An Interview with Lieutenant General (Retired) Francis Hickling
As the date of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan approaches, it is timely to identify organisational issues the Army faced post Vietnam, via a series of interviews with former senior officers and soldiers to be published in forthcoming editions of the Australian Army Journal. The intent of the interviews is to learn from the past to inform the future as the Army transitions from operations in Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The first of these interviews is with former Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Frank Hickling. The second interview is with Warrant Officer Kevin Woods. These are extracts of the interviews; the complete versions are located on the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis website at: http://www.army.gov.au/Our-future/DARA
Australian Army Journal (AAJ): Sir, thank you for your time today.
Lieutenant General Hickling: It’s my pleasure. Before we start I would like to preface if I may?
AAJ: Of course.
Lieutenant General Hickling: You only learn lessons if they change behaviour, otherwise they are observations, not lessons. Reasons for learning are useful when you find a reason for changing, or not changing, behaviour. If lessons are what cause you to change your behaviour, we should think of the reasons why we change our behaviour and what leadership has done to encourage these changes. Not every observation will lead to a lesson. Some observations are not worthy of a change in behaviour. It may be a valid observation and something that you think is interesting but you need to ask, am I going to stop doing what I am doing?
If it makes you think about what you are doing then it is a valid observation. If this leads to change, then that’s a lesson. The Army needs to get its head around the fact that it’s not a lesson if you don’t change what you’re doing.
AAJ: In order to understand the environment post Vietnam, what was the situation the Army faced in the period post the withdrawal?
Lieutenant General Hickling: We had an army of approximately 44,000 at the end of the Vietnam War. That army was only going to move one way, and that was down. There was a general understanding that this was the case. Firstly, I will address the question within the context of community attitudes. Some of my soldiers were spat on upon our return from Vietnam. We were not welcomed home or left with the view that the general public and the media believed what we had done in Vietnam was worthwhile and that they valued the soldiers. My first posting post Vietnam was to Army Headquarters and we were required to wear civilian clothes to work because people in uniform were being abused. That was the situation post Vietnam.
The Army did not have a clear understanding of its strategic purpose, its strategic mission, or how it could contribute to national security. I don’t think those questions were being seriously considered and discussed, noting I was a junior major at that time and didn’t have an insight into what was being done at the highest levels. Despite this I did not have any evidence, nor could my colleagues or contemporaries see any evidence, that strategic conversations were being held between government and senior military leadership. There was a feeling of drift.
I think the problem after the Vietnam War was the government didn’t know what it wanted the Army to do. It knew it didn’t want the Army to take off on any more adventures to exotic places, because the public reaction from the Vietnam War had made that kind of expedition very unpopular. So we retreated into the model of continental defence which culminated with the Dibb Review in 1986 and the subsequent White Paper. Bear in mind this is some 13 to 14 years after the end of the Vietnam War, so we had 13 or 14 years without any strategic guidance.
I think what is important today as we come to the end of our intensive phase of operations is that this strategic conversation needs to continue between government and the leadership of Defence, including, of course, the Chief of the Army. It is important that some kind of strategic vision is articulated, and that it describes the army that we want to have, why we require it and what it is for. It’s very important that those simple messages permeate society, not just the Army, but society at large.
The Australian people need to know why they’ve got an army and somebody needs to tell them. One of the things that I did when I took over as the Chief of the Army was go to the National Press Club and make an address live on television and say this is where I am taking the Army and this is why.
AAJ: How was this received?
Lieutenant General Hickling: With horror.
AAJ: Was that horror from inside or outside the organisation?
Lieutenant General Hickling: Both. The Defence Minister of the day issued a directive that no service chief would speak in public again without his written permission. There was a good deal of internal friction resulting from what I had said. This was because I was taking the Army in a different direction without going through the committee processes. What I said we needed to do was become an expeditionary army. Within six months, we mounted the first of the expeditions to East Timor, effectively ending the debate. I would have most likely been looking for a job had that not happened.
AAJ: Post Vietnam, how were the units structured? Did it focus on the jungle war the Army had fought in Vietnam?
Lieutenant General Hickling: Doctrine, and where possible structures, were essentially constructed around the Division in Battle series of pamphlets. There was a pamphlet, ‘Counter Revolutionary Warfare’, which included operations in the jungle. The rest was about conventional operations, in all kinds of terrain. My recollection was that a lot of TEWTS were run in South Eastern Australia, where the jungle is a bit thin on the ground. Therefore I don’t believe the Army was intellectually overly focused on jungle warfare. When you think about the environment in which the Army had to live, train and develop, finding a clear direction was very difficult and I think it took more than 20 years to emerge from that post Vietnam hangover. We did not know what kind of war the country wanted us to fight. So it wasn’t a question of training for the last war, it was trying to find out what kind of war we were supposed to work towards.
