Australia’s Century-Long Tradition of Improving Things That Didn’t Need Improving
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Australia’s defence procurement philosophy can be summarised in six words: “Yes, but have you considered modifications?”
This proud tradition, it turns out, did not begin with the $1 billion Seasprite helicopter that couldn’t fly in bad weather, or the MRH-90 Taipan that was retired early and partially buried in the desert, or the M113 armoured personnel carrier that was upgraded so thoroughly it ended up unfit for combat. No, it stretches back at least to February 1915, when a New Zealand inventor named Captain J.F. Roberts demonstrated his travelling field kitchen at Broadmeadows Camp near Melbourne.
The Roberts cooker was a masterpiece of practical engineering. It had been exhaustively trialled in New Zealand, adopted as the sole field kitchen by the New Zealand Defence Department, and could feed 600 men from a unit designed for 250. Officers at Broadmeadows were full of praise. Captain Roberts was understandably pleased.
Then the Australian Defence Department got their hands on it.
Rather than use the proven two-vehicle limber-and-cooker arrangement, they mounted everything on a single lorry — facing the wrong way round, with the furnace doors at the front instead of the back, the oven doors blocked by the brake mechanism, the springs removed, the cook’s workspace reduced, and the elegant one-man turning system eliminated. Captain Roberts, with the restrained diplomacy of a man watching his life’s work being reassembled by a committee, observed politely that the Department had “not given his cooker a fair chance.”
Before our Australian neighbours bear the full weight of this gentle mockery, however, honesty compels several admissions.
To be fair, and fairness demands we acknowledge this, Australia has an enormous and capable military, and plenty of procurement decisions have worked out perfectly well. The F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet purchases were sound and delivered on time. The C-17 Globemaster heavy airlift fleet was delivered on schedule and within budget — a fact so remarkable it was specifically noted in defence reviews as an exception worth celebrating. The MH-60R Seahawk, acquired off-the-shelf from the United States, has been a straightforward success with the Royal Australian Navy. The M1A1 Abrams purchase gave the Australian Army a world-class main battle tank with minimal fuss. The P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft has been broadly regarded as a capable and appropriate choice. When Australia buys things sensibly and resists the urge to improve them into dysfunction, it does so very well indeed.
The failures, however, share a depressingly consistent profile. The Seasprite was a sound helicopter, but the decision to add an entirely new, untested, and uniquely Australian avionics suite was a mistake. New Zealand bought essentially the same aircraft without the bespoke modifications, and it worked fine, to the point where New Zealand later bought the helicopters Australia had abandoned and operated them successfully. The Collins-class submarine took a capable Swedish design, substantially enlarged it, mandated local construction through a newly created industry with no submarine-building experience, and integrated an American combat system never previously used in a submarine, producing boats that were, for years, described as “noisy as a rock concert” and that sometimes had five out of six vessels simultaneously out of service. The MRH-90 Taipan added local construction requirements and Australian-specific modifications to a European helicopter that was already challenging to support, ultimately producing a fleet so expensive to maintain and so unreliable in service that it was retired early and replaced by a modern version of the very Black Hawk it had been bought to supersede.
The pattern is not that Australia can’t buy equipment. It’s that Australia can’t resist improving equipment that already works — adding bespoke avionics, local-industry content requirements, novel combat systems, unique carriage arrangements, and Australian-specific modifications until the thing costs twice as much, arrives a decade late, and occasionally can’t open its oven doors while moving.
The impulse to tinker is not, however, uniquely Australian. It is arguably a standard feature of any peacetime military, where budgets exist, time is available, and there is no urgent operational reality to impose discipline on the requirements process. When armies are not actively fighting, the temptation to refine, improve, and customise is almost irresistible, and the consequences of over-engineering remain comfortably theoretical rather than immediately fatal.
Closer to home, New Zealand is not immune to the siren call of “Yes, but have you considered modifications?” We have had our own moments of requirements-creep, our own projects that drifted from elegant simplicity toward expensive complexity, and our own defence procurement decisions that looked better on paper than in practice. Those who live in glass houses, and so forth.
Which brings us back to Captain Roberts and why his story is something more than an amusing footnote. In February 1915, the modification of his field kitchen was an inconvenience. A well-designed piece of equipment was made awkward and less effective, but meals were still cooked, and soldiers were still fed. The cost of the institutional habit of improvement for its own sake was modest.
