Budget 2022: Last-chance saloon for Coalition: either arm Defence or do nothing foolish

Defence Minister Peter Dutton. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Defence spending in Tuesday’s budget is the last chance for the government to announce or, much more importantly, to do something significant in that area.

There is one thing it should do, and one thing it must not do, if it’s serious about Australian defence.

The biggest mystery remains why the government has not yet announced any action on the initiative it first announced two years ago – and which has been re-announced repeatedly since – to build a missile manufacturing ­facility in Australia.

The government has several times told stakeholders it is on the brink of an announcement, but no announcement has followed.

If there were a specific commitment to a specific site or precinct, involving one or two US companies, with a firm start date, that would be the first and only action involving actual military weapons in the government’s recent rash of announcements about defence.

Most have been announcements about announcements.

Specific announcements have all been about job creation in enhancing defence bases and real estate. Any big dollar amounts are overwhelmingly far enough into the future to be beyond forward estimates. The $10bn headline figure for a new submarine base, for example, turns out to be an estimate of money to be spent over the next 20 years.

Nonetheless, all these announcements are good in their way, perfectly normal business for an election campaign, but they have nothing directly to do with weapons or military capability, especially on a relevant timescale.

So one very good criterion for judging the seriousness or otherwise of the defence budget is whether there are any dollars spent within the forward estimates on actual weapons that will exist in the physical world.

The government needs something on missiles, both the so-far chimerical missile factory, and just buying some missiles ready-made.

The huge contribution the government could make to national security involves not doing something. Governments can achieve a lot by not doing foolish things. We are, bizarrely, committed to spending billions of dollars on tanks, and another $30bn beyond that on heavy armoured vehicles.

The government is set to choose either German company Rheinmetall or South Korean company Hanwha to provide 450-odd heavy armoured vehicles.

Spending this much money on armour is the most irresponsible, frivolous and militarily ridiculous decision any Australian government could make today. It’s not only a colossal waste of money, it guarantees a militarily irrelevant structure for the army. We will never use the armour. The Defence organisation may not have noticed but we are an island surrounded by oceans. We cannot drive these vehicles to any relevant battle, or any battle at all. They have no maritime relevance.

Not only that, the Russians have shown in Ukraine that tanks and armoured vehicles are easy prey to shoulder-launched missiles. Even when invading a country right next door, with short supply lines and overwhelming force superiority, Russian tanks and armoured vehicles have been death traps and militarily ineffective.

We are spending tens of billions of dollars to build a force that could unsuccessfully attempt to invade a small city, though why we would want to do that is a secret only military planners could possibly know, for it is beyond rational.

In their territory grabs of 2014, the Russians decisively and easily defeated the Ukrainians using tanks and armoured vehicles. The Ukrainians, so much smarter than we are, worked out in the intervening period that modern warfare is mostly about missiles, and that big platforms are big targets.

So applying the principles of asymmetric warfare, the Ukrainians killed the Russian tanks and armoured vehicles.

The government in the budget, and before the election, should not announce who will build our new heavy armoured vehicles, and under no circumstances should it sign a contract.

Refraining from such foolishness would mean that at least the next government could absorb the lessons of recent conflicts, and reflect on the nature of our maritime environment before throwing away tens of billions on utterly useless vanity projects.