His revelation, during a recent "webinar" involving about 2000 of the department's 17,200 public servants, that consultants and experts now outnumber departmental staff, should not come as a shock to anyone familiar with defence's continued heavy reliance on contractors.

Defence and the Defence Materiel Organisation, have been condemned for feather bedding, using recent departures as consultants, cost overruns, delays on major projects and a mind boggling ability to spend tens of millions of dollars on things that just didn't work for decades.

It has escaped major change despite the best efforts of successive governments to implement the often "cut and pasted" recommendations of numerous reviews.

The most recent, the First Principles Review, dissolved the DMO and rolled it back into the main body of the Defence Department as the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group in July 2015. The reintegration of two entities that had operated separately, and often with a communications disconnect, since 2000, was meant to herald a new era of efficiency, staff reductions and reform.

While, on paper this appears to have been achieved with current Defence Department staffing 1000 short of the 18,200 cap, the reality is different.

According to Mr Richardson, an experienced public administrator who headed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade before taking on this job in 2012, Defence now has up to 18,000 "service providers, consultants and contractors". Many of these are working for companies that provide services that have been outsourced.

In the very best bureaucratic "whack-a-mole" tradition, for every staff post that has been cut at least one, or more, external vacancy has been created.

A cynic might suggest the secretary's venting, which would have been expected to make its way into the public domain given the number of participants in the "webinar", may be intended to forestall criticism from his political masters as much as anything else.

Mr Richardson was at the helm since well before the latest reforms led to the departure of thousands of departmental staff from 2015 on.

The explosion in non-public service recruitment, which Professionals Australia said was necessary to keep the wheels of the defence bureaucracy spinning because of the high number of departures, happened on his watch.

Mr Richardson's plan, as we understand it, is to act the "mongrel" by setting up a centralised process to directly intervene wherever and whenever a division strays above the sanctioned head count.

If this works then well and good; if not then the public may be entitled to conclude this is just more of the "same old, same old" from a bureaucracy that has successfully fought change since before the Vietnam War.