In an era of sharply rising strategic uncertainty, where the comfortable assumption that procurement timelines can stretch across decades is being stripped away with some speed, the Roberts cooker story carries a more pointed message. Programmes that might once have been refined over ten years of peacetime tinkering may now need to deliver capability in three or four years. Equipment that works adequately off the shelf may be considerably more valuable than equipment that works brilliantly in theory but spends years being modified to meet requirements that keep changing.
The lesson Captain Roberts could not quite bring himself to state directly in front of the assembled officers at Broadmeadows in 1915, that a good thing rendered complicated by committee is no longer a good thing, may be among the more important pieces of advice available to defence procurement officials in Wellington, Canberra, and well beyond, right now.
Some lessons from 1915 are worth taking seriously today. This might be one of them.
Sometimes the sharpest insights hide in plain sight. This cheeky two-page RNZASC newsletter from 1978—penned by Captain R. A. Armstrong—is cheeky by design, poking fun at mess pecking orders and flirting with the idea that the Soviets might feed their troops better. Still, it also captures a valuable moment in time. Read against what we now know, it lets us compare three things at once:
New Zealand’s still-serviceable but largely 1940s-era field kitchens and improvisation;
the Soviets’ purpose-built, highly mobile galley trucks and bakeries that promised hot meals at manoeuvre tempo; and
how both systems actually performed once reality set in—from NZ’s 1980s push to modernise ration science and packaging, to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, where interdicted convoys turned elegant kitchen fleets back into tins, biscuits, and tea.
Crucially, this snapshot also foreshadows New Zealand’s hardware catch-up in the following decade, when the Army modernised its field kitchens with state-of-the-art German Kärcher TFK-250 field-kitchen trailers—a step-change from veteran cookers to modular, hygienic, road-mobile capability. In short, the article is satire with teeth: a Cold War snapshot that helps us separate platform glamour from supply-chain grit, and headline claims from what cooks could really deliver day after day.
SO YOU THINK OUR CATERING IS LOUSY?
By Capr D.A Armstrong
A recent article in the “Army Logistician”, the official magazine of the United States Army logistics, compared the Soviet Army’s catering services and attitudes to those of the US Army. Several interesting points were made which indicate some marked differences between Soviet and Allied thinking on the subject of feeding their respective armies. If you are thinking of defecting, but enjoy your “nosh”, perhaps you had better read on.
The first interesting point is that, despite the so-called classless attitudes of the USSR, better food is a privilege of rank in the Soviet military, with the conscripted rifleman being the lowest in the pecking order. (No prizes for guessing who gets the best food!) NCOs receive more meat than enlisted mem, while officers have a greater variety of meat, eggs, dairy foods, fruit, and vegetables. Some soldiers need to receive food or money from home to supplement their military diets. Many enlisted men suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies because of the lack of a variety of foods, especially vegetables, in their diets.
A typical daily menu for enlisted men is shown below.
Compare that to our rationing system, where generals and private soldiers receive exactly the same monetary allowance per day for the purchase of rations. Because of the different feeding patterns in officers’ and junior ranks’ messes, our soldiers often receive better food than the officers, although standards of service may differ between the two messes.
In combat, food supplies take the lowest priorities of all items supplied through the logistic channels. Ammunition and fuel supply priorities are not relaxed even if the troops have to forage for their rations. It must be very difficult to fire weapons or operate vehicles in the middle of a Russian winter when your stomach thinks your throat has been cut, and your navel keeps knocking on your backbone.
Within garrisons and camps, Soviet forces supplement their ration supplies by running farms for livestock, rabbits, vegetables, and poultry. Soldiers are detailed to work in the unit’s garden and to care for the animals. Where camps do not run their own farms, a unit commander may make an agreement with a neighbouring collective farm to provide soldiers on Sundays to assist with labour in exchange for foodstuffs. (And we complain about the odd maintenance days in camps).
The quantity and quality of food received by the Soviet soldier depend on a number of factors. The most important is the regimental or garrison commander’s concern for and understanding of the nutritional needs of the troops. Supplies of rations are the responsibility of the regimental mess officer. He procures the foodstuffs from division or area headquarters, and the local market.
SOVIET ARMY DAILY MENU FOR OTHER RANKS
Breakfast:
White bread
2 Slices
Black bread
1 Slice
Butter/Margarine
20g
Sugar
3 Cubes
Tea
Unlimited
Kasha*/Potatoes
300g
Fish/Meat
50g
Midday:
Soup
400g
Kasha with Meat
400g
White bread
1 Slice
Black bread
2 Slices
Fruit Compote
200g
Dinner:
Fish
100g
Potatoes/Kasha
300g
White bread
2 Slices
Black bread
2 Slice
Sugar
3 Cubes
Tea
Unlimited
Butter
20g
* Kasha is rice, buck wheat, wheat or oat porridge with salt, pepper, onion and fat.
