NSW: Military leaders must have compassion - Cosgrove

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NSW: Military leaders must have compassion - Cosgrove

By Billy Freeman

SYDNEY, Aug 22 AAP - Their obvious job may be to fight wars and kill the enemy, butthe most important quality in a military leader remains compassion, Australian DefenceForce chief General Peter Cosgrove said today.

General Cosgrove told a human relations conference in Sydney the one quality a militaryleader must have above all others is compassion.

"The quality I really expect in a leader, especially a military leader, is a streakof compassion a mile wide," General Cosgrove said.

He said the bloodbath at Gallipoli in 1915 and other World War I battle losses hadshaped Australia's military outlook.

"I think Australian military culture has been deeply affected by the slaughter on WorldWar I battlefields, and I think we all learn at our military grandfathers' knee as wegrow up through the service, about this.

"I can assure you that if anybody in the military sees me now as a sort of grandfatherlyfigure, it is this sense of compassion, rooted in our history, that I seek to have themunderstand."

He said he hoped that anyone who would become a leader in the military or elsewherealready had an inbuilt sense of compassion.

"What we seek to do is tell them, `it's okay to show it ... in fact, it's not justokay, it's mandatory to display it'," he said.

General Cosgrove, 56, told the forum he had grown up in "an Australian Army environment",as his father was a soldier.

After graduating from Duntroon Military College in 1968 General Cosgrove was soon sent,"like many young men of my generation", to the Vietnam War.

After many years as a decorated soldier but relatively anonymous to the public, hewas catapulted into the spotlight as the leader of the Australian-led peacekeeping forcein East Timor in 1999.

The way young soldiers were prepared for combat had changed dramatically over the courseof his career, General Cosgrove said.

"We ... are now preparing our leaders to operate in a complex environment that canbe uncertain, volatile and ambiguous, and I wouldn't have described Vietnam that way,"

he said.

"I would have said that as wars go, that was pretty simple, one knew what one had to do.

"Increasingly ... young officers are in a situation where their selection of a particularcourse of action could have important consequences."

General Cosgrove said he could sympathise with the young soldier of today shocked bythe confronting reality of the battlefield.

"I know instinctively how superficially confident, inwardly uncertain and scared youngmen and women in those leadership positions can be," he said.

AAP wf/kbw/sco/de

KEYWORD: COSGROVE