The guardians must still be accountable

The Australian Defence establishment has had the couple of months from hell recently, what with a damning report into an appalling culture of alcohol abuse, sexual terrorism, command breakdown and cover-up aboard HMAS Success; and the revelation that maintenance failures have rendered two Navy fleet support vessels, HMAS Kanimbla and Manoora, unserviceable for some time to come. The Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, was so dismayed by the latter that he has explicitly condemned the culture which permitted such an outcome, and has taken measures involving external intervention, to put matters right.

Several years ago I prepared a list of major defence projects which had gone off the rails big-time. These include (not the complete list):

the construction of HMAS Tobruk in the late 1970s (delivered 293 days late, as against the original contract, and 22 days late even against an amended contract; 42% over budget and also heavier than intended, with negative operational consequences). This matter was adversely reported on by Parliament's Public Works Committee in Report 223 (1984 – not online, unfortunately).

the Inshore Minehunter Project in the late eighties (produced two vessels which never left Sydney Harbour on operations and were subsequently decommissioned – cost: in excess of $100 million). See Senate Hansard 15 Oct 2003, p.16492.

the notorious Collins submarine project, with remedial costs probably approaching $1 billion, despite which the six boats have never really met their original capability objectives.

the JORN over-the-horizon radar project, delayed for years and with losses estimated at $600m (see E.M. Andrews, The Department of Defence, Oxford Uni Press 2001, p.289).

the original purchase of Kanimbla and Manoora from the US (thought to be a bargain-basement coup at $61 million, ended up costing about $340 million because both vessels were severely affected by rust unrevealed in the pre-purchase inspection and required extensive remedial work). See Ian McPhedran, 'How the RAN was ripped off', Canberra Times, 21 March 1996 – not online; and my list, cited above.

the Army Bushmaster vehicle project where, instead of receiving over 370 vehicles for an approved project cost of $316m (a notional unit cost of $854,000) we received only 299 vehicles for the same price – a notional unit cost of $1,057,000, or in other words an overrun of almost a quarter.

the Seasprite naval helicopter project (cancelled in 2008; those helicopters delivered were returned to the manufacturer; cost: about $ 1 billion).

Military organisations by their nature have unusual internal cultures. In many respects this is a good and necessary thing stemming from the unique nature of military service. A substantial part of military training is specifically designed to inculcate the culture into new recruits because, without it, they would never be able to manage the challenging demands they may face on operations.

However, there can be too much of a good thing. It is, for instance, obviously necessary that a ship's company have a sense of "family", of corporate identity and unity, if you like. Yet this same sense, if not properly managed by the command hierarchy, can run amuk, as it clearly has on HMAS Success where serious personnel abuses and public misconduct by crew members has apparently become part of the ship's culture. Significantly, even the recent searching inquiry into this affair had to report that it did not believe it had uncovered all the truth, because crew members continue to lie and cover-up in order to protect each other from the consequences of their actions.

It might be that the Navy (or anyone's navy) is especially vulnerable to this kind of failure, because each ship on operations is an isolated unit with only remote access to the rest of the service, let alone the nation at large, for weeks on end. But this only imposes on the command structure, all the way to the top, an obligation to manage effectively the problems inherent in maritime service. It is not as if such inherent vulnerabilities are something new and unforeseeable, they have been there for as long there have been navies. Nor does any such vulnerability explain, let alone justify, the Navy's atrocious record of major project management.

Actually, the real failures, both in the egregious personnel issues aboard Success and in major Defence project management, are of command, responsibility and accountability.

If, say, the Air Force wants a new combat aircraft, it will naturally present to Government the strongest case it can. The case will emphasise the virtues of Australia's having such aircraft, it will minimise any downside matters, including cost. The requesting Service will try to manoeuvre a government into investing so much political, as well as dollar, capital in a project that it cannot be cancelled. If the project runs into trouble, it will first try and fix problems "in family" without alerting superior authority. If that fails, it will try to minimise the true significance of any problems – this was in essence the sad story of the Collins class – for fear that a government might decide to cut losses and cancel the much-desired project. It will try to discredit those, such as the Audit Office, who raise embarrassing questions by claiming they lack the technical, or strategic or some other expertise to properly assess such issues.

Personnel issues are both easier and harder to manage from a "damage limitation" viewpoint. Easier, in that the culture I discussed earlier strongly discourages tale-telling outside the "family", and also because strong peer group pressures outside normal command lines can be brought to bear, especially on victims. Harder, however, because we are talking here about people, not machines, and at the end of the day people so badly abused that their faith in the "family" is destroyed and fear of peer disapproval no longer matters cannot be silenced.

Aboard a Navy ship at sea, in an Army combat unit, there is only one ultimate authority, the Commanding Officer. There is probably nothing closer to God-on-earth than a Captain on a warship bridge. Though authoritarian to a degree distasteful to civilians, this is a tried-and-proven system: it usually works though, of course, it has its flaws. The great US Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee made few mistakes, but the one he made at Gettysburg in 1863 cost his army over 25,000 casualties and, on many assessments, cost the South the war. Lee, however, had standards: he tendered his resignation to his government (it was rejected). A mistake by a naval commander can cost the lives of all aboard, as apparently occurred in World War II with the loss of HMAS Sydney to a much-inferior German raider, the Kormoran.

This of course highlights the importance of selecting the right commanders. Had the details of Sydney's loss been known in 1941, questions should have been asked as to why the officer in command was elevated to that position. Today, one wonders whether questions should be asked not only of HMAS Success' recent commanders, but of those who appointed them to that post. In fairness, for all I know, such questions are being asked right now.

A kind of mystique shrouds and, to some extent, has protected Defence from application of proper accountability standards. The Australian Defence Force consists of people, all volunteers, who have agreed to put their lives on the line, to endure harsh training and harsher operational conditions under an authoritarian system, to risk horrible physical and/or psychological damage and if need be to kill other people at the behest of the government of the day. This uniquely challenging work environment inspires a willingness to "cut these people a bit of slack", while the specialised nature of military operations, tactics and strategy make it difficult for those outside the system to criticise apparent failures or abuses without being tripped up on some fine point of expertise.

Nevertheless, there must be both accountability and responsibility. Commanders are responsible for the lives of those they command; it is the taxpayer's money Defence spends; and it is our national reputation and standing that is at issue when our forces carry out tasks on active operations.

Just as commanders must be held accountable for what happens within their command, those who spend our money must be made to account for it, and to be responsible for it. Major mismanagement must therefore be punished, not out of vindictiveness, but to remove the mismanagers from the system. This requires above all the will, at the top of the military chain of command, of the civilian Defence bureaucracy and, critically, of the political overseers, the government of the day.

Until the present government pulled the plug on Seasprite and roundly condemned the personnel abuses aboard Success, the only other example of such political will I can recall was the period under John Howard when Mr John Moore was Minister for Defence. It was he, discovering the true extent of the Collins fiasco, who saw to it that heads rolled both at the top of the Navy and of the Defence Department. But his standards were not kept up by his successors. It is to be hoped that the present government's new emphasis on accountability does not end when Mr Smith inevitably moves on. It needs to become an integral part of the Defence culture, not a response trotted out only after the latest major example of incompetence or abuse.