Tough times ahead for Australia's Defence Force

We can do this, however, with less investment than we have been making. The Defence Force should not be expected, as under Howard, to maintain not one but two coalition operations in separated theatres - Afghanistan and Iraq. We should maintain forces adequate to deploy with the US in one distant coalition campaign, not two.

It falls to the new Rudd Government to determine the next stage of Australian security policy development. Everybody knows that it has to find significant savings and efficiency gains in the Federal public sector to help minimise any inflationary pressures generated by the cost of its electoral bidding war with the former government during the 2007 campaign. This alone would allow one to predict tough times ahead for the Department of Defence, but of course there’s more.

I have gone on at considerable length in several forums (including this one) over the years about Defence’s astonishing capacity for wasting enormous sums of public money, and I don’t intend to rehash any of that here. Suffice it to say that while Defence by no means gets every major acquisition wrong, when it does mess up it often does so big time.

It’s encouraging to detect in statements from the new Government, and also in comments from several of the more perceptive media, a tendency to take as a fact the need to do something really significant to put an end to Defence’s unconscionable behaviour pattern, which has persisted literally for decades.

The Rudd Government has comparatively little inherited political baggage on this issue: on the contrary, it will be able to do most of the finger-pointing, at least for now, especially because the Coalition’s current Leader, Dr Nelson, was until their defeat Minister for Defence and thus an easy target on this issue. Nelson made his present position worse by the extraordinary decision to acquire so-called Super Hornet fighters from the US at a cool $6.6 billion as a stopgap just in case the Americans continue to fall behind with their Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), to which the Tories have shackled us with chains of gold. The new Defence Minister (Mr Fitzgibbon) probably had little option but to reluctantly proceed with the deal as he has done.

So there are both budgetary and political incentives for the new Government to demand significantly higher standards from Defence. An additional incentive is that, if such standards are achieved, they will provide a degree of protection against future acquisition disasters, taking some pressure of the Government’s forward spending projections.

Moreover, along with a needed reshaping of force structure priorities to bring them more into accord with foreseeable strategic conditions, improved standards in defence management will, if sustained, free-up resources long-term for needed capabilities.

To miss the present opportunity for a fundamental readjustment of Australian security priorities will be to condemn us to increasing irrelevance and even impotence. What use will our expensive force of Abrams tanks be in the event of a climatic disaster? How useful will an Air Warfare Destroyer fully equipped with a US “missile defense” suite prove when we are trying to police our maritime approaches?

A shift in emphasis is required. There is time and opportunity; neither will last.