ADF’s staffing problems laid bare in lengthy senate estimates hearing

At a time where Australia’s military is trying to grow, staffing levels are plummeting – but one type of role seems to be growing in size.

Australia’s defence force is struggling to recruit new staff, while the number of top brass is surging, senate estimates have revealed.

In a lengthy hearing on Wednesday, chief of defence force Angus Campbell conceded that the entire defence force was more than 4300 personnel – or seven per cent – below strength and shrinking.

The force’s authorised strength is 62,735 staff, and the federal government has set an ambitious goal of boosting that by 18,500 people by 2050.

“Inflow rates remain below the level required to maintain our current force,” General Campbell told estimates.

He said the military was considering allowing foreigners to serve.

Compounding the recruitment crisis is the revelation that it is taking up to 10 months to fully on-board new recruits, which the ADF said it hoped to get down to 100 days.

But while the number of enlisted people has shrunk year-on-year, the number of star ranked officers is now at a “record high”, according to Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge.

Chief of defence force Angus Campbell faced a grilling in senate estimates on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Senator Shoebridge said the number of personnel has increased in this financial year from 219 to 238.

Questioning General Campbell and defence officials, Senator Showbridge asked why “Australia has something like five times as many generals to troops as the United States and four and a half times as many star officers to troops as the United Kingdom”.

“Why so many generals, so many admirals, so many air commodores,” he asked.

Defence officials said the ratio of senior officers to troops across the services “hasn’t changed”, but what had changed was a “very significant expansion in the complexity of the roles and responsibilities” across the entire defence force.

“We need to undertake work at senior and complex levels that are required for the building and sustaining of, not just the current force, but evolving into a future force,” General Campbell said.

“Each of our counterpart forces across the developed community of nations that we work with are seeing similar challenges across similar complexities and dealing with it in very comparable (ways).

“We are dealing with the same breadth of complexity that other major development forces are, but we are a smaller force.

“So the outcome of bringing and building expertise which naturally sees people rising in rank or role, or being more experienced members of the force, is that we have a different ratio … because the combat elements of our force is smaller than the combat elements of other forces.”

The ADF is currently six per cent below target strength, despite an ambitious plan to grow by 30 per cent over the next 20 years. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The army is currently suffering the hardest by low personnel numbers, and is almost 2900 people below target. The navy is currently 880 people below target while the air force is faring the best at 536 people below the ideal level.

“It puts stress across the entire organisation in terms of being able to both train, recruit, to conduct activity, and to sustain our people, support their families, continue our tempo of activity, both internationally and domestically,” General Campbell said.

Low unemployment is making it difficult for the ADF to compete with the private sector, and General Campbell said the military was exploring other ways to boost numbers, including allowing “non-citizen enlistment on a pathway to citizenship”.

Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie called on the government to step up to address the military’s “recruitment and retention crisis”.

“We need to do a much better job of getting young Australians into uniform if they want to serve,” he said.

“There are a lot of barriers at the moment.”

Originally published as ADF’s staffing problems laid bare in lengthy senate estimates hearing