Australia’s military strategy seems devoid of leadership – and yet we are going to need some. The outlook isn’t good. After killing off the leaders with a mind virus, we end up with political managers. Managers are great in a public service context where avoiding blame is more important than getting things done, but not much good in the arena described in Roosevelt’s famous speech. Leaders come into their own in high-pressure situations like sport, advanced R&D projects, and military action – in times of difficulty and change. Managers have a place in times of prosperity and stasis.

Certain ‘not seen in our lifetime’ confluences of events are calling, but Australian leadership can’t get to the phone right now. Where have our leaders gone and why are they hiding their lamps under a bushel?

Greg Sheridan spoke recently on Australia’s military preparedness and our military manufacturing industries’ capabilities. He described a circular problem – we need stuff (submarines in this case) soon to deter the Chinese; we don’t have an industry to build them; we can’t set up an industry in a short enough lead time; we change our minds about what we want to build because we can’t build it quickly enough; and we repeat.

The problem is more about leadership than technical capability. A leader can shorten lead times and build up capability around a singular vision. A leader can come up with solutions to procurement problems like getting hold of a second-hand US submarine to get our sailors up to speed. A leader recognises that the first submarine we build is going to have a lot more bugs than the 10th and takes this into account. A leader looks at innovative solutions, like autonomous submarines and backs themselves so that we can build them.

I don’t know enough about Richard Marles to point out where he could be doing better. In a way that is part of the problem. I saw him on TV recently. His body language wasn’t that of a man who knew where he was going, and how he was going to get there. He seemed, at first glance, to be a quite a reasonable and consultative bloke. A guy who would be a nice boss. He didn’t seem like a guy who could build a military manufacturing capability out of nearly nothing (since Abbott’s abolition of the auto industry). He didn’t seem like he could get around the US-owned big-military OEM’s conflicts of interest. His face had blown out timelines and budgets written all over it, and lacked a certain something – call it mongrel.

Mongrel is the reason leaders can’t co-exist with our feminist-influenced modern Australia. Anyone who shows any similarity with a sabre-toothed tiger is deemed ‘unsafe’ and immediately de-toothed and de-clawed. Australia doesn’t get mongrel and mistakes it for abuse. They mistake a leader attacking the ball, for a psychopath attacking the player. Sailing on amateur yacht race teams has taught me the distinction. Sometimes getting yelled at is for the team’s good, if not your own safety. While unpleasant, there can be times it is necessary. It takes humility to realise you don’t have the overall vision and should probably do what the person yelling is asking you to as quickly as possible.

Ironically, a flesh and blood leader would scare the Chinese way more than the underwater steel tubes (submarines) that Greg Sheridan was proselytising. A steel tube can tootle around the coast at 30 knots (55km/h) arriving a few weeks after a modern warfare conflict has finished. How this deters the Chinese from doing anything, with our vast coastline, I’m not exactly sure. To be frank, our current crop of politicians would be too scared to authorise pressing the red button to shoot anything at them anyway in case they put a tariff on our Shiraz. A wartime leader like Winston Churchill, who was part-man, part-Doberman, was also two-parts intelligence and love of country, with every one part ‘don’t mess with me’.

As the world’s best manufacturers capable of building anything from ships to iPhones, the Chinese would laugh at our submarine conundrums. On the other hand, they would sit up and take notice of a real leader. Someone who could generate mutual respect, who respected their cultural differences, but told them to bugger off.

As an engineer, I fail to see why, according to Greg Sheridan, it would take us 15 years to make a submarine, just in time for the peace deals having lost a third world war. Ford took seven years to develop a car, while McLaren took just two. If the need is immediate enough, anything is possible. If the need isn’t immediate enough, create one and stick to it.

On one hand, submarines are simple. Round as pressure acts perpendicular to the surface. As long as drag is related to length. Get some BMW NVH engineers in to make it nice and quiet as they can only be detected by sonar. On the other hand, submarines are complex, they have people living in them. Why not back Australian ingenuity and create a crack skunkworks team designing and building an autonomous submarine? If we took an innovative Australian-owned (not just made) approach, we might actually become world leaders at something.

Speaking of innovative, I was lucky enough to work at McLaren towards the end of Ron Dennis’ time at the helm. Ron was to McLaren’s F1 team what Sir Alex Ferguson was to Man U. Uncle Ron was renowned as a guy who terrified people the moment he walked out of his office. Everything had to be perfect, clinically neat and tidy, and any mess was disposed of on the spot, no negotiation. Uncle Ron had the mongrel spirit, but would do anything for his people when they were in need. My first boss told the story of an F1 mechanic being flown home from the Australian GP to the UK after his mum fell ill. My grandmother passed away in Scotland during my first year there and my boss arranged flights, a rental car, and was going to pay for my hotel so I could go to the funeral. Ron’s culture had cascaded down. It was something I’ll never forget – I withstood a lot of ‘tough love’ because of the loyalty engendered by that generosity and kindness.

Masculine love is the missing link that modern Australia does not get. When you have military conflict, people die. There is no management style that adequately encapsulates the best way to ask a person to die. Empathetic, definitely; consultative, of course; transformative, certainly, but how ridiculous, insulting even. The only way to ask someone to die is to love them and be willing to die yourself.

The great military leaders all had these ingredients. Alexander the Great led from the front, cared about his people, was ruthless with traitors, and had the enormous courage to go with his strategic and tactical genius. He followed his gut in the moments that mattered. Alexander’s leadership style would get him in trouble if he was working in the public service or running a café in the age of communistic ‘guilty until proven innocent’ power-hungry anti-power campaigners.

Don’t get me wrong, true leaders don’t harass. Harassing, dominating, and controlling are all signs of insecurity, not leadership. I was lucky enough to hear Dr Brendan Nelson speak recently. He encouraged women to ditch impostor syndrome saying that men suffer from it less than women. As a man who suffers from impostor syndrome, I can’t stand men faking an over-confident, loud, brash, non-impostor persona and I empathise with women who feel the same way. But a man in a tight suit who talks over everyone, seems confident verging on hubristic, and is devoid of any impostor syndrome is not necessarily a leader. Just as a quiet man in a poor-fitting suit is not, by definition, a follower. It was often the quiet guys who were first to jump out of the trenches and did the most heroic acts in war. Australia needs to get over this black and white communistic notion that all men displaying leadership traits are toxic. Some are, certainly, but that doesn’t mean all men are.

Extreme an idea as this may seem, but some straight white men have, at different points in history, played an extremely important role in shaping the world for good. Some did it from positions of leadership and were extremely good at it, in times of great need. It is a modern crime to suggest that the masculine story is the hero’s journey and the feminine story is based on care and nurturing so I won’t suggest it, but anecdotally, a lot of boys like playing soldiers and a lot of girls like playing with dolls. My observation has been that this isn’t forced indoctrination, but rather a natural predisposition. Our body types even mimic this natural disposition, one for killing (people in warfare and animals for dinner) and the other for care and nurturing. I wonder if the difference in upper body strength is part of the reason for the popularity of women’s football yet why, according to Serena Williams, men’s tennis is a completely different sport to women’s? Sure, each individual has their share of nature and nurture, but to think we are completely one or the other is idiocy.

Sadly, I’d suspect that we will only stop drinking the lunatic Kool-aide after, as Cold Chisel puts it, the War is Over. In the meantime, we could stick with coffee shop military management styles, stay away from innovation and leaders who pursue manufacturing goals with a singular vision, pretend we have a sovereign manufacturing capability, employ a committee of bureaucrats to mess up the Aukus project, building the submarine in 30 years and 10 times the budget, and ideologically cut off the head of anyone who shows any masculine leadership attributes, toxic or not.

Should we get our white flag out now? Or should we start empowering leaders to solve the problems we are facing. Leaders who intimidate the Chinese enough to build respect and a good working relationship. Leaders who relish the chance of sailing in a lightning storm and don’t mind a drop of massively discounted premium clean-skin wine.

Paul Batten is the founder of LifeMapp. He developed good working relationships with Chinese car companies while completing over a dozen vehicle dynamics consulting projects from 2008 to 2013. 

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