Monday, May 5, 2014

Is the Defence Minister aware of how many uniformed personnel are in the ADF?

I am curious if the Defence Minister knows how many people he has in uniform?

This from today's The Australian in reference to coming civilian cuts in the ADF to be announced in next week's budget:

“We’ve got 23,000 public servants in Defence running 59,000 uniforms,’’ he said. “Now, this is unsustainable."

Let us look at that. My super-credible source (Wikipedia) shows this:


Service Permanent -Active Reserve -Total
Navy 14,054 2,001 16,055
Army 29,697 17,251 46,948
Air Force 14,243 2,820 17,063
Total 57,994 22,072 80,066

Others that follow this more closely may have better numbers. But not mentioning the reserves is a critical error. Details like this are important when looking at budgets.

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