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As I asked recently, Can NZ join a military pact without having a military to speak of? I was referring, of course, to current talks between the Chris Hipkins and Anthony Albanese, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, with a view to New Zealand possibly becoming part of an expanded AUKUS alliance. Which, I wrote, begs the question of what, exactly, New Zealand has to bring to the defence table?
Of course, it’s easy to make fun of New Zealand’s defence forces, as when satirical newspaper The Betoota Advocate wrote that the Ukrainian president was touched by “Kiwi PM’s Offer To Send Over Air Force’s Doorless Cessna 206 And Two Revolvers To Shoot From It”. But if, as the Australian’s Greg Sheridan has also written, Australia is “compared with New Zealand, Godzilla, Hercules and Arnie Schwarzenegger all rolled into one”, he stresses that that’s only compared with New Zealand.
Because, when it comes to frittering and degrading defence capabilities, Australia’s doesn’t exactly have a lot to be proud of, either.
The Australian Defence Force, the Defence Department and Australian defence industry are all in a desperate crisis of cost-cutting and complete confusion about direction, timetable, purpose and everything else.
People are leaving the ADF, especially the army, at a rate of knots and cannot be replaced. The department is going through a frenzy of cost-cutting that is seeing all kinds of capabilities deferred, which often means abolished.
It would be too easy to blame it all on the current government; in fact, the blame spans multiple governments. But Defence Minister Richard Marles is kicking few goals for his portfolio. The best that can be said of the Albanese government is that, like Marise Payne and Scott Morrison before them, they’re managing diplomatic alliances well. But actual defence capability? Forget it.
Defence Minister Richard Marles has lost the battle of the budget. It’s not clear he put up any fight. Foreign Minister Penny Wong is a far more powerful cabinet minister. Defence is suffering grievously as a result […]
Consider the both parlous and chaotic state of defence spending. The budget generally compensates Defence for movements in foreign exchange rates but not for inflation. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s budget analysis concludes that the Albanese government, by this mechanism alone, has taken $1.5bn from Defence over the forward estimates, the next four years. In fact it’s worse than that because while the budget was framed at a higher inflation rate than the previous estimates, the actual inflation rate we’ve experienced is higher still, so the real loss to Defence is more than ASPI’s $1.5bn.
Even worse, Defence is being cut by stealth, with hundreds of millions reallocated to other departments, especially the the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to compensate it for helping to negotiate AUKUS and the like. To use an old Australian metaphor, it’s a Clayton’s Defence spending: the defence spending you make when you don’t spend anything on actual defence.
There are times when government passes beyond parody. This recalls the Gillard government deciding to spend part of the foreign aid budget on processing asylum claimants. Thus one of the biggest recipients of Australia’s overseas aid was Australia!
Worse still, the Albanese government is effectively spending nearly a billion dollars meant for Australia’s defence to prop up a tinpot Eastern European kleptocracy. Military aid to Ukraine might soothe the vanities of the yellow-and-blue profile mob, but it does zero to defend Australia from its real strategic threats.
While the AUKUS nuclear subs will – eventually – be a vital part of Australia’s defence, the fact on the balance sheets right now is that they’re obliterating nearly everything else. And what little is left is being frittered on pointless toys.
The only specific military capability arising in the near term from the DSR is the HIMARS rocket launchers for the army. These will initially have a range of 300km but over time will probably get to 500km. That’s a useful capability well worth acquiring. But it does absolutely nothing to provide Australia with any long-range strike or strategic deterrence. That was supposed to come through long-range missiles, swarming drones, long-range fighter aircraft with in-air refuelling capabilities and much else. But we’ve got nothing more than vague promises on that score […]
The DSR’s biggest capability decision was to cancel the last squadron of F35 Joint Strike Fighters that we had always planned to buy and to defer any consideration of our pitifully under-armed surface fleet to another committee.
All of this is starting to add up to a very dangerous mixture of neglect and poor priorities.
The problems with Defence start at the top brass – and, as middle managers everywhere will, they’re making sure they’re the last ones to answer for their own screw-ups.
Marles made his first big mistake in reappointing the Defence leadership that had produced such dismal performance for so many years […] A government remotely seized of the urgency of our situation would be pushing hard now to establish all manner of real combat capabilities.
The Australian
And, ‘Hey, at least we’re better than New Zealand!’ is not much of a brag.
