The ADF is still not fit for purpose

The Armed Forces and the government need to throw out the old inefficient and expensive way of doing things and think outside the box.

HMAS Hobart’s MH-60R helicopter ‘Voodoo’ prepares to launch during a regional presence deployment. Picture: Department of Defence

As we head into election season, it’s worth reviewing how well the Albanese government has performed on defence. Has it succeeded in shaping the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for what both major parties agree is the most uncertain strategic environment since World War II, one in which any warning time of major conflict involving Australia has evaporated?

Two and a half years in, the government’s record is decidedly mixed. It set a high bar for itself, commissioning the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) that concluded that the ADF was not fit for purpose.

The government presented its response as a deep reset of the ADF. But when we put the hyperbole aside, the overall trajectory has been one of comfortable continuity rather than radical redesign and adaptation.

The core role and nature of the ADF hasn’t changed. The government states that the ADF has moved from being a balanced force to a focused force, but it’s hard to see what that means in practice.

The tasks that the ADF must perform in the National Defence Strategy (NDS) are still just as broad as they were before the DSR – ranging from defending Australia to helping to maintain rules-based global order. What contingencies does the ADF no longer need to be ready for?

The ADF is to adopt a “strategy of denial”. Defined as “working with the US and key partners to ensure no country attempts to achieve its regional objectives through military action”, it’s hard to see how this is fundamentally different from Australia’s traditional military strategy.

Certainly the DSR did result in some changes; for example, Army adopting a more amphibious role. It appears that the Army is embracing this direction. But presumably the point of this amphibious capability is to be able to operate in littoral regions to protect Australia’s northern approaches, and that has been the primary task of the ADF since World War II.

There is also continuity in the ADF’s people problem. The government inherited a growing gulf between the ADF’s personnel requirements and actual ADF numbers. Despite repeated statements by ADF leaders that it is turning that around, we are yet to see meaningful increases. Moreover, the government has not addressed the problem by reducing the personnel requirement through revising the ADF’s force structure.

Similarly, there has been little news on different models of service that could expand the ways a broader cross section of the Australian population can contribute.

There’s continuity also in the area that matters most, namely funding. For this term of government, Defence essentially has the same funding line that the previous government published in its 2016 Defence White Paper.

The sum total of “new” money that the Albanese government will have devoted to Defence for the period 2022-23 to 2024-25 will be $400m. That’s an increase of a mere 0.25 per cent on the roughly $158bn that has been planned since 2016. It’s hard to square that with the government’s assessments of our declining strategic circumstance and lack of warning time. One has to wonder whether it believes its own narrative.

Furthermore, the acquisition plan the government inherited was massively unaffordable, another factor in the DSR’s “not fit for ­purpose” assessment. To square the circle in the absence of additional funding, Defence has had to eject numerous planned capabilities from it.

The government’s one major addition to the acquisition plan is the rapid acquisition of a fleet of 11 General Purpose Frigates. After inheriting the previous government’s trainwreck of a shipbuilding plan that left the Navy at grave risk of having virtually no ships by the 2030s, it had to do something.

Whether the plan of acquiring an off-the-shelf design, with the first three ships to be built overseas followed by eight here, will succeed remains to be seen, but at least it’s trying something different. The possibility of injecting the approaches of Japanese or South Korean shipbuilders which, unlike their Western counterparts, can build warships at reasonable cost and in relevant timeframes also offers some cause for optimism.

But fundamentally the current government’s defence industry policy is one of continuity. Industry policy mirrors capability priority, and that is still built around small numbers of exquisite, crewed platforms. So industry policy is centred on large construction programs that build foreign designs largely comprising foreign components. These systems take years to design and build at exponentially increasing cost. They do, however, require thousands of presumably unionised jobs.

Unfortunately, it’s the same glacial approach that led to the DSR’s judgment that the ADF was not fit for purpose. If the government had truly wanted to show Defence and industry that there was a new sheriff in town, it would have cancelled another legacy it inherited, namely the Hunter-class frigate, a grotesque program whose cost has spiralled while its scope has shrunk from nine ships to six and won’t deliver any capability until 18 years after the program started.

