Articles by: "Andrew Davies"
ASPI recommends: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

For your (virtual) bookshelf: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Centre for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999. In the 1990s, the CIA commissioned a study on the nature of intelligence analysis to …

Air combat – where to from here?

The recent Australian National Audit Office reports on the current and future air combat capability highlighted the risk and potential cost of keeping the 1980s vintage Hornets flying until they are replaced by the F-35 …

Trouble at the docks? (part II)

Earlier this year, Mark Thomson and I wrote a paper that highlighted the challenges in maintaining continuity in Australia’s submarine force. One of the things we didn’t discuss at any length in that paper was …

Table of the week: how much is 3%?

Just to put into perspective what a 3% real increase in the Defence budget amounts to over a decade, the table below shows how a baseline budget of $25 billion would evolve over ten years …

ASPI answers a letter from a reader

Dear ASPI, I have a ‘friend’ who has an embarrassing problem with defence planning. It seems no matter what he tries, it ends up expensive and unsatisfactory. What can he do? Worried of Parliament Hill Dear …

The swings and roundabout of defence reform

On Monday we promised to provide some suggestions for implementing the recent 364-page report from the Senate Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Reference Committee on ‘Procurement procedures for Defence capital projects’. Today we’ll discuss one …

Re-re-re-reforming Defence acquisition

The recent Senate committee report ‘Procurement procedures for Defence capital projects’ was naturally of great interest to us, concerned as it was with our core business. We weren’t dispassionate observers of the process either; we …