Soviet military nutrition norms are similar to most Allied countries with a weight ratio of 1:1:5 for protein, fat and carbohydrates respectively. It is significant that no other nutrients are tabulated to ensure that all the nutrient requirements are met. By comparison, the New Zealand weight ratio of protein, fat and carbohydrate is roughly 2:0.5:4.5. (We have a far greater ratio of meat and dairy products.)
In normal feeding, the Soviets provide about 25 per cent of the calorie requirement at breakfast, 45 per cent at midday and 30 per cent for the evening meal. Usually, our meals reverse the midday and evening meal calorie contents.
As far as cooking in the field goes, the Russians are streets ahead of us in terms of equipment. The concept is that field kitchens and bakeries must keep pace with the troops they support while still providing meals on schedule. Since 1965, the Soviets have introduced four field kitchens and a field bakery which can cook on the move. With the exception of a West German kitchen truck, the Soviet Union is the only country with field kitchens mounted on trucks and tracked vehicles. These kitchens are better able to keep up with fast-moving combat forces and can cover a greater variety of rough ground than even the new US Army trailer-mounted kitchen. (Mind you, they haven’t seen the kitchens we mounted on the M818 semi-trailers for Ex Truppenant. Perhaps we are also unique?)
Two of the kitchens are known to provide physical protection in chemical, biological and radiological environments. The tracked vehicle-mounted kitchen (similar to an M113 Command Post vehicle) is hermetically sealed and is probably outfitted with a filtering ventilation system.
Makes the old sheet of canvas off the side of an RI Bedford seem pretty archaic, doesnt it?
The conclusions to be reached from reading this article are.
All RNZASC cooks should defect to the Soviets. They could no doubt use our knowledge, skills and comradeship, and we could certainly use their field cooking equipment.
Any soldier who enjoys even basic food should not even consider defecting to the Soviets. Officers, on the other hand, may be more persuaded. although the promotion and security of employment prospects are not as bright
RNZASC Newsletter No 8 July 1978
What NZ cooks actually worked with in 1978
Despite a professional corps of cooks, much NZ Army field catering kit in the late 1970s still traced its lineage to the Second World War and early 1950s:
Wiles trailer kitchens (1940s-era): still around in numbers into the late 1970s; robust but hardly “mobile ops” by modern standards.
US-pattern ranges (M-37 → M-59): the ABCA-standard M-37 (1950s) and its successor the M-59 (from the late-1960s) framed much Allied field cooking practice; NZ experience mirrored this long tail of legacy equipment.[1]
Armstrong’s quip about slinging a canvas off a Bedford tailgate wasn’t far off the mark: mobility came from trucks and improvisation, not from purpose-built kitchen vehicles. The upshot was sound, honest food—but with slower start-up, more weather exposure, and more manpower to erect, fuel, and run.
What the Soviets were advertising: mobility first
Armstrong contrasted our “Bedford and canvas” with Soviet kitchen trucks and tracked galley vehicles able to cook on the move, some even CBRN-protected. Contemporary Western handbooks and studies back him up:
Soviet materiel tables put kitchen trucks and mobile field bakeries inside divisional service units, not as bolt-ons—so hot food was designed to keep pace with manoeuvre.[2]
Cold-War analyses describe powered PAK-200 and KP-130 kitchens, with tracked/van variants and filtration for contaminated environments—exactly the “streets ahead” mobility Armstrong flagged.[3]
The kitchen of the family PAK-200 on the chassis ZIL-131ю Photo Russianarms.ru
Thermal kitchen unit PAK-200. At the top you can see the lids of the boilers, below – the firebox. Photo Dishmodels.ru
Bottom line (1978): on paper, the Soviet field-feeding platforms were more mobile, better integrated, and harder to knock off the timetable than our trailer-and-tent solutions.
