Defence Minister Richard Marles is hoping today’s (20 February 2024) announcement about the restructuring of the Royal Australian Navy will keep us all feeling happy and safe. Is this true?
On 16 September 2021 then Prime Minister Scott “from marketing” Morrison used his AUKUS announcement to bury the fact he was cancelling the troubled Attack Class submarine program – years wasted and $3B shredded. Today Defence Minister Richard Marles used the thrill of new purchases to bury the fact that Navy procurement is still an utter shambles.
After today’s announcement, we’ll see our navy moving forward as follows:
Submarines
There was no new announcement on our submarines; the status quo remains.
Our sailors will be sent to sea for the next decade on six aging Collins Class submarines that were supposed to retire in 2026. The life-of-type extension planned to keep them going will cost the taxpayer more than $6B dollars.
Sometime in the mid-2030s, if we can get the United States Congress to match Prime Minister Albanese’s $US5B submarine industry support donation (which Congress declined to match last week), and if isolationist and erratic Donald Trump doesn’t get elected, we’ll have the first of three Virginia Class submarines appear alongside a naval base in WA.
That’s the initial deal – if it happens. A decade will pass, and we might get some US-built vessels at full price plus a $5B sweetener. No significant Australian industry involvement in construction. Apparently, no refund if it all falls over.
We’ll then switch from the highly capable Virginia Class submarine to an unknown and unbuilt new design, the AUKUS-SSN, developed by the UK’s shipbuilding industry that has persistently been late and over budget on naval construction.
Air warfare destroyers
According to Marles, upgraded air defence and strike capability will be procured for our three Air Warfare Destroyers, but apart from that, it’s status quo.
The Government did announce that it will announce the Air Warfare Destroyer replacement program in the future.
Future frigates
There will be a reduction in the number of future frigates from nine to six, simultaneously raising the unit cost of the ships (assuming the budget remains at $45B for each of these ships, the price has gone from $5B per vessel to $7B per vessel) while reducing our anti-submarine capability, at a time when we have a record number of submarines in our region, with that threat only likely to grow further.
Whilst we’re buying nuclear submarines to station off ports in China, the Chinese Navy already has nuclear submarines to station off Sydney heads and Rottnest Island near Perth. The Chinese submarine commander’s job just got a bit easier today.
General purpose frigates
The one positive announcement from today is the procurement of 11 general-purpose frigates, though the term corvette might be more appropriate for these smallish vessels.
There was little detail in the announcement today, but It’s reasonable to assume that Defence will eventually select some design of a ship that has not been fielded and try to load it up with ‘RAN special sauce’, an approach that added risk and guaranteed that future frigates blew out in cost and schedule.
The first three of these vessels look to be built overseas. That’s Australian jobs exported.
‘Optionally Crewed Surface Vessels’
The media loves novelty, and today’s announcement was loaded up with an exciting new element: six “Large Optionally Crewed Surface Vessels”. Cynics might think that these ships might be a solution to the Navy’s chronic recruitment and retention problems, and fielding autonomous platforms might help with that.
However, the thing to understand is that this is another ambitious venture into new and largely untried technology when the Navy and Defence really can’t afford another major project failure. Perhaps these still drawing board concept boats might be great, but one would want to see a lot more detail before seeing this as an assured capability that will be delivered on time and on budget.
Offshore patrol vessels
If you haven’t heard of the OPVs, these are vessels slightly larger than a patrol boat which the Navy decided to build 12 of. A construction contract was signed in 2018 and we still don’t have an operational vessel available to Navy use.
The real problem left unsolved
Defence Minister Richard Marles left the Naval shipbuilding capability issue unsolved today; the “always choose something special and untested” problem.
He should have been looking through the track record of failure, of massive cost blow-outs, protracted delay and abrupt cancellations, to find a real fix necessary to solve the Navy’s (and Army and Air Force’s) woes.
Defence has consistently failed to manage project risk, taxpayers have been picking up the tab on every occasion.
This problem starts with our Senior military officers, who were no doubt great warfighters in their junior ADF years, having little project management experience. They’re the ones making high-risk purchase recommendations to Cabinet ministers – who have zero project management experience.
