The Army has a new secret weapon but it won't be used in warfare. Instead, it's destined for entertainment.
Hidden under a draped black cover inside the main judging pavilion at Canberra's Summernats street machine festival, "Matilda" will be unveiled to the Australian public for the first time on Friday night.
Project Matilda has been four years in the making and was driven off the back of the Army's multi-billion dollar fleet switch from the British Land Rover brand to the four wheel drive Mercedes.
This out-of-left-field recruitment strategy has its origins back in 2005 when the-then Chief of Army, General Peter Leahy, had his attention drawn to a critical shortage of diesel mechanics to keep the defence forces' armoured wheels turning.
The plan was to make a greasy-hands career in the Army more attractive by showing that recruits in diesel engineering have the opportunity to do things which car-mad young men and women might consider more exciting than marching, eating in a mess hall and peering into the dirty engine bay of a tank.
Team Army and its veteran specialist burn-out truck Armygeddon - a Land Rover which was damaged during its active service in Timor and was headed for the scrapyard before its rescue - was the result.
As a tyre-smoking recruitment tool, Armygeddon as been a huge success and recently joined the 32-race national V8 Supercar schedule. However, time now has been called on the Land Rover-badged burn-out car in order to wheel out a brand which matches that in common service.
The base vehicle for the project was easy enough to acquire as a number of G-wagons were flogged to near destruction as part of the fleet selection process at the Army's proving ground. All that was needed was a donor engine with generous quantities of horsepower.
When a promised Mercedes-Benz V12 performance engine didn't eventuate, the next alternative was something much more Army-like and highly unusual - a two-stroke diesel engine taken out of a light armoured amphibious vehicle.
"The engine is a twin-turbo, supercharged V6 and has had a lot of modifications but that's as much as I can tell you until Friday," the project manager for Team Army, Major Graham Anderson said.
"We chose a diesel engine because it's more relevant to what our trainees are working on every day," Major Anderson explained.
The Team Army program has been such a success for enlisting diesel mechanics that there's now young men and women on the defence recruitment waiting list at a time when the same skills are in a critical supply across the civilian population and there's fierce competition among businesses for the best young apprentices.
The trainees are all based out of the Bandiana base in Albury-Wodonga. Once they finish their apprenticeships and get posted to bases around the country, Team Army then has a pool of volunteers it can call upon as its semi-trailer filled with cars rolls its way around the country.
Innovative marketing to attract the next generation of soldiers isn't just confined to fast cars.
The artillery arm of the Army is now using drone racing competitions, including the nationals held in Canberra in October, as a recruiting strategy to lure talented young gamers into the ranks of the new Unmanned Aerial Vehicle regiment - the 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment - based in Brisbane.
The gates open to Summernats 33 in Canberra on Thursday at 11am. At noon, thousands of cars will flood down Northbourne Avenue for the City Cruise.
