, and the hospitals they work in may be very useful in the future, when due to an accident, or combat, etc, we have people who need reconstructive surgery.
During my time in the Navy, I had cosmetic dentistry paid for by the Navy. I had counselling for work related stress. Were either of those things strictly necessary? No, not in my case - but they did help me. And they helped me to better discharge my duties. When you find yourself on a semi-diplomatic posting to London, where you are sometimes finding yourself having to speak up for the Royal Australian Navy to Royal Navy officers, the last thing you need is to feel self conscious about your appearance. Maybe that seems petty to some people - in fact, I admit, I'm rather embarassed to admit something so minor worried me. But it did - and fixing things helped me to do my job better. It might have been a fault in me - but it was in the interests of the Navy, and my country to correct it.
Thank You for this thoughtful post. I think that if a person in a civilian job can obtain these procedures and help, then it follows that a nation’s military is keeping up with present times in looking after it’s people and thier needs also. Another check in the pro column for a military career or enlistment choice.
The Navy accepted me as a Cadet Midshipman at 16, five years short of my majority (21 in those days). In so doing, they accepted a degree of responsibility for my care - this is something of an alien concept in an era when minors are no longer recruited in that way, but in the RAN, boys were accepted for officer training up until around 1980, and for training as sailors until 1986, and it's still part of the culture. Strictly speaking they should have dealt with my dental care while I was still a boy, but it got missed.
I specialised in carrier operations, and that was intended to be my long term career path. In that capacity, my teeth wouldn't have mattered. But then they decommissioned our only carrier, and the newly elected Labor government cancelled the replacement. The Navy had to find something else for me to do, or waste a ten year investment in my training.
It was in that context that I found myself posted to London to liaise with the RN.
Incidentally, I would have paid for the dental work myself, but getting it done through the Navy got it done much faster - within a couple of days, rather than within a couple of weeks. And it was done by Naval dentists who would have just been sitting around doing nothing.
I happen to agree that the RAN should do a better job on psychological screening than it does, but it is an imperfect science at best - and once these people are in, is it better to write off tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers money spent training a sailor (hundreds of thousands for a senior sailor) or to spend a little extra to keep them in? For me, the arithmetic is pretty simple.
I've never heard of anybody getting a Porsche - but the RAN has paid cash bonuses of something like $50,000 to keep some people from leaving the Navy. You have to have the people to do the jobs, and that is getting harder and harder all the time. You don't want to lose people you can easily keep.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.