Scales, menus, and who ate what
Armstrong summarised a Soviet conscript’s day heavy on bread and kasha, with small meat portions, tea “unlimited,” and rank privileges inflating the officers’ variety. He also cited a Soviet macro ratio of 1:1:5 (protein: fat: carbohydrate) versus a NZ pattern nearer 2:0.5:4.5—more meat/dairy in the Kiwi diet. (Those figures are his 1978 comparison, not a NZ regulation.) In Soviet doctrine, ration “norms” were calorie-based, bread was central, and a “dry ration” existed for when hot feeding wasn’t possible; a new one-meal combat ration appears in Soviet sources around 1978–80—again aligning with the article’s timeframe.[4]
By contrast, NZ was already edging toward modernisation on menu science—even if the pots were old. By 1985 the Army commissioned a formal redesign of the One-Man 24-hour ration, targeting ~3,678 kcal, adjusting for vitamin losses over shelf life, and—crucially—surveying soldiers about what they actually ate (and binned). High dissatisfaction with the then-current pack and heavy discard rates drove reform of menus, beverages, and packaging.[5]
Field reality check (1970s–80s NZ): long exercises in Singapore/Malaysia and NZ’s alpine winters meant weight on the back, wet/cold heat loss, sleep disruption—and the need for rations that were palatable, quick, and resilient. That lived experience shows up clearly in the Army’s 1980s ration-pack redesign work.[6]
Priorities in combat supply
Armstrong wrote that in Soviet practice, ammunition and fuel took precedence over food when push came to shove. The formal record shows why: Soviet Rear Services concepts after WW2 put huge emphasis on mobility and survivability of POL and ammunition flows, with kitchen/bakery assets nested inside that machine. In other words, feeding rode in the same convoy system dominated by POL and ammo.[7]
What the Soviet soldier actually carried (c. 1975–82)
Post-1945 Soviet feeding relied on:
Organised field kitchens.
group-feeding sets for squad cooking,
“mobile” individual rations when kitchens couldn’t keep up.
The “individual” ration wasn’t very individual. Early sets leaned on large tins—fine for crews to share, poor for dismounted troops. Specialist units often received ad-hoc mixes (e.g., East German E-Päckchen biscuits, emergency bars, malted milk and vitamin tablets, iodine water tabs, and condensed milk tubes—even commercial West European supplies), which were useful but never standardised.
A: tin of tushonka (fat-heavy), ~100 g crackers, small cheese tin, tea, sugar.
B: Two tins of kasha with meat plus crackers or plastic-sealed bread.
C: tin of stew/meat, tin of fish or vegetables/fruit, crackers, tea, sugar/drink mix.
Portable on paper, these packs were monotonous and underpowered for altitude, cold and hard marching.
The 1980 response: “Improved/Mountain” 24-hour pack + supplements. Spring 1980 introduced tins of meat dishes (e.g., chicken-and-dumplings, beef-and-vegetables), instant kasha (buckwheat/oatmeal, meat/fruit-flavoured), tea, and sugar—sometimes with early bar-coded labels. Critically, the basic pack hovered around ~1,200 kcal, so commanders were authorised supplements to scale intake:
Biscuits/wafers (~500 kcal), hard sweets and sugar (granulated or tablets).
“Army Loaves” high-nutrition crackers; extra tinned meat, jam/honey, condensed soup; a daily vitamin sweet.
Implementation varied—sometimes excellently, more often poorly—but the logic was sound: use supplements to tune calories to mission and climate.[8]
When Afghanistan stripped off the gloss (1979–89)
The Afghan war is where Armstrong’s wry “I wonder what it’s really like for the Russian soldier” meets evidence. Once the invasion forces surged past 100,000 men, convoy-based logistics over two treacherous mountain MSRs became a running battle of ambushes, mines, and blown bridges. Soviet responses included helicopter lift, pipelines down the Salang route, fixed security posts, and longer, better-armed convoys. Hot feeding kept pace when it could; when it couldn’t, soldiers fell back on dry rations and whatever reached them through interdiction. The system survived—but food variety, regularity, and morale inevitably rode the same roller-coaster as fuel, water, and spares.[9]
What’s for lunch? A typical Afghan outpost menu (c. 1979–89)
Afghanistan “eating out” ranged from canteens to mounted and dismounted operations. Outposts—typically 10–20 soldiers—sat at the hard end: weekly resupply, minimal refrigeration, soldiers doing the cooking. Long-life items dominated; variety was limited.
A day on an outpost looked like:
Breakfast: kasha with a little meat/fish, bread, and (rarely) butter—small-batch cooking could taste better than garrison fare.
Lunch: nominally soup + main (macaroni/potato/kasha) + “salad” (often sauerkraut). In practice, this collapsed to one hot main—mashed potato or pasta with tinned meat—because water, vegetables and time were scarce.
