ADF: Attenuated Defence Force

Very good piece in the AFR today on Defence cuts

"The budget this month contained $5.5 billion in cuts over four years, a 10.5 per cent cut that is the biggest in percentage terms since the Korean War drawdown in 1953.

As a proportion of the size of the economy, defence spending is at its lowest level since the eve of World War II in 1938.

One of Australia’s pre-eminent defence analysts, professor Hugh White, said last night the government was “effectively downgrading Australia’s status from a middle power to a small power’’. “The government is free to make judgments about defence spending, but it should level with the Australian public about what it means for Australia’s security and so far it has been dishonest about it,’’ he said."

It is difficult to understand what, if any, thinking drives the Gillard government's thinking on Defence or indeed any aspect of military strategy. It is a well-known matter that as Deputy PM, Julia Gillard sent her former bodyguard to National Security Committee meetings. She is not interested in Defence and, given her background as a union lawyer, it is probably understandable that this is not her natural area of expertise. However she is the Prime Minister and that office requires her to take seriously the Prime Minister's duty to secure the country to the best of his or her ability. The contrast between her and her predecessor Kevin Rudd is a stark one indeed. The 2009 Defence White Paper was Kevin Rudd's great legacy to the ADF and, if implemented, would have resulted in an ADF of the potency and weight last experienced in the Vietnam era. Sadly, Rudd's blueprint has been junked by the Gillard Government and there is simply no replacement force structure concept. The worst aspect is that there is little appetite among Opposition ranks to fight on this issue. While Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is personally well-disposed to the ADF, the rest of the Coalition has no interest or stomach for fighting for a larger and more potent ADF. This is disappointing as whatever else is the role of conservative parties, the raising, training and sustaining of the armed forces is usually one of its major priorities.

The sly junking of the 2009 Defence White Paper reveals one of the fundamental problems faced by the ADF: it has comprehensively failed to develop a broad constituency. Since the end of the Vietnam War and national service in 1972, very few Australians have any personal experience of the armed forces and little knowledge about what they do. Australians are supportive of the ADF and proud of the work done but cannot understand "guns" as easily as "butter". This political reality enables Governments of all persuasions to extract billions of dollars from Defence safe in the knowledge that there will be few protests and that the issues involved and capabilities sacrificed are too complex for the average voter to understand. The depth of recent cuts to Defence would be unthinkable in portfolios like Health and Welfare, which have large, well-organised and mature lobbies ready to pounce on even a small reduction in the rate of spending. Defence has the odd retired senior officer writing a letter to the editor which, in 2012, will probably not be published if something more salacious is in the news.

To prevent such degradation in the future, one remedy is to legislate for a process whereby the ADF's senior commanders must provide annual reports to the Parliament, free of ministerial spin, on the ADF's force structure, manning, capabilities and readiness. In short, each year the ADF's senior commanders would report on what the state of the ADF is, where capability and personnel gaps exist, and what should be done to fill them. Senior commanders could be examined by Parliamentary committees and allowed to freely explain what the state of the ADF was and, if deficient, how to improve it. Then the pressure would be on the Government of the day to accept this advice or reject it.

Clearly the current system - of trusting partisan governments to honestly manage Defence structure in the national interest - has failed and failed miserably.