In choosing paper capabilities, Defence exposes its programs and taxpayers to budget blowouts that ultimately mean there’s less money to spend on other much-needed Defence capabilities and schedule blowouts that leave our service men and women without modern capabilities.
Repeated failures
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the cancelled Multiple-Role Helicopter program ($3.5B wasted), the cancelled Sky Guardian medium altitude long endurance attack drone program ($1.3B), the cancelled Army’s Battle Management system ($760M), the failed Spartan battlefield airlift aircraft ($900M), the failed Tiger helicopter program ($1.8B wasted) and the cancelled Attack Class submarine program ($3B).
Two weeks ago, the Auditor-General reported to the Parliament that, across 20 major Defence projects, the “total schedule slippage was 453 months (23%) when compared to initial project planning”.
There hasn’t been any accountability for past procurement failures or reform to ensure better performance in the future.
So, we need to put away the undue excitement of some from today’s announcement. We need to appreciate that today’s announcement will see the same incompetent organisations that consistently deliver failure put in charge of the announced programs.
The real change that’s needed from today moving forward is some real constraint on our Defence bureaucrats from doing anything remotely risky.
Big announcements and press conferences don’t deliver the goods. Effective project management by leaders and teams with deep expertise and experience do. That’s what Defence needs to build if they are to do better in the future.
The Greens Call it Out
The Albanese Government is reinforcing and rewarding failure with its review of the Australian Navy’s surface fleet, released today.
More than a decade after it was conceived the Hunter Frigate program is being backed in with the same eye-watering price tag of $45 billion but producing six instead of nine ships. If ever built they will be the most expensive, and some of the least useful, warships of their class on the planet.
The Hunter Frigates program was referred to the National Anti-Corruption Commission last year by the Greens due to the lack of value-for-money assessment, uncompetitive tender and systemic failures.
Remarkably, the same senior people in Defence that landed us with the Hunter Frigates mess are now being rewarded with an extra $11.1 billion to buy a new class of unidentified Tier 2 ships.
The current price tag for Labor’s “enhanced lethality surface combatant fleet” review is a total spend of $54.2 billion over the next decade. This is on top of the $368 billion on yet-to-be-designed AUKUS submarines.
In short, Defence has kept all their money, kept all their failed projects and been given more money and more projects to play with. Rewarding failure like this makes us less safe.
Greens Defence Spokesperson Senator David Shoebridge said:
"This review is about reinforcing failure, recommitting to the disastrous $45 billion Hunter Frigates and expecting the same team that led us into this mess to fix it."
“Two years of dithering by Defence Minister Marles has led us to this point. The push for continuous shipbuilding in Adelaide, linked to local politics and the hope to keep a nuclear submarine workforce, is what’s driving this multi-billion dollar mistake.
“No matter how many times Defence leadership fails, both overcharging and underdelivering, they keep their jobs and get rewarded with billions more public dollars.
“The goal in this review is to more than double the size of the combat surface fleet, with unclear timelines and increasing budgets. It is not a review it is a shopping list and it will be impossible to hold Defence to account for the inevitable future failures.
"The framing of this review to increase lethality and Defence expenditure should tell you everything you need to know, it is all about threatening our neighbours not defending Australia.
“One of the most remarkable features of this $54 billion shopping list is how little it connects with the $368 billion AUKUS submarine project.
“If you were looking for a coherent plan to defend Australia you won't find it in this review,” Senator Shoebridge said.
A skills shortage could derail the federal government’s ambitious plan to modernise the navy by building a fleet of frigates and uncrewed drone boats in Perth, the managing director of one of the country’s biggest defence companies has warned.
BAE Systems Australia maritime managing director Craig Lockhart, who oversees naval shipyards in Perth and Adelaide, said finding shipbuilders and other workers was significantly more difficult in Western Australia because of the state’s low unemployment rate and competition from the high-paying resources sector.
Western Australia was the big winner from the government’s $11 billion naval overhaul, with the government announcing it would build up to eight general-purpose frigates at Perth’s Henderson shipyards after buying three ships from overseas.
The government will select a winner from existing designs submitted by German, Spanish, South Korean and Japanese companies.
