You can play the game quite easily: it just requires working out what you'd need to be absolutely confident you could defend Australia. Let's start with submarines (say 30) to destroy any enemy ships headed for our shores. Jet fighters (say 200, maybe the F22 Raptor that the United States won't sell us) would shoot down any enemy bombers coming this way, while bombers (another 200) would wreak havoc in the homeland of anyone who had the temerity to assault us. And finally, a couple of amphibious taskforces would probably be enough to take the fight back to the aggressor's shores. That's where the army could come into play, with a quick assault directed at the presidential palace of our assailant.
It's Boys Own Annual stuff; it's also complete fluff. There's no way that we'd be prepared in a time of peace to cough up the tax increases that would be needed to provide anything like this sort of capability to the armed forces. There's also no guarantee that, even if we did acquire a force mix such as this, it could provide security against the new challenges that we'll face in future. It's not hard to design the perfect defence force in theory. The only problem is paying for it.
Funding remains the key parameter against which the framers of the new Defence White Paper will have to balance their objectives. Professor Paul Dibb, back in 1986, was the first person to relate Australian defence expenditure directly to GDP. When it was published a year later, his White Paper advocated a continual slow increase in expenditure on defence until it reached 3 per cent of GDP (this was in the context of the Cold War). But the amount that governments were prepared to commit never did reach these giddy heights, despite the grand words of the politicians. There was always somewhere else the money was needed more urgently. This has changed since the attacks on the World Trade Centre, but only at the margins. One of the authors of our new White Paper, Dr Mark Thompson, has calculated that over the past five years (under the Howard government) spending on defence has increased by 55 per cent.
That appears to be remarkable growth, but examining the figures more closely suggests some other lessons. The Australian Bureau of Statistics still reckons that it is only in the current financial year that funding has finally stretched above 2 per cent of GDP. The last time we spent this much (proportionally) on the military was, ironically, also in the final year of a government, but then it was Paul Keating's in 1995-96. Thompson also found that the Howard government did make significant alterations, without any fanfare, to the way it was funding our security. Funding for the AFP, for example, grew twice as fast as defence spending since 2001. Nevertheless, even this significant increase is paltry by comparison to the resources committed to ASIO. The domestic security agency has seen its funding grow from $69 million to a phenomenal $441 million in the same period a rise of 539 per cent.
We can draw two conclusions from this. Firstly, even though politicians are quite happy to beat the drum about the importance of the forces, it's very hard to justify the spending when it's being weighed up against either a tax cut or keeping open a hospital in a marginal electorate. Immediate needs always beat the long-term ones. And although governments are quite willing to devote money towards ensuring our security, this doesn't mean it will necessarily go towards the services. Australia will face many threats in the future, and they won't just be military. In other words, even though it would be nice to have bigger forces than we do, the country isn't prepared to fund them (particularly in the current environment) and the government seems to think that some other agencies are already in the front-line contributing to our security. They're the ones that will continue to receive the big increases in funding.
There's another significant fact buried in last year's budget figures, and this is where the money is going. Just because money is now being allocated to the forces doesn't mean that it's buying extra capability. More than $5.3 billion was committed in the last budget to funding significant initiatives in defence over the coming decade, but $1 billion of this will be chewed up in recruitment and retention initiatives.
Not buying extra planes, ships or tanks, it will be spent just keeping people in the military. But even this is unlikely to be enough to stop the drain of vital people with critical skills who are leaving the forces. A couple of weeks ago there were plenty of applicants to be heads of the three services, but it's a different thing when it comes to radar technicians, submariners, or mechanical engineers. Even though the military is trying desperately to use new methods of remuneration to keep the rank structureintact while at the same time filling these vital positions, this all costs money.
So it's no use planning to have a fleet of 30 submarines when we can't even crew six boats. At some point the visionaries have got to meet reality, and that point is going to be the nexus between cost and capability. It's all very well designing the perfect military, but this effort is going to be in vain unless it relates to the community's willingness to pay.
This is the task of the White Paper team. It's got to come up with a solution for our defence needs that is fiscally responsible and politically saleable. Any other ideas will get short shrift. As an example, if the suggestion was put forward to introduce conscription for two years (as in Singapore) we could easily pay people less and still have the ranks filled. At a stroke, the size of the forces would be enhanced, and our problems would be solved.
Unfortunately, it would also be a rapid way to electoral oblivion for any government.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
nicstuart@hotmail.com