Cam Slater: The Defence Force Is Bleeding Out

The Defence Force is in crisis. It’s actually worse than that: if it were an accident victim being triaged, it’d be classified as unlikely to live, regardless of what care it received. That’s how bad it is, as we will demonstrate to readers with leaked internal documents from the NZ Army.

The NZ Herald discussed how parlous the situation is in a recent podcast:

The New Zealand Defence Force is facing an “unbelievable surge” in people leaving the organisation.

Speaking to The Front Page podcast, freelance journalist Pete McKenzie says that while the country commemorates Anzac Day, the Defence Force finds itself in a state of crisis.

“Right now, we’re seeing attrition rates of upwards of 10 or 15 per cent, and upwards of 20 or 30 per cent for some of the most skilled people in the organisation,” McKenzie says.

“That’s just not a rate that the organisation can sustain.”

McKenzie detailed many of his findings in a recent cover story for North & South magazine, which canvassed the myriad reasons that Defence Force staffers are leaving in droves.

“We’re seeing people who can’t afford to stay in the organisation and others who are getting offered tens of thousands of dollars to leave,” McKenzie says.

“What that means for the Defence Force is profound. It means that if it was asked to do a long-term peace-keeping mission in the Pacific, for example, it probably wouldn’t be able to do that, according to the people I spoke to. That’s a really fundamental expectation that we have of our Defence Force.”

Even local obligations could prove a challenge if these staffing issues aren’t addressed appropriately.

“If another earthquake were to hit or if more cyclones were to strike or if we saw increased flooding of the sort that we saw earlier this year, the Defence Force would really find it tough to go into those regions and to help the people who would otherwise rely on that.

“Effectively, we’re seeing an organisation that, for all that our country relies on it for, is struggling to walk and chew gum.”

NZ Herald

Sadly, the fourteen-minute Herald podcast doesn’t really get into just how bad the situation is.

Fortunately, The BFD can reveal just how bad the situation is. For example, there are now fewer than 1400 privates in the entire Army.


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The numbers shown in the slide above shows that we no longer effectively have an army. As you can see, the Army is very top-heavy. There are 31 full colonels for just 33,373 non-commissioned soldiers. Not even a single full battalion is able to be fielded. The numbers we can see are across all Corps. The capability of the Army is now actually embarrassing.

The Army and indeed the Defence Force in general have lost any war-fighting ability as they’ve pursued an increasingly woke agenda. There is even talk that promotion to Lt Colonel will now require fluency in te reo.

The attrition level is appalling:


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The rate of attrition is accelerating, and it has got so bad that the Chief of Defence, Kevin Short is in a blind panic, as a recent email to all Defence Force personnel from him shows.


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Desperation is a stinky cologne, and large one-off payments in an attempt to get people to stay reeks of desperation. While his adherence to woke culture by use of Maori greetings and making sure we know his pronouns is admirable for political classes, it does nothing to staunch the flow of people leaving the military. You can see why he is panicking from another leaked slide that shows the value of the losses:


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The Defence Force and the Army in particular are in drastic decline, with demoralised troops who are poorly paid, and equipment purchases that were an expensive waste of money when not even half of items bought have even been used (LAVs), or equipment is obsolete or just plain not fit for purpose (NH90 helicopters).

The government is spending moonbeams on new planes, and frigate replacement will be a big issue soon. We are not living in a ‘benign strategic environment’ any longer, with Russia waging war on neighbours, China becoming increasingly bellicose and our traditional allies ramping up defence spending. We spend nowhere near what is considered a minimum spending level of 2% of GDP on defence. We have become a laughing stock and defence bludgers.

But let’s see if the Defence Force will deny the existence of these leaked documents. I suspect they will. Just like the Police denied that the Interpol emails we leaked were authentic, until they couldn’t.

Our Defence Force is nobbled and crippled, beset with woke dogma, and unable to sustain itself.

Sadly, this situation has developed under successive governments, both Labour and National. Something is going to have to give.

To put this in perspective, Fiji has 4040 active personnel, for a population of under 1 million people. Our Army has 4133 soldiers and is shrinking.

Do you feel embarrassed about our Army now?

At the current rate of attrition, we will soon be putting NZDF on cenotaphs across the nation.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE