Three decades after Australia took part in Operation Solace – a peacekeeping mission in Somalia – Governor-General David Hurley has reflected on the challenges he faced commanding the 1st Battalion.
Mr Hurley faced “unpleasant tasks” as his Battalion was instructed to create a secure environment for NGOs to help them deliver food into contested regions.
“We did test our doctrine and we found that although we had trained a lot in Australia and we were deployed long distances in Australia, we hadn’t really set ourselves up properly logistically to support an operation that distance away from Australia,” he told Sky News Australia. The Governor-General said the soldiers learned “a lot of lessons” in the ten-year period leading up to the East Timor deployment in 1999.
“Many of the people who served in my battalion then, or in the other organisations that were in Somalia, were in senior positions by the time we went into Timor.”
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