Defence Department overhaul: Australia prepares for war by giving politicians more power than military leaders
Defence Minister Richard Marles has lost patience with the military’s ability to build ships, missiles and other lethal equipment.
On Monday he revealed that three little-known but important agencies responsible for supplying the Australian Defence Force would be stripped out of the Defence Department and merged into a new organisation.
Instead of being responsible to the admirals, generals and marshals who run the ADF, the leader of what will be known as the Defence Delivery Agency will report to two politicians: Mr Marles and Defence Industries Minister Pat Conroy.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“This is being done because clearly there is a lack of confidence on behalf of the minister that Defence is not well placed to deliver projects on time and on budget,” said Malcolm Davis, a military analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra think tank partially funded by the Defence Department.
“He wants to be able to have greater accountability from Defence.”
One of the most notorious examples are frigates being built by BAE Systems, a British defence contractor. Construction of the Hunter-class ships, designed to hunt Chinese submarines, is seven years late.
The price has blown out from $3.8 billion to $9 billion each.
The organisation overseeing the project, the Naval Shipbuilding and Sustainment Group, will be moved into the Defence Delivery Agency with the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (which keeps the Army’s helicopters flying) and the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Group, which has not produced any weapons in its half-decade of existence, according to Dr Davis.
Mr Marles, who has had responsibility for the portfolio in government and opposition nine years, will appoint a National Armaments Director to run the agency. They will not be professionally dependent of the ADF leadership, giving Mr Marles greater power over the vast defence budget as the military expands, slowly, to meet the threat from China.
The potency of the new threat was highlighted Monday when Mr Marles confirmed a media report that the ADF is monitoring a Chinese naval task group in the Philippine Sea that could, theoretically, be heading to Australia.
“We do not have a sense of where it is going,” Mr Marles said.
The new structure will not have an immediate impact on the AUKUS nuclear submarines, which are not due to begin arriving until the late 2030s. Nor is it the radical, one-in-50-year reform asserted by Mr Conroy. It is the latest attempt to fix a problem that has persisted for decades.
Although the government has been criticised for vague, long-term promises to increase defence spending, Mr Marles says there will be an extra $70 billion allocated over the next decade. As the minister responsible, he does not seem to trust senior officers to allocate the money.
The British military recently implemented a similar approach, a response to a perennial problem facing all militaries which has gotten worse as wars have become more technologically complicated.
The solution sometimes makes the problem worse. Negative publicity about big projects since the early 2000s has made Australia’s Defence Department paranoid. The result is a bureaucracy that moves cautiously, trying to remove the risk of cost overruns that are accepted during wartime.
“They have introduced complexity and slowed it down dramatically,” said Neil James, the executive director of the Australia Defence Association lobby group. “What we need is speed, even if it is going to cost us more. The one thing you can’t buy is time.”
Mr James likes to cite the example the Royal Australian Air Force during the Korean War. The Air Force’s World War II-era P-51 Mustang fighters could not match Chinese jets.
The Americans could not spare any of their new F-86 Sabre jets. In desperation, Australia bought 93 Meteor fighters from Britain and handed them over to a squadron leader based in Japan who almost singlehandedly integrated them into the RAAF.
Delegating such an important job to a single person would be considered inconceivable in the modern military, but war requires shortcuts.
Some analysts believe another war involving China could break within a decade. Whether Australia will be ready will depend in part on the person Mr Marles chooses to run his new agency.
On such bureaucratic decisions the fate of nations rest.
