The recent Australian National Audit Office reports on the current and future air combat capability highlighted the risk and potential cost of keeping the 1980s vintage Hornets flying until they are replaced by the F-35 …
Articles by: "Andrew Davies"
Senator David Johnston, the Shadow Minister for Defence, spoke at an ASPI lunch yesterday. His speech was titled ‘The politics of defence’, but its main theme was why defence shouldn’t be political. Along the way, …
The Australian National Audit Office last week released a pair of related audit reports, on the acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the management of the current fast jet fleet. The reports are …
The Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Mark Binskin AO, delivered a thought-provoking speech entitled ‘The ADF as as a foundation for Australian prosperity’ to an ASPI dinner last night, and here are …
Earlier this year, Mark Thomson and I wrote a paper that highlighted the challenges in maintaining continuity in Australia’s submarine force. One of the things we didn’t discuss at any length in that paper was …
Just to put into perspective what a 3% real increase in the Defence budget amounts to over a decade, the table below shows how a baseline budget of $25 billion would evolve over ten years …
Dear ASPI, I have a ‘friend’ who has an embarrassing problem with defence planning. It seems no matter what he tries, it ends up expensive and unsatisfactory. What can he do? Worried of Parliament Hill Dear …
Regular contributor Peter Layton drew my attention to the final chart in the ‘Tax Chartacular’ at the Mark the Graph blog. It shows Australia’s total taxation burden 1959–2011 as a proportion of the nominal GDP. It …
On Monday we promised to provide some suggestions for implementing the recent 364-page report from the Senate Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Reference Committee on ‘Procurement procedures for Defence capital projects’. Today we’ll discuss one …
The recent Senate committee report ‘Procurement procedures for Defence capital projects’ was naturally of great interest to us, concerned as it was with our core business. We weren’t dispassionate observers of the process either; we …
Following on from my post on the increasing lethality of weapon systems over time, I got some interesting correspondence from Strategist reader David Goyne. He provided me with some data taken from the work of …
The structure of a country’s naval fleet should reflect the thinking of governments (and navy) about their use of the sea. To a large extent it’s possible to ‘reverse engineer’ naval aspirations from the force …