Defence Force manoeuvres

The budgetary balance is a headache for defence establishments in any democracy because voters rarely see defence spending as a priority. This is a challenge in all liberal democracies, but more than usually so in Australia because of the remarkable security we enjoy from the US alliance, and the enormous difficulties for any foe making a significant assault on our shores.

The intractable problem of conflicting inter-service priorities, and the asymmetries in costs between the capital equipment needs of the different services, must be added to the budgetary shortfall induced by voter insouciance.

These factors, combined with the defence bureaucracy’s dysfunctional features, conspire to make alignment between strategic planning, force-structure planning and capital-equipment acquisition chronically tangled and cumbersome.

In addition, there is the procurement cycle to consider. Major weapons platforms might be added in substantial numbers to an existing military, off a galvanised industrial base, in times of war. But on a regular basis, they can only be procured over very long lead times and tend to remain in service for decades.

This means that over any given procurement cycle of around 10 years on a rolling basis (defined as the Defence Capability Plan), there is scope for about a 30 per cent modification of the force structure, making wholesale overhaul intrinsically impossible. Even fundamental change requires many years, if agreement can be achieved.

The strategic vision, war-fighting doctrine, training capacities and maintenance costs associated with such overhaul all impinge on how effectively new platforms (and their associated weapons and communications components) can be integrated into the armed forces.

Such are the threads by which the Gulliver of serious and practical defence reform and force-structure redesign is bound in his efforts to get off the ground. Yet Gulliver is rising because a few professionals, in and outside of the services, for years did the conceptual work indispensable to reform and redesign of the defence force.

Soon after coming to office, the Howard Government signalled its intention to get new thinking off the ground by expressing dissatisfaction with the strategic policy advice and capital equipment procurement processes then entrenched in the Department of Defence.

The difficulties experienced in carrying out the East Timor operation in 1999, coupled with the psychological shocks of September 2001 and October 2002, galvanised Gulliver into starting to snap the threads tying him to the ground.

It is important to distinguish analytically between the conceptual work done by the professionals and the political impulse provided by the Coalition’s broad strategic preferences and the psychological shocks of 1999-2002.

The conceptual work revolved around several fundamental insights into what war-fighting was increasingly becoming as the 20th century drew to an end - and what the Australian Army’s shortfalls were in being able to do its work effectively in that strategic environment.

Both centred on the concept of “manoeuvre warfare”, incubated in the 1980s within the military reform movement in the United States and, in Australia, within the small circle of army officers who developed a vision in the mid-1990s of “Army 21” - the army needed for the approaching 21st century.