Setting longer term priorities fundamental to fixing acquisition process

How can Australia’s troubled defence acquisition process come as a surprise when few national security priorities have reached strategic permanence throughout the vicissitudes of defence planning over recent decades?

Since 2009, Australia has had three white papers, several investment and industry reviews, a strategic update, a force structure plan — and now a Defence Strategic Review, a yet-to-be conducted review into the Royal Australian Navy’s surface fleet, and a biennial national security strategy.

One cannot begrudge our nation’s key decision makers for wanting to make informed decisions on multi-billion-dollar projects. However, it is fundamental to acknowledge that each of these reports is conducted through the lens of the “in vogue” security risks or geopolitical aspirations of the day.

Now, before readers start cracking their knuckles and writing furious missives for denigrating security and geostrategic risks that were critically important several years ago, hindsight has illustrated that review after review has resulted in a death by a thousand cuts. Not only has this approach kicked the can down the road and delayed the construction of those large ticket items that are fundamental for the prosecution of warfare — from submarines through to infantry fighting vehicles — but year after year have dragged defence to address discordant threats, making long-term acquisition very, very hard.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane to the 2013 Defence White Paper. While acknowledging the increasing competition between China and the United States, the 2013 Defence White Paper stated that “we expect that both the United States and China will work hard to maximise cooperative aspects and minimise the competitive elements in the relationship.”

Comfortable optimism, rather than realistic pessimism, coloured the document — and in turn, defence policy.

“Australia welcomes China’s rise, not just because of the social and economic benefits it has brought China’s people, but also in recognition of the benefits that it has delivered to states around the globe.

VIEW ALL

“The government does not believe that Australia must choose between its longstanding alliance with the United States and its expanding relationship with China; nor do the United States and China believe that we must make such a choice.”

While hindsight is 20/20, many in the national security ecosystem were already acutely aware of the risks posed by growing bipolarity between the United States and China and weren’t willing to obfuscate the likelihood of growing soft and hard power competition.

Indeed, writing seven years earlier in 2006, even Professor Hugh White’s Beyond the Defence of Australia paper published by the Lowy Institute observed that growing competition between the two nations may result in military confrontation.

“If America cannot remain the undisputed leader in Asia, it may have to settle for a lesser role as an equal partner with China and other major regional powers,” Professor White observed.

“Otherwise, competition and conflict do indeed seem inevitable, as Mearsheimer says. How intense might that strategic competition be?”

Another risk of the review-after-review rabbit hole is that not only are Defence white papers and reviews coloured in the language and trends of the day, but they also aren’t binding. This can be observed in the year in, year out commitments to achieving adequate levels of defence spending … at some point the future.

Not only did the 2013 Defence White Paper advocate for the Commonwealth to “grow the Defence budget to around 2 per cent of gross domestic product,” it also articulated that the Commonwealth expedite the transference of innovative capabilities into the hands of Defence faster.

Just three years later, the 2016 Defence White Paper was coloured with the ongoing calamities in the Middle East, in particular the growth of the Islamic State and transnational terrorism. So much so did this document focus on terror, that the 2016 Defence White Paper features 100 mentions of terrorism versus 64 mentions of China. Like its predecessor, the paper recommitted to raising defence expenditure to 2 per cent of GDP while promising to “streamline acquisition processes.”

While the trend of the day changed, the same structural issues of underfunding and poor acquisition continued.

As the Hon Kim Beazley appropriately observed in ASPI’s The Strategist in February, budget savings from the peace dividend are a compounding problem. Had the Commonwealth heeded their own advice a decade ago, the problems of those structural issues that plague defence — including the need to replace ageing platforms across all services — would have been mitigated.

Passing through the 2020 Defence Strategic Update which gleefully reports that the government is on its way to spending 2 per cent of GDP on Defence, we now reach the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) — which has been billed by the Commonwealth as the most important defence review since World War II.

As part of the suggested process to enhance defence capability acquisition, the Commonwealth has pledged to take on more risk and do away with past “perfectionism”.

“Once projects have entered the IIP, capability managers have too much latitude to make design changes, tinker with capability outcomes, and indulge in the quest for perfectionism,” the DSR read.

“These behaviours result in delay and strategically significant capability outcomes not being achieved in a timely manner, or at all.”

However, it is hard to reconcile Defence’s belief that capability managers are merely stifled by “perfectionism” when one considers the raft of acquisition failures over recent years. (In fact — I might be as blunt as to suggest that this throwaway comment was the Defence equivalent of being asked what your weaknesses are in a job interview. “Perfectionism”, the eager jobseeker always responds.)

Are the lack of armaments on the offshore patrol vessel down to perfectionism? Or the much-blighted MRH-90? Or maybe the C-27J Spartan that cannot be deployed to a battlefield?

The proliferation of white papers, reviews, industry papers, and updates have sidelined those defence acquisition priorities that should have achieved strategic permanence over the last two decades — including infantry fighting vehicles and frigates. Rather, each document re-pivots defence’s priorities to the trending threat of the day. While this is not to suggest that those threats are not legitimate, Defence must make a clear delineation between transitory geopolitical assumptions and permanent strategic needs.

Indeed, we can already see evidence of this in the recently released Defence Strategic Review.

In the review, just over one and a half pages have been allocated to the cyber and space domains (combined) compared to just under one and a half pages to climate change.

While climate change may shape the way in which militaries prosecute warfare, issues such as anti-satellite capabilities and cascading space junk poses an existential threat to military satellite communications — while state-based hacking groups can cause untold humanitarian suffering by targeting our critical civilian infrastructure.