Debate: "Policy, guns and money"
How to manage long project timelines? (part one)

Andrew Davies’s recent post about long project timelines highlights issues that everyone accepts but rarely factors into the planning and management of the future force structure; modern projects take an unconscionably long time to actually …

Once more around the Cape?

One of the capability announcements made along with the launch of the 2013 Defence White Paper was that ‘the Government will also bring forward the replacement of Australia’s Armidale Class Patrol Boats, with both Australia’s …

On projects and performance

Every year I get to watch Mark Thomson pull off a remarkable feat of ‘extreme analysis’, as he cranks out 260 pages of the annual Cost of Defence report in the couple of weeks after …

Amphibious operations: more than meets the eye

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen some impressive photographs and the naming ceremony of the first of the 27,000 tonne Canberra class landing helicopter docks (LHDs) coming together in the BAE shipyards in Williamstown. …

The Defence budget: a first look

Mark Thomson is squirreled away producing his usual tour de force budget analysis (on the streets May 30) so readers of The Strategist will have to make do with my first take on the Defence budget. Let’s …

Defence budget: give the dog a bone

Mark Thomson is widely quoted this morning as saying that the defence budget outcome is better than many observers hoped. Saved by the government’s decision to keep the overall budget in deficit, Defence was not …