Our defence promises are pure hot air

Raytheon’s National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System, which is deployed in seven nations, including the US.

If Australia could guarantee its ­security through announcements, we would be the most secure nation in the world. The government has finally decided on its industry partners in the project, first announced two years ago, to create an Australian missile manufacturing enterprise. They will be Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the biggest missile manufacturers in the world. We are also going to get some advanced sea mines and accelerate the acquisition of missiles for the navy and air force.

All of this is very good. It remains a mystery why it took two years since the first announcement to get to the point where we’ve chosen Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. They were the ­obvious choice before day one.

It’s more than a bit unclear what the various Australian companies and consortia that have been simultaneously announced will do. Canberra typically likes to share the honey around so that everybody gets a prize.

Our making missiles will require formal State Department approval for each missile type. This will be forthcoming, but it only gets tested when we apply for permission to produce a weapon.

The bigger danger is the announcement never produces action, or produces action far below that suggested in the initial announcement. For the past 15 years, defence policy has been characterised by epic announcement and dismal failure to deliver.

Peter Jennings on Monday wrote in The Australian about the truly bizarre cancellation of the $1.3bn Sky Guardian armed drone. As everyone except the Australian Defence Organisation (a term embracing both the Defence Department and the Australian Defence Force) knows, unmanned drones are an increasingly critical, and lethal, vector of modern warfare. They have been around for 20 years and, as all recent military conflict shows, you can’t leave home without them.

An MQ-9B sky guardian UAV drone.

So how many armed drones does Australia have? Precisely none. We were going to get one, the Sky Guardian, a version of the Predator. In 2019, then defence minister Linda Reynolds rapturously announced the project after years of work had taken place on it. Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price hailed the opportunities it would give “(Australian) companies that provide a range of innovative sensor, communication, manufacture and life-cycle support”. The project ­required sensitive US approvals, which had been secured.

Now it has been ditched, ostensibly to provide money for the enhanced cyber warfare activities the government is planning to produce. Jennings was characteristically charitable in describing it as a decision of “mind-boggling stupidity”. The government put out a statement in response claiming that the Loyal Wingman unmanned aircraft plus the Triton drone we plan to acquire mean we no longer need Predator.

But Loyal Wingman doesn’t yet exist as a mature capability, and in any event does a different job from the Sky Guardian. Triton is unarmed. So here we are in 2022 without even any plans to acquire an armed drone. In terms of defence policy, that is very nearly clinically insane. And all to save $1.3bn, when we have just spent $300bn on Covid without getting a single useful thing from it, when we are still planning to spend $30bn on tanks and heavy armour that we will never use. Is there a human being alive who could work out the convoluted thinking that leads to conclusions like that?

And this is after Peter Dutton a few months ago gave a speech, which got favourable coverage, saying that drones were the future and there would be heavy emphasis on armed drones in the ADF. Yet the only actual decision is to scrap the single armed drone we were going to get.

By the way, everyone in Defence now hails Loyal Wingman, oddly renamed as the Ghost Bat, as the solution to all problems. But Defence, and the air force, never wanted Loyal Wingman. Christopher Pyne as defence minister forced it on them. It didn’t fit any of Defence’s long-term plans or acquisition procedures. Pyne had to scrounge around for the seed money for the project and found it finally in the air force training budget. I have come now to an infallible conclusion: Defence ministers the Defence Department likes are never any good. The ones they complain about, such as Pyne, are getting something done.

It is also, incidentally, quite shocking that the announcement that we would get the Sky Guardian was bold, rapturous and produced the right headlines, whereas the news that our one and only armed drone would be scrapped leaked out through the Senate estimates process.

There have, of course, been a whole series of submarine announcements, going back to Kevin Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper, which have come to absolutely nothing. I was once naive enough to think a signed contract might mean physical reality would eventually follow. But we famously scrapped the French subs. On the basis of the budget papers, I wrote at the weekend that this would cost us $4bn. But it was revealed, again at Senate estimates, that the cancellation cost is $5.5bn and the French could still sue for more. So we can spend $5.5bn for nothing, but we can’t ­afford one single armed drone?

MQ-28A Ghost Bat pictured in flight during flight testing at Woomera, South Australia, 2021.

This syndrome of announcement then non-delivery is a pathological syndrome in Defence. Those of you with elephantine memories might recall that in 2018 we announced that we would build, with the Americans, and Papua New Guinea, a joint naval base in Lombrum on Manus Island in PNG. The headlines hailed a base in the region for our warships and all the military projection possibilities this involved. As of now, the Americans have more or less disappeared, we have completed the refurbishment of the chapel – which is great of course – and are constructing jetty facilities so small they cannot even accommodate our offshore patrol vessels, which guarantees no Australian navy ship will ever spend any significant time there.

Announcement? Rapturous. Military capacity delivered? Zero.

Before the last election, the government announced it would build a large Pacific aid navy vessel. After the election they decided to buy it overseas instead. The creation of an Australian naval ship building industry, which was the Coalition government’s main defence talking point for years, is now a complete bust – the subs ­delayed more or less forever, the frigates delayed at least several years, the aid ship cancelled.

As a result of all of the above, and there are many other examples, this column has adopted its own Defence policy of paying on delivery, not promise. So far there is almost nothing to pay.