Defence Minister doesn’t get Defence timescales

In the course of an interview between ABC chief political correspondent Sabra Lane and Defence Minister Stephen Smith on Radio National’s PM program yesterday afternoon, the following exchange took place:

SABRA LANE: The Government says its spending on Defence will be increased to 2 per cent of GDP when the financial circumstances allow, got any rough idea as to when that might be?

STEPHEN SMITH: I'm not putting a timetable on it.

SABRA LANE: But you've got respected analysts like Peter Jennings who say it just shouldn't be left to chance you should be able to give people an idea of when that might be.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well I don't want to shop Peter, but Peter was intricately involved in a former life with the detailed working of the 2009 white paper, he was one of the people who thought that you could map out for Defence a guaranteed share of spending with dedicated growth paths from 2009 through to 2030 - over 21 years. Well life is not like that and the global financial crisis taught everyone that life is not like that.

I have news for the Defence Minister. When you are dealing with defence procurement and capability development, life is exactly like that, or at least it needs to be, because acquisition of a complex defence platform takes twenty years or more. In order to manage such projects and be in a position to enter legally binding contracts between the Commonwealth of Australia and the supplier, the Department of Defence needs to know how much money it is likely to have over the relevant timescale:

-  Planning for a replacement for the Oberon Class submarines began in the late 1970s, the winning design was announce in 1987, and the submarines were built between 1990 and 2003: major capital investment over a quarter of a century.

-  Planning for the replacement for Collins began not later than 2007. These boats will enter service in the 2030s.

-  Australia signed up to the Joint Strike Fighter program in 2002.  The first tranche of 14 aircraft will be delivered no earlier than about 2017-19, and it will be well into the 2020s by the time we have full capability. Meanwhile we will have to make a stop-gap purchase of Super Hornets.

All of these procurement projects require very substantial complementary expenditure on facilities, crews and crew training.

The fact is that if Governments want Defence to manage its procurement, facilities investment, through life support and training programs efficiently and effectively, it needs to give the Department reasonable predictability of funding. This is not a year-by-year business.

See the full interview at Sabra Lane - Stephen Smith interview, 3 May 2013.

A fourth Air Warfare Destroyer?

According to this online piece from News Limited,

Adelaide is in line to secure a fourth $2 billion air warfare destroyer because the Federal Government wants a major shipbuilding project in its defence program.

The project will be included in next year's Defence White Paper.

The Government wants to help bridge the national skills gap and a fourth air warfare destroyer is the likely choice.

Leaving aside any question of whether we needed the first three Air Warfare Destroyers, let alone a fourth, and leaving aside that this represents a Government that is highly unlikely to be elected at the next election thinking aloud about what it will do following the election after that, this seems a curious way to shape the Royal Australian Navy.

Let us leave aside also the fact that if the Government had conducted itself with any meaningful sense of purpose in relation to the future submarine we would have been cutting metal by 2016 in order for the first of the new submarines to go into service as the Collins Class submarines reach the end of their planned service life from 2025.  That didn’t happen; instead, the Government presided over a charade in which the Defence Materiel Organisation ran around the world trying to drum up a design competition when it has been clear from the start (including, apparently, to the European submarine builders) that the only way for Australia to procure a submarine that is fit for purpose is to have the Government’s very own ASC Pty Ltd build a submarine that takes HMAS Collins as its starting point, evolves the design both to build on what we have learned from designing, building and operating the Collins Class and to take account of perceived changes of requirement. We must be the only country in the world in which the Government owns a submarine builder and yet agonises for years over who should build its submarines.

I would be the first to agree that continuity of work for Australian defence industry and the preservation of its very high skills is important, and if any Government were to start to talk seriously about a “continuous build” approach to both its surface ships and its submarines (there is talk of this for the future submarine build) I for one would raise a cheer.

Meanwhile, I would have thought that an adequate maintenance and refit budget to keep Australia’s six submarines and 48 commissioned surface vessels in fighting trim would be more than adequate to maintain all the shipbuilding and maintenance skills we would need to support the RAN – especially as the Government’s antics in relation to the future submarine mean that it has inadvertently committed us to cutting up and refitting some number of Collins Class boats – a major shipbuilding task in itself, the end result of which will be a 1980s submarine for the 2020s-30s.

Whatever the case for the Air Warfare Destroyer, I think the certainty of being able to deploy two vessels in fighting trim, while a third undergoes maintenance or refit, would be preferable to having four in various states of disrepair. Given that the Navy could not muster a single seaworthy amphibious ship to assist in disaster relief during last year’s cyclone season, there is plenty of work to be done. What is required is the money and the political will to do it.

Reforms to naval ship repair

The Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, The Hon. Greg Combet, today announced reforms to Australia’s naval ship repair sector. Under the reforms,

... the Defence Materiel Organisation will reform the Navy's Major Fleet Unit Repair and Maintenance program as outlined in the Smart Sustainment initiative.

If the DMO’s conduct towards the government’s shipbuilder/sustainer ASC Pty Ltd is anything to go by, the thought of DMO teaching anyone else how to go about their business does not have me throwing my hat in the air.