AAJ: With that in mind, when we deployed to East Timor and there was uncertainty about the type of operation, was the Army equipped and prepared to undertake conventional warfare?
Lieutenant General Hickling: I think so because we had—especially in the 3rd Brigade as the high readiness brigade at the time—guys working pretty hard on basic fighting skills. I reinforced it at every opportunity by saying to the formation commanders and COs to make sure that the soldiers can shoot, can hit what they’re shooting at, know their drills, and have got the basics right, because if we have to fight, that’s what wins. A corps attack is a couple of hundred section attacks together. If your section and platoon commanders are doing their jobs, you’re going to win. That was the line that we took and we did everything that we could to prepare for the eventuality that we were actually going to war.
When I say well prepared for Timor, we were prepared personally and organisationally; however, we were not prepared materially. We didn’t have the weapons, the equipment, the resources or the logistics. We were bloody lucky that it only lasted six months at the intense rate. The shortfalls were a result of the strategic drift that ran from 1973 through until 1996-97. To address this, in 1998 when I raised the readiness of 1 Brigade it was a huge gamble as I didn’t know where the money was going to come from. I just raised the level of readiness and told the brigade to get on with it. Pull out whatever you need and make it happen. It was a gamble. A good gamble—as it paid off.
A couple of days before the first troops deployed to Timor, I visited the soldiers with the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition. The politicians were extremely nervous. They thought that we were going off to war. The Prime Minister took me aside in the plane and said to me, ‘Can we actually do this thing?’ I said to him, ‘The soldiers, they will do the job Prime Minister, but there may be some body bags coming home. That won’t stop them doing the job though.’
AAJ: What was the Prime Minister’s reaction to this comment?
Lieutenant General Hickling: He was a bit stunned; suddenly I had taken that body bag reality to him. I said to him, ‘There is one thing that you and the leaders of the opposition can do for us which is more valuable than anything else. Make sure that these kids don’t come home with the kind of welcome that I got when I came home from Vietnam.’ Beazley joined the conversation at that point. They looked at each other and said that they’d do that—and they did. They were very careful from that point, right through the Iraq deployment, through to Afghanistan, that if the opposition disagreed with policy, they did not include the soldiers. From that point they would highlight the good work of the soldiers, and then debate the policy issue.
We visited 3 RAR in Darwin; they were going over by the HMAS Jervis Bay, the catamaran that the Navy had leased. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition were grabbed by the CO and I went to talk to a platoon sitting on the grass. Just before we left I said to them, ‘I want this message passed around the battalion. A lot of old men are going to be watching you on television. These are men who fought at Kapyong, and Maryang San, and Coral and Balmoral. They won the battle honours on your flag. Don’t let them down.’ Their eyes lit up and they got the message. I turned around and there was the Prime Minister who had been standing behind me listening to what I had to say. Later, on a flight down to Katherine, he said to me, ‘I never realised what generals did.’ I said, ‘That’s what they do, well, some of them anyway.’ The Army captured Prime Minister Howard, he arrived in Townsville and they captured him. It was continually re-enforced; every time the Army did things well, as they do, it raised his opinion a little bit higher.
AAJ: How did Army ensure its people were intellectually prepared for the next war?
Lieutenant General Hickling: I believe the Army has an outstanding training system. It wasn’t the question of preparing leadership but rather preparing leadership at every level. We have improved the system progressively, complicated it in some ways, simplified in others, but the system is still there. It is the system that is at the heart of the Army. This is a view that I had as the Training Commander. This view held when I was Land Commander and the Chief of Army; the Army lives in the school house, to use the old American phrase. The heart of the Army is in the training institutions. It is the quality of the work produced by the training institutions that leads to the quality of our officers and soldiers. It’s as simple as that. You can’t skimp on that. To my mind—and I used to say it to infuriate my colleague, the Land Commander at the time—‘you and all of your people are expendable. What’s not expendable in the organisation is Training Command’. The training establishments within Forces Command are the same deal. They are not expendable, everything else is expendable, but you need to maintain the capability to generate training and train soldiers, train leaders at all levels. Then you are going to have a successful army.
That’s what happened after Vietnam; we got on and trained and educated our people and refined the system over the years. It doesn’t look much now like it did then but the basic core, the golden thread of logic, as John Sanderson used to say, is still there. It’s all about taking people off the street and turning them into soldiers and officers. It’s about turning those soldiers into leaders and taking officers and turning them into senior commanders. This has to happen. My thesis was and still is people like brigade commanders, battalion commanders, brigade majors, divisional quartermasters, company commanders and section commanders need to be grown from the egg. You can’t go into the street with a cheque book and buy one. You can’t go into the street and see a fine looking lad and turn him into a battalion commander. You have to grow them, and if you are going to grow them you need a training system. That’s why in my mind the last thing that has to be cut to save money or costs is the training system.
AAJ: Did Army as a learning organisation capture the important lessons from the Vietnam War and transfer these lessons to training?
Lieutenant General Hickling: No, I don’t think it did adequately. The Vietnam War actually changed behaviour in the Army. The behavioural change was on learning some hard lessons. For example we didn’t have a Centre for Army Lessons. The lessons we learnt were reflected in the doctrine. But those lessons didn’t necessarily drive the doctrine.
Now that may or may not be a good thing. For example, I think there are many lessons that should be learnt from Afghanistan and Iraq, but having said that we must be very careful that these lessons do not distort the Army’s culture and its ability to conduct fundamental warfighting. The extent to which those lessons are absorbed and change behaviour has to be determined by how the Army sees itself fighting the next war.
The most difficult form of warfare that you can undertake is to my mind the mid intensity style conflict which also has to take place within a population. That’s as hard as it gets. A professional army must be able to do the hardest operations. Army must push forward with a notion that we will be fighting complex wars in the future; whether regional or extra regional, it doesn’t matter. They are always going to occur in places where we’d much rather not be.
Hopefully we will never have to fight those wars in the south-east corner of Australia. We are going to have to fight those wars in complex terrain within some other population. The trend seems to suggest the next war will follow those of the last few years. It will probably be more difficult as we will probably be up against a more credible enemy. Therefore we need to aim at that benchmark. The people framing alternative guidance around peacekeeping or low-intensity conflict don’t know what they are talking about. They don’t understand just how difficult the type of warfare that I am describing is. So for that reason we need to push back and ask them if they appreciate what they are asking.
AAJ: As a peacetime army, how did Army promote or undertake training to maintain motivation for service in order to retain personnel?
Lieutenant General Hickling: The problem is training is dependent on resources. You can make the training as interesting and as sexy and as exciting as you like if you have unlimited resources. If you haven’t got limitless resources—and the Army will never have limitless resources—you have then got to become creative. Leaders at every level from section commander up have got to start thinking about ways that they can make their training interesting so they don’t have their diggers wandering around painting the rocks white. That is the challenge now and was the challenge post Vietnam. We tried to make the training as interesting as we could, with varied success, but essentially if the soldiers are enjoying what they are doing and are challenged by what they are doing, you are going to keep them. The kinds of people that join the Army don’t join for comfort. They join for a challenge. They join because they want to see new things and want to do new things. So the challenge will become a leadership challenge like most other things. That’s easy to say that but it’s harder to do. Leaders are going to have to be encouraged and we are going to have to help them think creatively about their training.
The second part is maintaining standards. That’s what you are paying your senior NCOs for, your junior leadership in particular. Sergeants, company sergeant majors, company and squadron commanders and commanding officers: they’re the ones that have to insist on high standards all the time, and again, my experience is that soldiers like that! They might talk about enjoying slackness, but slack soldiers are not happy soldiers.
AAJ: In the wake of Vietnam there was an increase in female involvement in the Army. Are there any lessons that may be learnt in increasing the participation of women, especially with the recent removal of restrictions in combat roles?
Lieutenant General Hickling: We have certainly had our problems assimilating females into the Army. There is no denying that and it’s the same with the other services; maybe not the Air Force, but the Navy has definitely had the same sort of problems. You get people serving together, young people serving together in close proximity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and there are going to be issues. For example, when I was the Commandant of ADFA and people asked me what it was like being the Commandant, I likened it to sitting on the top of a volcano waiting for the lava enema. You know underneath that there are things going on, but it’s very hard to put your finger on exactly what they are. When you’ve got all these kids, most of them straight out of school, first time away from parental supervision, first time that they have money in their jeans, their hormones are growing a lot faster than their ‘grey matter’, so why are we surprised that there are issues and untidy things happening; and why do we have all of this sucking of teeth and carrying on every time something stupid happens. They’re young, they’re fit, they have access to alcohol and they don’t have 24 hour supervision, so you’re going to have problems.
