Australia's rich history of military equipment stuff-ups
Choppers with doors too narrow to provide cover for exiting troops, ‘airlifters’ that can’t fly safely into battle. The cost of bad decisions is high.
At a recent Defence conference in Canberra, a relaxed-looking Peter Dutton was asked how he would fast-track the acquisition of new capabilities for the Australian Defence Force to meet growing strategic challenges posed by China.
“The real joy of this job is I get to deliver programs from decisions that were made one, two, three, even six predecessors ago,” Dutton deadpanned.
“The joy is I can bequeath the same sort of decision-making processes for years to come.”
The point was not lost on the audience at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s annual War Conference, which rippled in collective amusement.
The tight-knit world of arms manufacturers, Defence hardware buyers and military planners runs on decades-long time frames, while strategic threats and domestic politics can shift in a matter of months and years.
Dutton’s laid-back manner belies the task before the veteran minister, whose appointment to the Defence portfolio in March came at a critical time.
Weeks earlier, he declared the prospect of conflict with China could not be discounted. His former departmental secretary in the Home Affairs portfolio, Mike Pezzullo, put it more pithily – “the drums of war” were beating.
The world’s $360bn-a-year global arms industry sells a unique and compelling proposition – the promise of national power.
But the opportunity cost of bad decisions has never been higher.
Australia has a rich history of Defence procurement stuff-ups, wasting years and billions of dollars chasing the best capabilities money can buy.
We have utility helicopters with doors too narrow to provide covering fire for exiting troops, attack helicopters that can’t share tactical data with other Defence platforms, and “battlefield airlifters” that can’t fly safely into battle.
The jury is still out on the government’s decision – under former defence minister Marise Payne – to buy the world’s biggest and most expensive submarines, and highly-developmental sub-hunting frigates.
Both are so cutting-edge that they exist largely in the minds of their designers, and won’t start to arrive until the mid-2030s.
At the same time, Defence is spending $30bn on new tanks and armoured vehicles that are unlikely to ever go to war.
Yet it has somehow failed to acquire cheap combat drones and loitering munitions that make heavy armour more vulnerable than ever.
“Defence has had the luxury of not having to worry about anything bad happening soon,” says defence strategist Dr Andrew Davies.
“They have got into the habit of always planning for the distant future.”
As Defence’s 2020 Strategic Update warns, the comfortable assumption that Australia will have a decade to prepare for a major attack has now been turned on its head.
China’s rapid military advances and its anti-Western belligerence have laid bare the consequences of bad decisions and a plodding Defence procurement culture, injecting fresh urgency into the capability debate.
Proven military platforms carry far less risk, but time and again the Defence Department and the governments of the day decide to modify perfectly good off-the-shelf capabilities to meet Australia’s “unique” requirements.
The needs of industry are often prioritised over those of the equipments’ end users and, when all the evidence suggests it’s time to scrap dud programs, Defence can be the last to admit failure.
Davies, a former Defence Department capability analyst, says procuring complex military hardware is difficult, “but we make it harder than it should be”.
“Sometimes it’s political, remembering that every defence industry facility is in someone’s electorate,” he says.
“And we insist on fiddling with things to make them more Australian, instead of just buying them off an assembly line.”
He cites “Augustine’s Law”, posited by America’s former undersecretary of the army, Norman Augustine, that “the last 10 per cent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems”.
French company Naval Group made high-performance promises when pitching to build Australia’s next-generation submarines, selling their boat as, literally, the biggest and the best.
It is also a completely new submarine that will bear only scant resemblance to its nuclear antecedent.
Defence wanted 12 “regionally superior” boats that could operate far from home off the Chinese coastline, to track PLA submarines as they left their bases.
Rival Japanese or German boats would have been cheaper and faster to build, and quite capable of lurking around choke points in the Indonesian archipelago to intercept enemy subs headed south towards Australia.
“There is always a push to get the very best money can buy, on the grounds that you want to provide your fighting people with the best equipment you can,” Davies says.
He says it’s “not an unreasonable position”, but one that can have far-reaching consequences.
“The Future Submarine is a classic example. We are going for a very high-performance conventional submarine but we won’t get it until 2035.
“But if there is a war between now and then, we’ll have to fight it with a submarine that was designed in the 1980s.”
Naval Group and the government are locked in negotiations on a contract to design the Attack-class submarines, amid battles over cost, schedule and Australian industry content.
