Show less

When Defence announced the Commonwealth’s court win in April 2001, it made a couple of observations which must be in the running for a ‘most understated comment in a press release’ award:

Notwithstanding the decision of the Court, Kockums, as the designer of the Collins Class, has a very important role to play in the future support of the submarines.

And:

Although we have been successful in this instance, we sincerely hope that we can move forward and quickly restore the prior mutual respect and strong working relationship that existed between Kockums and the Submarine Project Office.

In fact, court action between the parties dragged on for another three years, finally being settled in June 2004 with payments being made in both directions, in the process greatly complicating Commonwealth plans to sell ASC.

Any evolution of the Collins class, which now has a combination of design and hardware elements originating from Sweden, France, the United States, Australia and other sources, will require a solid basis for handling the complex web of IP rights involved. Without an agreement of the type reached today, that would be a fraught process indeed.

A working relationship needs to be far more than a formal agreement, and time will tell whether the high degree of cooperation required can be maintained. But the parties involved in today’s announcement today should be congratulated for giving us a good chance to avoid a repetition of past problems in what’s bound to be a complex and challenging project.

Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Image courtesy of Flickr user mikecogh.

Show less

The budget papers also tell a story about the management of the Defence workforce. When the 2012-13 budget was brought down in May of last year, the aim was to have 58,636 full-time ADF personnel. Clearly recruitment has failed to make up for separations, and the additional estimates figure in February this year was 56,751—a shortfall of 1,885 people. The ‘increase’ in full-time ADF personnel being reported this morning as a 2013-14 budget measure is in fact nothing more than a re-stating of last year’s failed aspiration.

Table 3. The Defence workforce

One final observation is the winding down of operations is showing up in the budget figures. Last year’s budget (as amended at additional estimates in February) included $1.530 billion for operations, including $1.190 billion for Operation Slipper in Afghanistan. This year’s estimate is $918.5 million, with Afghanistan accounting for $874.9 million.

But if there’s a lesson we can draw from the last three Defence budgets (or for that matter the overall federal budget), it’s that no government can tie the hands of the Treasurer who next steps up to the dispatch box on budget night. We can go through the entrails of this year’s budget if we want, but next year might see a completely different set of externalities, government priorities, or both. In many ways, this makes the business of planning for multi-year procurements of capabilities that will span decades extremely difficult. But it’s the form of executive government that we have, and all departments have to live with it.

Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist.

Show less

Show less

Figure 1. USAF planned F-35A expenditure by year FY 2008 – 2014

But it’s also true that the USAF doesn’t have much choice. Without the F-35, it faces the choices of recapitalising on the F-15 and F-16 series (either through life of type extensions, new builds or both), resurrecting the F-22 Raptor production line (itself a prodigious consumer of resources for both production and maintenance) or—perhaps worst of all from a blue suiter’s point of view—buy aircraft produced for the US Navy in the form of the Super Hornet. For various reasons none of those are appealing options. That’s why the F-35 program has been ‘teflon coated’, receiving support from the highest levels even in an increasingly hostile fiscal environment.

And this year, for the first time, there’s evidence that the USAF is about to bite the bullet, committing to buy a substantial number of aircraft before the end of the decade. The second graph shows the number of F-35As requested in annual budget submissions over the same period as figure 1. Until now, each successive year has seen the USAF defer its acquisition of the F-35 to later years. In the FY 2008 budget, it was expected that there’d be 142 aircraft in its inventory or on the production line by this year. Today the number is less than 60% of that total. (In fact, the total number of all variants of the aircraft in production, including Navy and Marine Corps aircraft is only just over 100 now.)

Figure 2. USAF planned procurement quantities FY 2008 – 2014

As in previous years, there’s also some aircraft deferred—but this time it’s less than 5% of the expected total, representing a much smaller cut than in any previous year. And that’s in the face of the looming spectre of budget sequestration, which could see the total Pentagon spend downsized by 10%. With the pressure it’s likely to face on other programs in this environment, this is a significant vote of confidence in the F-35, which in turn might indicate that the program is in much better shape than has been the case in the past. Clearly risks remain, but the USAF seems to be about to place its bets. It might also mean that the RAAF will finally get its own F-35s before 2020.

Disclaimer: Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the F-35 program, is a corporate sponsor of ASPI. All figures in this blog are open-source information.

Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist.

Show less

There were a few announcements made today that impact on the projected workforce requirement. In summary, the navy’s at-sea replenishment vessels will both be replaced as a matter of urgency, the replacement for the Armidale class and Pacific patrol boats will move forward (an unspecified amount), as might the future frigate program. The 2,000 ton multi-role offshore combatants announced in the 2009 White Paper are now just a twinkle in the eye, as a ‘possible future project, subject to technical maturity’.

There are some sensible steps here. The thinking behind the multi-role vessels was a source of puzzlement to industry and commentators alike, and didn’t seem to be the result of a coherent vision. And given that the Armidales are being worked above and beyond their design limits and are suffering from fatigue problems as a result, a replacement for those is important. Likewise, Navy has one replenishment ship (HMAS Success) that is 30 years old and in need of replacement and another (HMAS Sirius) that is only seven years old, but isn’t really up to the job. (Usually you could insert a trenchant criticism here, but it was a relatively inexpensive experiment in using a commercial vessel that has provided some capability and taught some valuable lessons.)

Less obviously sensible is the possible move of bringing the future frigates forward. I’ll reserve judgement until more detail is available, but we’ve just spent a lot of time, effort and money upgrading both the Perry class FFGs and the Anzacs. In fact, we’ve only really just started work on the Anzac fleet, having taken years finding the right solution. I argued that a fourth air warfare destroyer might be a case of the ‘industry tail wagging the capability dog’. I hope that isn’t the case here.

Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Image courtesy of Department of Defence.

Show less

The net result is that the plan is now to do whatever engineering work is required to improve the maintainability of the Collins boats and to get an extra operating cycle out of them, and then replace them. It’s likely that this work will involve an extensive rework (and possibly replacement) of major elements of the Collins’s propulsion system—including the diesel engines, electric motors, generators and the batteries. Once that’s done, assuming of course that it’s successful, the Collins class will have proven combat, weapon, sensor and propulsion systems and we could start looking at a new hull design that incorporated those systems or modest extensions of them. Thus the evolved Collins the new design might have much in common. A previous ASPI paper provided some schematics of how this might work.

Of course, it’s much easier to say all that than to do it, and it would be idle to suppose that we’ll avoid substantial risks and costs in the future submarine program. In fact, to some extent today’s announcement doubled our bets on being able to pull off some serious design work.

Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Image courtesy of Department of Defence.

Show less

Show less

My prescription for the ADF force structure is based on the following objectives:

• having the ability to lead or contribute substantial military capability to regional stabilisation, peacekeeping and non-combatant evacuation operations
• having adequate surveillance and constabulary capabilities to protect our maritime interests
• having the capability to defeat the force projection capabilities of countries in our immediate region
• having the capability to provide high value contributions to US led operations in the wider Asia-Pacific theatre and beyond 
• maintaining a critical mass of core warfighting capabilities which will allow for expansion in the future should the strategic situation deteriorate significantly

The first three points are options that support Australia’s core interests. First, we have a greater stake in regional stability than powers further afield do. That’s why we have found ourselves as leaders of operations in Bougainville, Timor Leste (twice) and the Solomon Islands. That’s not going to change, and we’ll have to be ready to do it again when circumstances demand. We’ll be able to handle similar operations with the land forces and air lift capability we have today plus the two large amphibious ships that will arrive in a few years. (Until then we might want to cross our fingers and hope our kiwi mates can provide sealift if we need it.)

Second, while we actually do a pretty good job of policing our maritime interests, in part by making good use of intelligence sharing arrangements, the politics of border security will probably cause governments to try to do more. Throwing extra money at top-end platforms like the naval version of Global Hawk or the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft is likely to be at the top of Defence’s wish list. But there are almost certainly more cost-effective ways to improve performance—a topic I’ll come back to in detail in an ASPI paper shortly.

Third, while there’s no indication that any country has designs on Australia’s territory (and there’s no credible reason for them to do so), maintaining capabilities that overmatch nearby militaries is prudent because intentions can change relatively quickly. We can put a large tick in that box with the forces we already have. Indonesia has neither the intent nor ability to seriously threaten Australia’s current air or maritime forces and has little prospect of doing so in the next couple of decades. In fact, given the large size of Indonesia’s army (and thus the unappealing idea of a land conflict there for Australia’s small Army), there’s a natural détente between the countries even if there’s a massive falling out. No other small to medium power has the ability to first defeat Indonesia then use their territory to stage against Australia.