In regards to the introduction of women within combat roles, there have always been women in the Army, but they have always been slightly separate. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that this started to change, so it was well after Vietnam. Essentially it becomes a leadership and management issue. You are never going to stop bad things happening because we are talking about human beings. What you have to do is minimise the occurrence, minimise the harm and deal with it properly. That won’t change and the same problems are going to be popping up ten, twenty, thirty years from now. If somebody says that they are going to eradicate this kind of behaviour, forget it. We are talking about people with excesses of testosterone and in some cases more testosterone than brains, therefore you are going to have problems. As long as we maintain the combat fitness standard, that’s all we need to worry about.
The girls that can pass the test—and good on them—they will do the job well. They will do the job of the forward scout along with the rest of our soldiers. As long as we don’t drop the standard then they will do very well.
AAJ: Are there any other issues or lessons that the Army faced in the years post Vietnam that you foresee the modern day Army is able to learn from?
Lieutenant General Hickling: I think we have talked about the great lessons about post Vietnam and I think the great lesson was, collectively, Army’s leadership has got to have a vision on where the Army needs to be to serve the nation, and what the Army needs to look like as a result of that. I think A21 was the Army’s attempt to craft a strategic vision for itself. I actually conducted the restructuring of the Army trials and abolished A21, because it was not an army that had an expeditionary capability, which is what I believed we needed. What we can learn from this is we need to be very careful about being constrained by guidance which is—and you can only say this in hindsight and I am not criticising anybody here—manifestly incorrect or inadequate. Army can’t accept that guidance and it has to be challenged. For example, in the late 1990s the government was starting to talk about a much more outward looking global engagement. The government wanted to have diplomatic weight in the region and beyond and therefore it seemed to me that an army that looked like A21, which was essentially a continental focus, didn’t fit the kind of aspiration that the government clearly had. Therefore, we challenged that strategic guidance; the culmination was the deployment to East Timor.
In regards to the Defence of Australia, I can understand the notion that by confining the Army to the continental defence of Australia and letting the Air Force and the Navy worry about the blue water, more resources could be freed up for major equipment. This conveniently does away with any notion of expeditionary forces. There’s a couple of problems with a so-called ‘defence of Australia strategy’.
Firstly, it ignores the fact that every deployment away from the Army’s bases is an expedition—and there are plenty of places in this country that are remote from the major bases.
Secondly, the Army is not supporting the defence of Australia’s wider interests if it’s not capable of moving off the shore. Australia has lots of interests, locally and globally, and those interests are not served by only having a large proportion of your defence force anchored to the continent. That in turn raises potential threats elsewhere. My view is that the Army still has a place in the defence of Australia and its interests go beyond the continent of Australia. If the Army is incapable of operating beyond the continent of Australia then we are unnecessarily limiting the extent to which Australia’s interests can be protected. The point is, do you really want to fight someone in your own backyard?
That’s my take on continental defence. It is an attractive proposition when times are hard, because we can say we are going to cut the Army and say we will divert money to capital equipment—which is much easier to produce than a fighting force that takes decades to develop, not months, weeks or years. This is complex, therefore it is easier for many academics to grasp the concepts of command of the sea or command of air space. It’s a much easier and less complex concept to get your skull around. So for those that are much more academically lazy, it’s a far more attractive proposition.
That’s my view.
About the Interviewee
Lieutenant General FJ (Frank) Hickling, AO, CSC (RETD)
Lieutenant General Frank Hickling was commissioned into the Royal Australian Engineers on 14 June 1961. His regimental appointments have included troop, squadron and regimental level command tours of duty in both field and construction units, as well as an instructional appointment at the School of Military Engineering. His overseas tours of duty have included service in Papua New Guinea, Sabah, Malaysia and in South Vietnam.
Following attendance at the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham (UK) and the Army Command and Staff College, Queenscliff, he served in Grade One and Grade Two staff appointments at the Department of Defence (Army Office). He commanded the 2nd/3rd Field Engineer Regiment and then served on the staff of Headquarters 1st Division, before attending the Joint Services Staff College in 1983.
Lieutenant General Hickling was a member of the Directing Staff of the Joint Services Staff College and was then appointed Director of Plans – Army at Army Office. In 1988 he attended the National Defence College of India, before being appointed to command 1st Brigade in 1989 and 1990. He assumed command of Northern Command in December 1990, an appointment he held until he was promoted to major general and appointed General Officer Commanding Training Command in July 1992. He was appointed Commandant, Australian Defence Force Academy in March 1995. He was the Land Commander Australia from May 1996 to June 1998. He was the Chief of Army from June 1998 to July 2000.
Since retiring from the Army, he has undertaken part-time work as a consultant and voluntary work on behalf of the community.
