When nearly 200 billion bucks of military spending is announced, you'd be forgiven for thinking everyone's a winner, especially here in Canberra, still easily Australia's biggest Defence town.
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But you'd be wrong, with the poor old Australian Public Service looking again like the baby who fell into a bucket of nipples and emerged sucking its thumb.
The sprawling department currently has a tick over 18,000 civilian public servants, most of them based in the capital, working to support about 57,000 men and women in uniform.
Now, the authors of the White Paper haven't tried to sugar-coat what they've got in mind for those people.
They reckon they "will realign the workforce" and "the APS workforce will be rebalanced with approximately 1200 new positions in areas critical to future capability including intelligence, cyber security and space‐based capabilities."
All that doesn't mean that Defence is going to go out and hire 1200 extra people, oh no.
The idea is to recruit these people "within an APS workforce of 18200", about what they have now.
So unless they can reinvent themselves as an intelligence specialist, cyber-security expert or somebody with "space-based" capabilities, whatever that means, chances are there'll be up to 1200 public servants looking for a job.
In 2012, Defence had a civilian workforce of about 22300.
So a shade less than 20 per cent of them have packed up their desks in less than four years.
The White Paper doesn't say anything about there being less work to do over at Russell Offices or Campbell Park, so it looks, again, like still fewer people to do the same amount of work, or probably a dollop more, what with all these new and enhanced capabilities.
Bear in mind that this is a workforce that hasn't even had a CPI payrise since 2013 and in all likelihood will probably have to settle in the end for something below inflation and it starts to look a bit like insult to injury.
We can on only guess how much of that $195 billion is going to end up in the pockets of contractors, consultants and various other hangers on that seem to proliferate around Defence establishments.
They'll be licking their lips today.
But we can be sure that the men and women at their desks over by the lake won't get much, other than their new lanyards.
