When I read material in the mainstream press about the Future Submarine, I can feel my eyeballs twitching a lot these days. All the contenders (the government of Japan with support from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, …
The release of the Defence White Paper, Defence Integrated Investment Plan (DIIP) and Defence Industry Policy Statement (DIPS) provides what industry has been asking for over the last 18 months; some certainty. Certainty about how …
Defence is big on definitions. If you can define something, you have a better chance of being able to manage it appropriately. So much of the documentation produced by Defence has pages dedicated to the …
Minister for Defence Senator David Johnston took the opportunity to launch a special report from The Sir Richard Williams Foundation, Protecting Australia with UAS (unmanned aerial systems), at the Australian Defence Magazine Congress earlier this …
When is off the shelf not off the shelf? When it takes an age for the shopper to decide that he wants a little from product A and a little from product B. A great …
At Australian Defence Magazine’s 3rd Cyber Security Summit this week, members of the shadowy cyber world gathered to swap war stories and scare one another silly with worst case scenarios. The thought that every major …
With all the ‘Days of Our Lives’ action in parliament a new Defence White Paper seems so far down the list of political priorities as to seem almost irrelevant. Prime Minister Gillard announced the election date …
In every relationship, personal, professional and diplomatic, negotiations and their subsequent compromises take place every day. Advantages are leveraged and exploited continuously. Some situations see small concessions or trade offs for mutual satisfaction while others …
Both Nic Stuart and Jim Molan have made their points clear on how they see Reserves: it’s a capability that’s either Needed by the wider Australian Defence Force or Wanted by those who think that …
As Andrew Davies noted here recently, the debate at the 2012 Submarine Institute of Australia (SIA) wasn’t over whether submarines should be built in Australia—that’s a forgone conclusion. Speeches from both sides of politics (both …
In a recent speech to RUSI, Raytheon boss Michael Ward outlined how the Australian Defence industry had dropped from close to 30,000 people down to about 25,000 people over the last three years. Given the …
Since the United States is our biggest ally, as generations of white papers have told us, it’s fair to say we want to be interoperable with their forces in a coalition setting. With this in …