The guardians must still be accountable

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.