Dinner: much the same as lunch; repetition was regular.
Drinks: tea, coffee, and cocoa were standard.
Bread & extras: base bakeries supplied nearby posts; remote sites got crackers/biscuits and sometimes flour for flatbreads. Condensed milk was the near-universal dessert/morale item. Limited local purchasing occurred only when security allowed.[10]
Even excellent mobile kitchens cannot defeat interdiction and distance alone—once convoy tempo slips, menus shrink to what rides and stores well. It also explains the premium soldiers place on palatability and speed—the very factors NZ targeted in its 1980s ration redesign
Purpose-built kitchen trucks/vans; tracked variants; mobile field bakeries.
Mobility & protection
Vehicle-towed or improvised; weather-exposed; slower to set.
Cook-on-the-move; better cross-country; some CBRN-protected kitchens.
Feeding concept
Unit-level kitchens; hot meals when set up; heavy on improvisation.
Timed hot meals from integral kitchen assets; dry ration when needed.
Breadth of diet
More meat/dairy in practice; equality of ration money across ranks (per Armstrong).
Bread- and kasha-centric; rank-based variety favoured NCOs/officers (per Armstrong).
Doctrine & priorities
Practical but kit-limited; modernisation brewing (ration-pack science by mid-80s).
Rear Services designed for manoeuvre; POL/ammo priority shapes what food arrives, when.
What changed after 1978—for both sides
Soviet reality check: Afghanistan exposed just how hard it was to protect long, road-bound supply chains—even for food and water. The Soviets adapted (escorts, pipelines, more airlift), but “guerrilla-controlled logistics tempo” was a real thing.[11]
NZ step-change: Through the mid-1980s, the Army professionalised the ration—calories, vitamins over shelf life, soldier acceptability, packaging weight and noise—and began phasing in newer field cookers (Kärcher TFK-250 field-kitchen trailers) to replace Wiles trailers and M-37/M-59 ranges. The rollout was uneven, so for a time, menu science ran ahead of hardware, with many still cooking on veteran kit.[12]
So—how did the “Russian scale” compare to the NZ scale?
Using Armstrong’s 1978 snapshot: the Soviet scale he quotes (roughly 1:1:5) aimed for calories cheaply with bread/kasha and small meat portions, shading more variety up the rank ladder; the NZ pattern he cites (about 2:0.5:4.5) reflected a higher meat/dairy intake and, crucially, equal ration money across ranks—even if mess practice meant the plates sometimes looked different. Later Soviet sources note a late-1970s combat ration meal and a formal dry ration for when hot kitchens couldn’t keep up—consistent with Armstrong’s comparison.
Conclusion
On the 1978 scoreboard, the Soviets looked ahead on platforms: integrated kitchen trucks, some with CBRN protection, promised mobility NZ’s trailers and tent lines could not match. But that advantage was conditional. Once lines of communication were contested (as in Afghanistan), menus collapsed to what could ride and survive—just like fuel and spares—while NZ, for all its veteran cookers, spent the 1980s fixing the contents problem (calories, vitamins, soldier acceptability, weight/noise in the pack) and then closed the platform gap by introducing Kärcher TFK-250 field-kitchen trailers. The net effect: Soviet kitchens won on paper and on roads they controlled; NZ kitchens won fewer style points in the 1970s but fed reliably—and, by the late 1980s, paired modern rations with modern kitchen platforms, delivering a balanced, resilient feed system that travelled and performed at the tempo the Army required.
[2] US Army, “FM 100-2-3 the Soviet army: troops, organization and equipment,” Washington: GPO (1991).
[3] Gilbert H Edmondson, “Logistics: The Soviets’ Nemesis to Conventional War in Central Europe?” (1989).
[4] Edmondson, “Logistics: The Soviets’ Nemesis to Conventional War in Central Europe?”
[5] Bing David Soo, “Development of nutritionally balanced and acceptable army ration packs: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Product Development at Massey University” (Massey University, 1987).
[6] Soo, “Development of nutritionally balanced and acceptable army ration packs: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Product Development at Massey University.”
[7] Edmondson, “Logistics: The Soviets’ Nemesis to Conventional War in Central Europe?.”; Army, “FM 100-2-3 the Soviet army: troops, organization and equipment.”
[11] Edmondson, “Logistics: The Soviets’ Nemesis to Conventional War in Central Europe?”
[12] Soo, “Development of nutritionally balanced and acceptable army ration packs: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Product Development at Massey University.”