That leaves us with hostile major powers—and brings us to the fourth objective. There aren’t any of those at the moment. But, again, intentions can change, and an insurance policy is worthwhile. That’s where getting smart in our alliance contributions makes good sense. Providing similar capabilities to the United States but on a much smaller scale won’t make any difference in the outcome of a major power conflict, but if we’re clever and turn up with niche contributions of often oversubscribed force elements, we could—and I hesitate to say it—punch above our weight. Peter Jennings pointed out some areas for high-value contributions in an earlier post. I’d add air-to-air refuellers (almost always oversubscribed in intense air operations), electronic warfare aircraft (ditto), Special Forces and (perhaps) conventional submarines—although we need to have a frank discussion with the USN about the concept of operations for those.

Finally, it makes sense to keep up the levels of expertise and a baseline level of sophisticated hardware to allow us to expand our defence forces if we need to. But we don’t need gold-plated technology to do that.

The force structure decisions that follow from this line of reasoning include:

• no need to develop substantial elements of Army as a ‘Marine’ force, with the exception of a vanguard force to seize and hold points of entry for larger forces—but only against light opposition. Army doesn’t need weapon systems designed for high intensity warfare
• no need for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter any time this decade—consolidate on the Super Hornet (especially the Growler electronic attack variant) and have another look some time after 2020.
• the future frigate needn’t be a large, top-end warfighting vessel. A larger number of less capable vessels would provide better value
• maritime surveillance and response needs a cost-effective force mix of manned and unmanned and military and civilian platform
• 12 future submarines might not be necessary, depending on what we (and the USN) want them to do

There are some sacred cows in this list, and Defence won’t like it one bit. Nor will either side of politics be prepared to say publicly that they’ll settle for less capability than is in the increasingly fanciful Defence Capability Plan. But the alternative is to cut elsewhere in government spending to put more into Defence. Don’t hold your breath.

Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Image courtesy of Defence.

Show less

Yet—and this is very important  for what follows—the ADF still managed to pull off the INTERFET operation in late 1999. It’s conventional wisdom to say that this was a ‘by the skin of our teeth’ success, which is usually followed up by an argument for boosting defence funding so that it won’t happen again. I’d argue that there’s actually another lesson that can be drawn from that episode; the decline in front-line combat capability across the ADF didn’t preclude success in that sort of operation.

It’s true that the ADF would have been it trouble if had it faced an adversary with high-level capabilities around that time, and things could have gotten difficult if the Indonesian forces had not cooperated in East Timor (that’s why Indonesian agreement was an effective precondition for the deployment). But the relatively benign stabilisation operations that did arise in East Timor, Bougainville and Solomon Islands were far and away the most likely sorts of contingencies foreseeable at the time. In short, the decline in ADF capabilities in the 1990s was lamented by the Services and by those who see a strong military as a vital arm of national power, but it didn’t endanger Australia’s security in any meaningful way. In fact, the embarrassing failure to provide amphibious vessels during the Queensland floods showed that our preoccupation with platforms suitable for high-intensity operations can lead to capability downfalls in those areas that are more likely to be required.

That observation brings me to what I think is the crux of the defence decision making process—the level of risk we’re willing to live with and how we assess it. (Mark Thomson has also been down this path.) Assuming that we’re at least passingly smart in the way we spend the defence budget, more funding buys more capability, which in turn retires more risk. That’s why we tend to ramp spending up in times of heightened risk perception, as the Menzies Government did during the time of insurgencies in Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, and as the Howard Government did after 9/11. But it’s also possible to overestimate risk and spend more than is prudent to retire the risk of events that are either unlikely to the point of irrelevance or which would have consequences that don’t outweigh the cost of hedging. The convulsive decade-long reaction to 9/11 is arguably a case in point.

The New Zealand example I mentioned last time is a good example of a country that took a hard look at its strategic situation and realised that it had capabilities on the books that weren’t ever likely to be used in anything but a war of choice which would take place far from its sovereign territory (and in which New Zealand’s contribution would be far less then decisive). Arguably, New Zealand is less well defended today than it was in the past, but it’s defended well enough against anything that’s actually likely to happen.

