Tuesday 12 May was to have been budget night, until Covid-19 intervened and the government moved the 2020–21 budget release to 6 October. This gives Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his team time to focus …
Articles by: "Marcus Hellyer"
In the first part of this series, we saw that by late 2015, before the Defence Department had received industry responses in the competitive evaluation process for selecting the designer and builder of the future …
There have been claims in the media and by various commentators that the cost of Australia’s future submarine program has gone up. The Defence Department insists that it hasn’t. So, who’s right? Unfortunately, nothing is …
In the viral outbreak of prognosticating about what the future beyond coronavirus should look like, there’s virtual unanimity about the need for countries to have supplies of essential items at the ready for crises. To …
In my previous article, I looked at classic deterrence theory, which distinguishes between deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial. The latter is more direct and arguably more effective when the measure of effectiveness is …
Last year, as part of the broader discussion about a Plan B for Australia’s defence strategy, I started a series looking at Australia’s options to project military power in an age in which we could …
The title of the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs asks, ‘Can we trust America?’ The case of the MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial system would suggest the answer is no. The 2016 defence white paper …
In the first part of this series, I noted that Australia’s Department of Defence spends a relatively small percentage of its budget on national support tasks (less than 0.2%), but around 40% of its capabilities …
The Australian Defence Force has performed valuable services in the 2019–20 bushfire emergency. More than 5,000 personnel have been involved in a wide range of tasks, both on the front line and in logistics and …
Two questions are frequently raised about the process that selected Australia’s preferred partner for the design and build of the future submarine. The first is why the Defence Department didn’t pursue a ‘son of Collins’, …
The Australian National Audit Office has just released its latest report on Australia’s $80 billion future submarine capability. It set itself the task of examining ‘the effectiveness of Defence’s administration of the Future Submarine Program …
Originally published 5 November 2019. We’ve known for a while that SEA 1000, the Defence Department’s future submarine program, is going to cost a lot of money—we just haven’t known exactly how much. But as …