Young ADF recruits ‘miss their phones on submarines’, defence experts warn amid shortage

Peter Dean has lashed the government for being ‘exceptionally slow’ on addressing the defence force’s workforce crisis, warning young recruits are struggling with the lack of connection to the outside world.

Defence slashed its workforce target by more than 4700 last year as near static military personnel numbers threaten the federal government’s $330bn push to rearm the nation.

Defence Strategic Review co-lead Peter Dean has lashed the government for being “exceptionally slow” on addressing the defence force’s workforce crisis, warning young recruits are struggling with the lack of connection to the outside world.

Professor Dean said the government should “not discount” anything put on the table to improve recruitment and retention in the Australian Defence Force, including criticism from former army chief Peter Leahy, who this week warned a decline in national pride and a culture of entitlement were contributing to the ADF’s personnel crisis.

However, he said the government had also not collected enough data to identify “one way or another” the greatest disincentive to joining the defence force.

“One of the things I think the government and the defence force needs to do is actually invest in figuring out all of this type of stuff in detail,” Professor Dean said.

“What I would argue is it took the government over a year to move on any of these measures (since the DSR). It’s been exceptionally slow, and then they’ve kept their response quite narrow.”

He also argued that the importance of young people to “stay connected” with the world meant that joining the ADF and being offline for months at a time was potentially stopping people from ever enlisting.

Retired chief of the army Peter Leahy.

“The nature of the community has changed. So you’re asking young people now, for instance, to get on a submarine and go underwater for however long a period of time, completely cut off from their community,” he said.

“And once upon a time, when there was any landline telephones and letters, that was a different world. Right now, young people are connected 24/7 to everything and everyone, so you’re asking them to step outside of that and do something very, very different.”

Defence slashed its workforce target by more than 4700 last year as near static military personnel numbers threaten the federal government’s $330bn push to rearm the nation.

Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge said the most significant barriers to young people joining the defence force were those erected by the ADF, including a slow and cumbersome application process and unnecessary reasons for disqualification.

“I think it’s a very practical issue about how difficult and lengthy a process it is to be recruited into the ADF, and how many barriers the military put in the way of young Australians,” he said.

“Things like, if you’ve seen a psychologist because you’re worried about stress in senior school, then that’s a disqualifying black mark.

“If you broke a limb when you were six, that’s something that they’re very concerned about.

“So normal issues in young people’s lives, including where they seek help for anxiety, are disqualified for service in the military, so they’re excluding whole chunks of our young population who have a sense of service and motivation.”

Peter Dean is the director of foreign policy and defence at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Mr Shoebridge said the ADF’s slow recruitment time frame also posed an obstacle with the process taking as long as a year, declaring Defence’s hiring regime was “broken from its basic foundations”.

“If you’re a high-achieving, motivated young Australian, and you’re thinking about careers and jobs, you won’t just apply to the ADF, you’ll apply to other employers,” he said.

“None of them put so many obstacles in the way of talented young people, and none of them take such a ridiculous length of time.

“So the whole recruitment process is broken from its basic foundations, and it’s just not competitive with any other organisation.”

As part of its push to address Defence’s workforce challenges, Labor has allowed permanent residents from Five Eyes countries who have not served in foreign militaries to join the ADF, with 350 such recruits expected by the end of the financial year.

“By being able to recruit Five Eyes permanent residents in Australia, supporting those that are already in service with things like the continuation bonus that we rolled out last year and are now expanding and extending so that people can get that at different stages through their defence ­career, providing additional family supports, for healthcare, improving the housing offering for members of the Australian Defence Force … what we’ve seen now is that we’re on track for a 24 per cent increase in the number of people joining the defence force this financial year,” Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh told the ABC in December.

But former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings said the government was simply not investing enough money for the ADF to reach appropriate recruitment levels, arguing that defence spending making up 2 per cent of GDP was simply too low.