This week Cabinet will sit down and approve a new Defence Capability Plan. This will provide us with the first opportunity since the release of the white paper to measure the Government's rhetoric about the importance of a strong defence, against its actions. It's a vital test, because there are increasingly signs of a widening disconnect between the words, and the reality, of vital funding decisions.
We're becoming so used to the confident pictures of decisive Diggers striding into action (in Afghanistan, Timor, or elsewhere), that it's easy to forget that this image is just the sharp point of a long series of extremely boring decisions, fabricated after years of meetings and documents, minutes and emails, and over cups of tea, in offices around the country.
The ability of our forces to achieve their tasks depends, primarily, on their initiative and performance in action. Nevertheless, as the disastrous experiences of the early days of struggle against the Japanese in World War II clearly demonstrated, much more is required in order to weld together effective fighting forces.
In the dark days of 1942, soldiers were sent into battle on the Kokoda Track wearing light khaki uniforms, originally designed for use in the Western Desert. Perhaps more importantly, they began fighting with sub-standard equipment. Before the outbreak of war, and when he was just 22, Evelyn Owen showed his excellent sub-machine gun to ordinance officials. They were unimpressed. They couldn't see the need for this simple, rugged short-range weapon. Even when the war migrated to the jungles, our soldiers were equipped with the same rifles their fathers had used on the Western Front 20 years before. It wasn't until Owen (by then a private) showed the weapon to a manufacturer one night in a pub that anyone awoke to the potential of the gun.
In the end, Australia manufactured 50,000 of the vital Owen guns by the time the war ended. The Diggers loved it. They finally had a weapon that allowed them to dominate in the dense jungle that dictated close-quarter fighting. Yet only a dramatic political intervention had managed to ensure that the weapon was, finally, placed in the hands of the troops.
Even at the last moment, at this time of dire threat to Australia, Ordinance Board officials still scratched their heads as they tried to decide on the calibre of the new gun. Should it be .45 (9mm) or .38/200, perhaps? Meanwhile our pilots were being sent up and shot down in the Wirraway (admittedly just a training aircraft, but it did down one Japanese Zero) and Boomerang fighters (which couldn't even shoot down one). Nothing has demonstrated more cogently the vital need to ensure the forces have adequate equipment, than the early days of the Pacific war.
Fighting power is an amalgam of people, doctrine (the way soldiers fight) and weaponry. The Defence white paper has finally restored the vital role of equipment to its war-winning role in this trifecta.
By the end of the Howard decade, major purchasing decisions appeared increasingly based on hastily contrived Cabinet submissions receiving one-off approvals. Purchases of the latest batch of FA-18 Super Hornets, or the C-17 Globemaster transports both fall into this category. Billions of dollars ended up being splurged on these aircraft without any of the normal tender processes in operation. Efforts like these made a mockery of the department's pretence that it was engaged in long-range planning.
This is the justification for the one startling change in the document that's before Cabinet at the moment. Previously, Capability Plans used to gaze a decade into the future. Not any more, if this current proposal to slash the time frame of the document is adopted. The 10-year rule will be abolished, resulting in a myopic DCP that peers out through thickened, misty spectacles, barely able to envisage the future five years' hence.
The idea is that this will make the DCP a far more practical document. Costs might have more than a passing relationship to budgets, and there will be a much more intense focus on timing and schedules for the introduction of new equipment. This is true, but there's a big danger in the scheme. Business has understandably complained that it won't have enough information for critical predictions that will be necessary way in advance of the release of the DCP. Assembly lines can't just be switched on and off at will; neither can high-end engineering and technical development workshops. Perhaps understandably, the industry is complaining that the inevitable consequence of this will be even more work moving overseas.
A counter to this argument is that greater certainty of the medium-term outlook will be provided by the production of a new white paper every five years, coinciding with the release of the DCP. The theory is that this will provide greater transparency, allowing business to make appropriate funding and investment decisions into the future. Theoretically, that's true. But there's a big gap between a couple of paragraphs in a political document and the reality of Cabinet committing a huge wad of dollars to buy more equipment. It also has the effect of shuffling a key role in the decisions about how the military will be equipped to the bureaucrats engaged in strategic planning.
This works at the moment, with capable planners and politicians (like Kevin Rudd) who are interested in Defence, but there's a growing feeling that this pattern might not be appropriate for the long term. So far, only industry is lobbying against the move to shorten the DCP. Nevertheless, as the top brass begin to understand how it will also marginalise their role in shaping future force structure, it's likely protests will grow. Instead of being able to put up capability wish lists, the items of equipment the forces are likely to get will have been delineated long in advance by teams of public servants.
But the hugely formulaic structure of the new DCP won't allow the next Owen gun to find its way into the hands of our forces. At a time when cyber-warfare and high-tech breakthroughs are no longer the monopoly of giant corporations, it's disappointing we don't offer more opportunities in these areas.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
nicstuart@hotmail.com
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