- The Strategist - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au -
ASPI’s decades: Urgently eating the defence elephant
Posted By Graeme Dobell on July 26, 2021 @ 06:00
‘It’s a very encouraging sign that industry can meet the challenge of ‘eating the elephant’ presented by the 2020 Defence Strategic Update’s growing acquisition program.’
— Marcus Hellyer, The cost of defence: ASPI defence budget brief 2020–2021, May 2021
The Abbott Coalition government came to power [in 2013] with a defence industry policy that was essentially indistinguishable from its broader industry policy. Subsidies were a bad thing, and just as the government wasn’t going to subsidise Australian industry to build cars, so it wasn’t going to pay extra to build military equipment in Australia. Defence’s investment plan was first and foremost about military capability, not nation building or supporting local industry.
Times (and prime ministers) have certainly changed, and changed quickly.
We now have a plan that calls for speed, lateral thinking, innovation and partnerships—to be implemented by an organisation that’s slow, subject to groupthink, risk averse and reluctant to reach out. Adapting Defence to the demands of our new reality is going to be challenging, to say the least.
The DSU emphasised the need for long-range strike capabilities that can impose cost on and deter a great-power adversary at distance. Yet the ADF’s strike cupboard is bare, and there’s no clear path to restock it quickly. Moreover, huge investment is planned in capabilities that appear to have minimal deterrent effect on a great-power adversary, such as up to $40 billion on heavy armoured vehicles.
Overall, the force structure and timelines for delivery are holdovers from previous strategic planning documents developed in circumstances that bear little resemblance to our current one.
Fundamental changes to concepts and force structure, such as making greater use of uncrewed and autonomous systems, are occurring only slowly.
The vast bulk of investment is still going into small numbers of exquisitely capable yet extremely expensive crewed platforms that take years, even decades, to design and manufacture and are potentially too valuable to lose. Defence needs to take more risk and invest more than half of one percent of its budget in R&D, particularly in distributed, autonomous technologies.
More funding is needed, but Defence will need to show that it can use it well to deliver capability rapidly. Over the decade, the government is providing $575 billion in funding to Defence, but in that time it won’t deliver a single new combat vessel.
Article printed from The Strategist: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au
URL to article: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-decades-urgently-eating-the-defence-elephant/
[1] The cost of defence: ASPI defence budget brief 2020–2021: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/cost-defence-aspi-defence-budget-brief-2021-2022
[2] sovereign: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-decades-off-the-shelf-overseas-or-on-shore-ourselves/
[3] industrial: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/covid-19-shows-australia-needs-a-national-sovereignty-strategy/
[4] capability: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/sovereignty-is-the-key-to-defence-industry-policy/
[5] amazing: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/making-decisions-right/
[6] Cost of Defence: https://www.aspi.org.au/cost-of-defence-database
[7] remarkable commitment: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/cost-defence-2020-2021-part-1-aspi-2020-strategic-update-brief