50 billion dollars… It’s money we spend to achieve a capable defence force every year. We are supposed to get something for our money, but we don’t. It would be easy to point the finger at the current government, which is acting true to ALP form and sacrificing defence to supply welfare projects that boost the government’s size and powers, but the previous Liberal governments were just as bad. Although it might not be fair to tar Abbott’s government, as it didn’t have much chance to attempt anything. Turnbull wanted to ditch anything that Abbott did and Morrison showed us why he was such a lacklustre marketing man.

50 billion dollars … and only 27 million Australians. It’s about $1,800 each. You could give every Australian a rifle for that money and a box of ammo to go with it. Australia would be better defended in that case too. It isn’t such a bad defence strategy. Switzerland has a trained militia as well as Finland. It means you can keep a small professional army but have large numbers of trained and capable soldiers available at the drop of a hat when the enemy comes. Afghanistan has proved a few times how well this strategy works.

However, Australia wants to have an army and defence force like it has always had. Wars tend to be sea wars or land wars while the Air Force gets to be involved in any war because control of the air is vital for success. For Australia, the importance of having a large and capable Navy should be obvious. Everything we use comes from over the seas, so to speak. We manufacture too little to bother counting it and instead survive economically by exporting minerals and agricultural products. Should the seas become contested space, all of that would end rapidly. At present, we have three Air Warfare Destroyers and eight Helicopter Frigates. One of the Frigates is laid up because the Navy does not have individuals to crew it. Can I say men to crew it? It might be unproven, but the ADF has been at pains to try and recruit women for years and has ended up recruiting too few of anyone to fill its ranks.

Defence might be able to learn some important lessons from industry. Everyone has heard of Lean Manufacturing. Some will know it is based on the Toyota Production System. Few are aware it is a waste reduction system. At its heart sits a timeline. The beginning of this timeline has an order, the middle process says ‘remove all waste’, and at the end it says ‘cash’. Order, remove all waste, then cash. There were seven wastes defined to aid in identifying waste. This is not an easy task as waste often hides in plain sight. Your accountant, for example, will consider stock as an asset that you can sell later, so it is valuable. TPS says that stock is waste. It is costing you money and it costs you time and effort to make something that was not required. You could have made something that was required and have received money for it. This might be informed by Toyota’s near bankruptcy in 1948. The company was bailed out but rose from there to become what it is today. What if defence had that mentality?

Perhaps defence should be allowed to go into administration… If we liquidate it, would we end up with a vastly superior fighting force? When I studied in Defence Systems it seemed to me that no one in the world ever has done defence particularly well. This makes sense because government is the one in charge. Everything government does it is expensive and fails to meet requirements. ‘Requirements’ is an important word.

Defence works by deciding to raise a capability. This is a bit like a Jerry can. Remember, if the Americans named the Jerry can they would have called it a Fuel Storage Receptacle Rectangular or FSRR. The Brits named it and I’d bet London to a brick that it was the lads on the line and not the bureaucrats who called it a Jerry Can because they pinched them off the Germans. Either way, when you need something created today it gets a dumb-sounding description to try and describe what capability you require like Fuel Storage Receptacle Rectangular. Then a list of needs is produced. This is the Defence Force’s wish list. This list creates a list of requirements, the must-haves. Delivering these or not will decide if the product is accepted or not. Requirements can be a really lousy thing because this is where everyone wants to have a finger in the pie, whether to foul someone else’s ambitions, or get something for yourself that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The nasty thing that happens here is known as scope creep. Every man and his dog attempts to refashion a capability to fill their needs as well.

An example of this is the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. It began as a troop transport. It was low and lean with a rifle mounted on top. Then it had redesigns that added a turret with a larger gun, this meant it would get the attention of tanks, so a TOW (Tube launched, Optically tracked, Wire guided) missile system was mounted on the side of the turret. While this was all happening there was more mass and a big gun needs big ammo so let’s leave a few of the troops at home and the armour is aluminium so it isn’t too heavy to be able to move itself. Aluminium has an ability to catch on fire and this did happen to the Bradley in different conflicts where it was shot with a 50 calibre round and burnt to the ground. Not a missile or a bomb, a round from a rifle. Talk about asymmetric warfare. The Bradley ended up being a tank that couldn’t survive a hit from a tank, a scout that was too big and heavy to observe anything and a personnel carrier that had no space for personnel.

So back to the ADF and spending $50 billion effectively on nothing. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that. The NCOs are keeping the proudest traditions alive. Should there be a war expect the ADF to perform with great courage and ingenuity to overcome Australia’s enemies. It will do this in spite of its higher command which likewise has a history of failure. Think of them as bureaucrats in uniforms. The failures in procurement have been spectacular. We do now get to the difficult question of who is to blame? Politicians or bureaucrats? That is uncertain. At present, the Albanese government carries a lot of blame because it does not want to spend money on defence, so it has axed tanks for the Army and announced submarines, but what else? It announces spending far in the future and axes contracts to collect money it can dole out where it pleases. I do like the Virginia class subs, although I think that they are not certain and so far in the future we should be building updated Collins subs right now. Not because Collins is the greatest thing ever but they are good and we know them and stuffing around will delay them when we need them right now. The communists are in one of the largest military build-ups ever, we don’t get to choose there is only time to get hold of anything we can. That might be the crux of the issue. Defence for too long has wanted the absolute perfect thing that could be everything to everyone. It ended up with too little of anything. Right now it is stalling off on a ship it doesn’t want the anti sub Frigate. Buying more Air Warfare Destroyers would be a good idea. You can have them, you know how to operate them. The argument against them is that they only have 48 missile cells and other navies have similar-sized ships with 100 or more missiles. The option we have is 48 or nothing and getting a few of those ships means we at least have something that we need in a hurry.

We have a vast number of Generals and Admirals in our armed forces and none of them has built anything. They are career bureaucrats. In the world they live in there are demands to produce reports and tick boxes and try and satisfy myriad demands which means a total lack of focus. Focus is something that enterprise is good at. This is why Higgins developed the landing craft that got troops onto shore on D-Day, De Havilland’s Mosquito was rejected before becoming one of the most successful aircraft of the second world war, and Hawker built up Hurricane fighters without orders certain that war was coming and when it came there would be no time to build enough. In Australia, Essington Lewis made the same bet with BHP knowing that Australia would need every scrap of steel it could get. We could use a bit of that right now. Australia has been working on an idea that it would have ten years warning to get ready for war. Sadly, we got that warning more than ten years ago but did nothing.