New Operational Service Medal for Australia

[Boots]

Australian honours and Awards, have just released news that a New medal will be released. The Operational Serivce Medal. This will replace the two medals the Australian Active Service Medal (for war like service) and the Australian Service Medal. The new medal will be issued with a ribbon corresponding to the campaign or theatre it was earnt in. Any other campaigns that a serviceman goes to will recieve the same medal again but with that campaigns ribbon.

This way our goverment only has to issue one medal instead of the current practice of making and issuing a serviceman an AASM or ASM with clasp and the corresponding campaign medal with it. MMmmmm efficiency or penny pinching???

for further details see

http://digital.realviewtechnologies.com/default.aspx?xml=defencenews_army.xml

or

http://www.defence.gov.au/medals/

Cheers Boots

[Chris Boonzaier]

Welll... now the big question.....

How will it look? Australians threw in the towel when it came to trying to design good looking medals some time ago... are they going to make another go at good looking medals???

Best

XChris

[Mervyn Mitton]

Boots - thanks for telling us about this change. I would say 'penny pinching' - it will look very strange to have - say - 5 identical

medals and ribbons that will disappear into the background.

Rather like the Zulu King - he wears five identical medals (we don't lknow what for ! ) and they just have plain coloured ribbons.

Mervyn

[Mervyn Mitton]

http://gmic.co.uk/uploads/monthly_08_2012/post-6209-0-60055100-1343831463.jpgclick to enlarge

[Boots]

You blokes are dead right, it will look a tad daft, and I do unfortunatley agree that that as a nation our medal designing skills lack, perhaps decent craftsmen, if fact as a recipient of several of our medals, and a user of our currency, I would say more thought, design and detail goes into our 50c peices!!!

Cheers Boots

[JPL]

Canada did the same when they created their OSM back in 2010, and at present there are 6 different ribbons for this medal. If one looks back, the UN and recently NATO have been using the same medal, but with a different ribbon, so this type of practice has been around for some time. Personally, I don't agree with this practice.

Reading the document on the Australian OSM, I see that Australia has already identified 11 Operations, so does this mean that we'll soon have 11 new Australian ribbons coming out shortly? BTW, I'm a ribbon collector, so this would certainly be good news for me...

Jean-Paul