The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has an ambitious vision for Australia.
He sees a future in which Australia becomes more closely engaged with Asia and is able to play a much more independent role in the region. However, his vision faces an enormous stumbling block in the dysfunctional force structure planning and emasculated Defence organisation inherited from the Howard government.
For Australia to have the credibility necessary to play its intended role in our region, it must have a demonstrable "strategic weight" and self-reliance in military terms. It cannot be so weak that it has to depend upon the United States for the provision of the basic military capabilities needed to handle anything beyond trivial contingencies. It must also have credible capabilities so that it cannot be coerced easily by any regional nation, including China.
The Rudd Government and new Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, enter the regional strategic game handicapped with a basket-case force structure plan for Australia's air force, introduced by previous defence ministers, Nelson and Hill. This plan guarantees the loss of Australia's air superiority around the end of this decade, yet will also strain the future defence budget and so impair opportunities to strengthen other key parts of the ADF structure.
There is little right with the current force structure plan for the air force. It calls for the premature retirement of the F-111, the best strategic air asset and deterrent Australia has, despite the affordability and low risk involved in a life extension of this superb aircraft, much along the lines of proven US practice with the B-52H, B-1B and A-10C aircraft.
Brendan Nelson's $6.6billion Super Hornets will not be competitive against the Russian-made fighters that will populate our area by the end of this decade, a situation not unlike that faced by our Meteors during the Korean War the last time that Australian fighter pilots flew against opposing fighter aircraft. The Super Hornet simply lacks the payload, range, and survivability to be a credible F-111 replacement.
The picture would not improve with the hitherto planned acquisition of the Joint Strike Fighter. It is designed to hunt tanks and troops on the battlefield, not to penetrate deeply into hostile air defences and strike critical surface targets, or to destroy opposing fighters and cruise missiles. The fighter would suffer most of the limitations of the Super Hornet, but it represents even poorer value for money.
Difficulties with the Nelson-Hill force structure plan run even deeper.
The current plan for five KC-30 tankers is running very late, and the size and number of the aircraft on order will provide at best about 25per cent of the aerial refuelling capability that Australia will need. The vital Wedgetail Airbourne Early Warning and Control is also running very late, in large part due to poor management by the Defence bureaucracy, with only six aircraft being procured against the eight or nine actually needed.
There are simple, pragmatic, low-risk and affordable ways of correcting this mess which have been analysed thoroughly and independently over the past decade.
The wealth of independent analytical evidence available publicly on these matters mostly reaches conclusions diametrically opposed to the views held so tenaciously by the Defence bureaucracy. Fixing these inherited problems will require that the new Government ditch the Nelson-Hill plan for the air force and start anew.
In doing so, it will have to deal with a dysfunctional and technically deskilled Canberra Defence bureaucracy, within which many senior personnel played pivotal roles in creating the problems that must now be fixed.
There can be absolute certainty that some in the bureaucracy will say anything to defend previous advice to government, no matter how overwhelming the evidence that this advice was wrong. The sorry collection of public statements made by many Defence officials since 2002, when challenged on the errors and falsehoods in this advice, proves this point glaringly.
The new minister's planned review of air force capabilities is intended to determine the facts. It will inevitably have to confront the corrosive influence of self-vested interests within the deskilled Defence bureaucracy.
The new Government has an overwhelming mandate from the community for change, and a tremendous opportunity to reverse the slide of Australia's air force into regional irrelevance, and avoid the strategic costs to the nation that would inevitably follow.
The Prime Minister's strategic vision for Australia's self-reliant posture in our region can be implemented, but to do so the Government will have to dump the dysfunctional Nelson-Hill capability plan for the Royal Australian Air Force.
Dr Kopp is cofounder of the Air Power Australia think-tank, and a research fellow in regional military strategy at the Monash Asia Institute. He has flown the Super Hornet.