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Updated: Sun Aug 29 16:43:38 UTC 2010
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APA NOTAMS ISSN 1836-7135
Situating the appreciation – The
perils
of force structure planning by edict
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Air Power
Australia - Australia's Independent Defence Think Tank
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Air Power Australia NOTAM
21st November,
2007
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Reprinted from Asia-Pacific Defence
Reporter – November 2007,
Vol.33, No.9, with permission.
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| Contacts: |
Peter
Goon
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Carlo
Kopp |
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Mob:
0419-806-476 |
Mob:
0437-478-224 |
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Australia is on the verge of a
strategic decline in regional military standing unseen for many
decades. The creeping arms race which has gripped Asia, a byproduct of
budgetary surpluses and an open global arms market, has produced a
regional spending spree on state of the art combat aircraft, guided
weapons, surface combatants, submarines and ISR systems not seen since
the Warsaw Pact spending surge of the early 1980s. These developments
have been paralleled by the Global War on Terror, which has pushed the
US into strategic and budgetary “overstretch” and are seriously
challenging its long term ability to credibly intervene in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Australia’s response to these developments has been remarkable –
downsizing and deskilling of the Air Force’s core capabilities of the
order of fifty percent, coupled with heavy investments in a number of
ostensibly “joint” land and maritime capabilities.
Yet the rhetoric emanating from the Canberra bureaucracy, and the
offices of the past two Defence ministers, presents a glowing picture
of an ADF which is surging ahead in the acquisition of an ADF force
structure that will be second to none in this region.
Such a glaring dichotomy between observable strategic reality and
nation state propaganda is disturbing for a variety of good reasons.
- The first is that the apparatus of state is clearly
disconnected from the situational picture across the region.
- The second is that excluding a surprise strategic calamity
which exposes this dichotomy, no effort will be made to correct this
disconnect from reality.
- The third is that sooner or later such an unexpected
calamity will occur, to the detriment of the Australian people.
- The fourth is that taxpayer’s funds are being squandered,
Defence Industry decimated while work is shifted overseas, and
de-skilling in Defence and Industry continues, unabated.
How has this come about? The immediate answer is that force structure
planning decisions since 2001 have been dominated by arbitrary choices
rather than by analytically derived selections. Decisions have been
made on trivialised, often internal political criteria, rather than
through carefully considered analyses anchored in hard numbers and a
proper understanding of the interaction between technology and strategy.
When challenged with hard numbers, the Canberra bureaucracy and
political apparatus has reacted with defensive explanations that
usually beggar belief. Forensic analysis of public statements and
parliamentary evidence put forth by the offices of the past two
Ministers, as well as many senior Defence officials, shows a disturbing
frequency of factual errors, logical fallacies, and misunderstandings
of the basics of contemporary force structure planning technique, and
its supporting knowledge base.
This exposes two of the deeper causes behind the ongoing series of poor
planning choices. Firstly repeated cycles of downsizing, outsourcing
and resulting deskilling have critically depleted the organic
analytical, technological, strategic, planning and acquisitions skills
base within the Services and the wider Defence organisation. Secondly,
the increasing prominence of propaganda in the management of the
organisation has elevated nonsense into the position of defacto
doctrine, displacing classical military reasoning processes.
The prima facie replacement since 2001 of the formal force structure
planning process with its analytical underpinnings, by arbitrary
decisions, a posteriori dressed up as analytically determined choices,
has without doubt put Australia firmly on the road to strategic ruin.
A retired general officer commented to me in 2004 that we are seeing a
“guess and backfill approach to planning – situating the appreciation”.
Three years later we can map an unbroken series of such major
decisions: the JSF in 2002, the premature retirement of the F-111 fleet
in 2003, and the Super Hornet in 2007, the latter in the face of
uniform public opposition by Australia’s analytical community. The
strategic damage produced by these decisions, if not reversed and
corrected, will take decades to repair, if it is at all repairable in a
strategically relevant timeframe.
Australia needs a fundamental rethink of how it goes about the business
of planning for Defence, and must return to the proven and robust
methodology of analytically driven planning.
The nation cannot afford either fiscally or strategically, to pursue
the force structure plan imposed since 2001. It must be revised, and
current plans terminated or radically changed, with the focus being a
strategically relevant and fiscally affordable strategy. Of the three
services, the Air Force has been damaged the most, and its repair must
become an urgent national priority, if we are to meet the policy
objectives set by government in terms of the capability to achieve air
superiority in our region, and to maintain a robust and credibly
self-reliant aerospace industrial base.
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F/RF-111C (US DoD)
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Air
Power Australia Website - http://www.ausairpower.net/
Air Power Australia Research and
Analysis - http://www.ausairpower.net/research.html
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