The government also announced that a fleet of six large “optionally crewed vessels” would be built at the Henderson shipyards, softening the blow from a decision to slash the number of offshore patrol vessels there.
Lockhart said that while demand for shipbuilding jobs in Adelaide still exceeded supply, resources companies in Western Australia were “stealing our people on a weekly basis”.
“I worry about the level of ambition for WA and would hate to see WA pitted against South Australia for scarce resources,” he said.
“It’s a risk for us.”
Western Australia has an unemployment rate of 3.6 per cent compared to 4.2 per cent in South Australia, and has the highest weekly average earnings for full-time workers in the country.
BAE Systems will build six Hunter-class frigates for the navy at Adelaide’s Osborne shipyards after the government reduced the planned order from nine ships.
Lockhart said he felt vindicated that the much-maligned Hunter-class program had survived a review led by former US Vice Admiral William Hilarides, despite concerns about its huge size and lack of missile cells.
“The experts have spoken, and they have found there is no better anti-submarine warfare capability in the world than the Hunter,” Lockhart said.
He said the government’s announcement “provides stability for the Hunter-class program and allows us to put all the conjecture behind us”.
During a visit to Adelaide on Wednesday, Defence Minister Richard Marles said the South Australian shipbuilding industry will “build and continue to build forever”.
Lockhart said he was baffled by government claims that the cost of the Hunter-class program had blown out from $45 billion to $65 billion.
“Any blow-out is not in BAE Systems’ scope of responsibilities,” he said. “Our numbers have not changed.”
He said it would be “common sense” for the government to use the same hull as the Hunter-class frigate when it pivots to building a new fleet of air warfare destroyers in Adelaide in the 2040s, he said.
“It would be silly for the government to give up that opportunity,” he said.
Commenting on the government’s decision to slash its order of offshore patrol vessels from 12 to six, German shipbuilding company Luerssen said it understood that “changes in the geopolitical circumstances affecting Australia has resulted in the government’s decision to change the composition and structure of the Royal Australian Navy’s surface combatant fleet”.
Meanwhile the weapons military industrial complex (MIC) and its majority Big Three owners (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) are still laughing all the way to the banks (which they are also the major owners of).
In 2023, the world was in turmoil, with the Russia-Ukraine war dragging on and the conflict in the Gaza Strip reoccurring. As the demand for weapons rose dramatically in many parts of the world, the US, known as a non-stop war machine, delivered yet another "outstanding" year-end performance review of foreign military sales: a record $238 billion. This figure was released by the US State Department in January 2024 and represents a 16 percent increase from 2022.
As a series of US elections approach, the State Department released the number of US foreign military sales in 2023 to impress arms dealers in the country. It's very likely Washington intends to showcase the Joe Biden administration's achievement as an "arms salesman" in order to gain support from the arms industry for the Democratic Party in the upcoming Congress and presidential election.
The influence of the military-industrial complex on US politics is pervasive. For many US politicians, whether they are Republican or Democrat, it is natural to advocate for the arms dealers who fund their campaigns. On a larger scale, neither of the two parties nor the US government dare to offend the US military-industrial complex.
The US military-industrial complex now wields significant influence over US national policy and, to some extent, has hijacked the government. The US State Department said in a statement on Monday that arms transfers and defense trade are "important US foreign policy tools with potential long-term implications for regional and global security," demonstrating the close relationship between US arms sales and foreign policy.
In many cases, Washington uses its foreign policy to provoke chaos and confrontation, artificially creating a demand for more arms in many countries. By constantly promoting narratives, such as the "Russia threat" and "China threat," the US government has helped US arms dealers boost the sale of military equipment, making it the biggest broker for the US arms industry.
As long as there are military sales, the US will never tire of war. It is expected that the growth of US foreign military sales will continue unabated in 2024, while the US will continue to allow conflicts to victimize innocent people in hotspot areas and fill the pockets of US arms dealers.
And today the US vetoed a UN Security C resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the third time in a row since October 7th.
13 members of the council supported the resolution drafted by Algeria, while Britain chose to abstain.
US ambassador to the UN, after vetoing a Gaza ceasefire resolution:
“We will continue to actively engage in the hard work of direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a Final Solution.”
Good grief.
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