Looking at Australia’s strategic circumstances, we’re less well served by geography than our mates across the Tasman, so our risk assessment is different—but perhaps not as different as might be supposed. Power projection across oceans remains a formidably difficult task, and the list of countries that could bring much combat power to bear against Australia’s territories is (provided we exclude the United States) vanishingly small.

A predictable rejoinder to that analysis is ‘but we can’t predict the future’, so we have to hedge against things we can’t foresee. To a point that’s true, as Mark Thomson and I would be among the first to admit. But any planning process has to have a stab at prediction within a reasonable set of parameters, and defence planning is no exception. So I’ll finish this post with my short list what I think are reasonable planning assumptions for the next twenty years. I don’t think any of them are particularly contentious:

• even with only modest investment, the ADF will continue to overmatch the power projection capability of those countries within range of Australian territories

• the United States will remain the primary military power in all parts of the Asia-Pacific region from which a conventional threat to Australian territories could be launched

• Australia’s budget situation won’t return to as favourable a state as was the case in the period 2000–2008

In my final post in this series, I’ll explain the force structure options that follow from this line of reasoning.

Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Image courtesy of Defence.

Show less

It’s not too hard to see how we got to this point. Defence spending has rarely increased at a rate that will allow the quantity and quality of capability to be maintained. As Mark Thomson’s analysis has shown, maintaining military capabilities requires annual funding increases of about 2.5% above inflation. The 2009 Defence White Paper promised to do that (for a while) but never delivered on it.

As Jim rightly observes, a decline in capability, capacity, or both is inevitable if the funding isn’t there. And the rising unit cost of military platforms doesn’t help. It’s meant that the numbers able to be fielded have steadily fallen over the years. For example, the Army had 143 Centurion tanks which were replaced by 103 Leopards, which in turn gave way to 59 Abrams. The RAAF and RAN operated over 400 combat aircraft between them in 1960. Today the RAN’s fast jets are a distant memory and the RAAF is down to 71 ‘classic’ Hornets and 24 Super Hornets.

When we argued about force structuring a few months back, Jim and I found ourselves agreeing that the overarching challenge is to align strategy and resources, and shape the force structure accordingly. Jim’s preferred policy prescription is the development of a cogent strategy, preferably with increased spending to arrest the decline. (Jim suggests around 2% of GDP would do the job—a long way from where we are today.) That’s certainly a workable solution—if the government and its successors in perpetuity are willing to provide the required funds. But it’s not the only way.

History and the current fiscal situation suggest strongly that pursuing that top-down strategy is unlikely to be an appealing option for future Australian Governments, especially if it comes with a big price tag. So we need to find a different approach, by accepting the resource constraints as more or less fixed (in the absence of an external shock that changes the calculus) and find a strategy that suits the force structure that the funding envelope can afford.

That approach isn’t likely to appeal to the Department of Defence or to those of us who make a living pontificating on strategic matters, because it’s somehow less intellectually ‘pure’. But I’d argue that we need to deal with the world we have rather than the world we’d like to have. If Jim’s right that the ADF is in terminal decline, then drastic treatment might be called for.

We have a very good example available to us of setting strategy to deal with a resource limited environment. We need only to look across the Tasman. Our New Zealand neighbours have taken a deep breath, weighed up their resources and strategic circumstances and have taken some tough decisions, at the expense of some military sacred cows. The most visible such decision was deciding that it could do without fast jets.

Instead, NZ has decided that it will keep the ability to police its maritime jurisdiction (with only limited warfighting capabilities at sea), do long range airlift, participate in peacekeeping and stabilisation operations in the South Pacific (and lead small ones), make small contributions to US-led and UN mandated operations further afield—and not much else. The result is a force structure that is modest but well-suited to the equally modest strategy it supports.

One objection to this argument as a role model is that NZ can always rely on Australia for its defence. My response to that is twofold. First, why shouldn’t they plan on that basis? It has the merit of being true because of geography and the realities of the scale of resources the two counties can bring to bear. And, second, we have a similar luxury of a bigger friend with more capability in the form of the United States. We mightn’t like to look so obviously calculating, but the New Zealanders have mostly learned to live with it.

In my next post I’ll tease out what these ideas and observations could look like applied to Australian strategy making.

Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist.

Show less

Show less