If the Albanese government wanted to achieve something truly new in its current term, it could push the ADF out of its com­fort zone and direct it to rapidly acquire locally designed and made systems.

AUKUS, another inheritance, seems to be Deputy Prime Minister (and Defence Minister) Richard Marles’s overriding focus. While even hardcore supporters of the SSN enterprise, such as Kim Beazley and former Coalition defence minister Linda Reynolds have voiced concerns about the pace of work, the government insists that the SSN program is on track – it would be dismal indeed if it had gone off the rails only 18 months after the “optimal pathway” was announced.

But what we have seen so far merely confirms that this will be a long and expensive pathway. The government recently announced three years of studies into the maritime infrastructure needed in Western Australia to support SSNs. So, three years after the original AUKUS announcement, it is only just commissioning studies. And there is still no word on the cost and schedule of the shipyard in Adelaide that will be needed to build the AUKUS sub­marines or a second submarine base on the east coast.

Between them, the SSNs and Hunter frigates will consume $75bn-$95bn over the coming 10 years and that, all going well, will only get us to the first vessels in each program entering service.

The Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordinance (GWEO) enterprise (again, begun by the previous government), aiming to build guided weapons in Australia, is another example of building foreign technology here in large, slow and very expensive industrial programs. Defence boasts it is using a “crawl, walk, run” approach that employs mature foreign designs and foreign components. Gradually it may increase the Australian-made content and maybe, just maybe, one day we might aspire to designing guided weapons in Australia. Fear of risk outweighs appetite for opportunity.

King Charles III inspects Australia's Federation Guard at Parliament House on October 21, 2024. Picture: Department of Defence

Certainly, some enhanced capabilities are trickling into ADF service. The first Australian-built Boxer Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle has been delivered. And that industrial capability has provided Australia with a contract to export 100 Boxers back to Germany. The Norwegian NSM anti-ship has been installed on Navy warships, providing a much needed upgrade. But we still don’t have the US Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) despite the previous government announcing its acquisition in 2020 under an “accelerated” process. That’s the nature of complex foreign weapons that need to be integrated onto complex platforms.

The fundamental problem is that these exquisite programs will not deliver what the ADF so desperately needs, namely affordable, renewable mass. ADF leaders, while resolutely determined not to learn any inconvenient lessons from contemporary conflicts, have at least admitted that mass will be vital to success in any future conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

But the combination of Defence’s personnel numbers, capability plan and industry policy will not deliver mass. Those are still built around the laborious construction of small numbers of platforms and weapons operated by exquisitely skilled personnel who will be quickly depleted in conflict and can’t be replaced.

How do you deliver mass with a navy that can get only a handful of ships to sea? Achieving mass can be done only by mobilising the population and industry to break out of the current model of a small ADF.

If the government and Defence wanted to learn some lessons from the conflict in the Middle East, there is a key one from the Houthis’ blockade of maritime trade in the Red Sea in the US’s belated recognition that the Houthis make many of their weapons themselves.

“Our assessment right now is the Houthis maybe do more indigenous production of things than we previously maybe gave them credit for,” a US official stated. The Houthis aren’t employing a self-hobbling “crawl, walk, run” industry policy.

In an era characterised by the democratisation of the technologies used in warfare, Australia shouldn’t either. In addition to highly skilled and creative local defence companies, we have companies with deep expertise in “defence adjacent” sectors such as mining, space, and autonomous systems. They have much to offer the defence sector.

A recent competition run by Defence’s new Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA) office for general purpose drones identified numerous local SMEs that could meet the requirement and quickly provide mature solutions.

The situation is similar with maritime drones and small land vehicles, loitering munitions, rocket motors, advanced sensors, AI – the list goes on.

If the Albanese government wanted to achieve something truly new in its current term, it could push the ADF out of its com­fort zone and direct it to rapidly acquire locally designed and made systems.

We have heard the ADF’s demurrals: auto­n­omous systems are too immature and don’t have the range needed in the Indo-Pacific; local industry doesn’t have the capability; and so on.

But do we really want to continue down a path that is not fit for purpose and can’t deliver what we need when we need it? It’s time for disruptive discontinuity.

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Dr Marcus Hellyer is head of research at Strategic Analysis Australia.