The contract to build nine anti-submarine warfare frigates, won by BAE Systems, is looming as another long-term capability headache.
The tender called for a mature design, but BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship design was the only one of the proposed options not based on an already in-service ship.
Defence also wants serious modifications to the yet-to-be-built British ship, including the powerful Australian-designed CEAFAR Active Phased Array Radar and the American Aegis combat system.
As Dutton revealed last month in The Australian, the program is now running 18 months late. The design is also running up against its planned weight margin, leaving just 270 tonnes, or 3.3 per cent of its maximum design weight, available for the addition of future systems.
The Super Seasprite fiasco has long been the nation’s poster child for Defence procurement incompetence.
The ill-fated navy helicopters – Australian-only versions of US legacy airframes – were axed in 2008, writing off $1.4bn worth of aircraft that were ruled too dangerous to fly.
It was a “never again” moment for Defence, which had considered cancelling the program six years earlier, but recommended against it.
Thirteen years later, Defence’s workhorse helicopter, the European-designed MRH-90 Taipan, is only just being returned to service after being grounded for the third time in as many years.
Defence finally admitted last year that long-running problems with the helicopter’s door gun were due not to faulty mounting hardware, but the size of the doors.
Former army private Phil Thompson, the Liberal member for Herbert, takes a soldier’s-eye view of the troubled $3.8bn helicopter program.
“You put five out on the tarmac and only two can take off. It happens all the time,” Thompson says, arguing the MRH-90 is a chronic underperformer that’s unfit for war fighting.
“We’re polishing a turd here.”
Thompson, who is close to Dutton and Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie, counts himself lucky that in 2009, when he was wounded by an IED in Afghanistan in 2009, he was airlifted to hospital by a US Black Hawk.
“If we relied on the MRH-90 overseas, people would have died,” he says.
“But you look at the Black Hawk, that is a proven, workable aircraft.”
The MRH-90 was sold by Airbus as an off-the-shelf capability, but was in reality a highly developmental aircraft.
Defence wanted the US-made Black Hawk, but the Howard government was swayed by Airbus’s plan to construct the helicopters in Australia with a promise of $1.1bn in local industry benefits including 400 jobs.
Today the program is running seven years late, blighted by “chronic” spare parts shortages and $35,000-an-hour running costs. It’s so unreliable, it has achieved just 53 per cent of planned flying hours over the past four years.
ASPI analyst Marcus Hellyer says Defence often refuses to call time on failing programs long after it should.
“The analysis has been done, and it’s pretty clear, that if you had got rid of the MRH-90 and bought Black Hawks instead, in the long run it would have been cheaper,” he says.
Hellyer says the “disastrous” MRH-90 should have been dumped like its Airbus sibling, the ARH Tiger, which will be replaced by US-made Apaches.
He says Defence “really doesn’t know how to do value-for-money analysis”, preferring to have a broad range of capabilities rather than prioritising those that are most needed.
“In the absence of clear and present danger, you tend to default to this balanced force construct,” Hellyer says.
“That is, you have a bit of everything, so if something happens down the line at least you have something to throw at the problem, or send off with the Americans.
“It’s not conducive to good prioritisation.”
Dutton has shown his readiness to deal with underperforming programs, calling time on a nine-year program to deliver a light, fixed-wing aircraft capable of operating in high-threat environments.
The C‐27J Spartan was never certified for its tactical role, due to deficient electronic countermeasures systems that left it vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles.
The Spartan has now been redesignated as a disaster and crisis response aircraft – roles it can comfortably undertake.
Under Dutton’s watch, Defence has also binned the army’s $1.3bn battle management system, amid rumours of security issues that could expose the locations of Australian forces.
Israel’s largest public defence company, Elbit Systems, was selected in 2010 to take the army’s management of its forces into the digital age.
More than a decade later, amid delays and cost overruns, Defence ordered its hardware to be removed from the army’s vehicles.
In carefully delivered evidence to Senate estimates, Defence’s chief information officer said a rumoured “backdoor” into the software hasn’t been found, but issues had emerged with “who can access it”.
Defence has turned to the US military’s preferred supplier, Danish company Systematic, to provide an interim fix.
Unsurprisingly, no one has put up their hand to accept responsibility for the time and money wasted on the now-unwanted system.
Success, as it is so often said, has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout