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 …
Debate: "Policy, guns and money"
Like so many people with very little firsthand experience of creating and using defence capability at any sophisticated level, Nic Stuart has effortlessly come up with yet another answer to the financial problems of Defence—Reserve …
Last week the Defence Ministers announced that the government would approach the United States to get cost and availability information for a second tranche of 24 Super Hornets. It doesn’t commit Australia to such a …
A few years ago, I estimated the per ship costs of the Air Warfare Destroyer program. The conclusion I came to, based on conservative assumptions, was that we were getting three ships for the price …
That there are ongoing problems with Defence procurement would surprise no one, and much has been written and debated on the topic. Recently, austerity has dominated the discussion, with the focus on budget cuts, and …
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 …
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 …
Hard times are upon Defence again, which will have implications for the way the nation’s military capability evolves. As Andrew Davies pointed out recently, much of the ADF’s capability today is thanks to a ramping …
The Australian National Audit Office last week released a pair of related audit reports, on the acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the management of the current fast jet fleet. The reports are …
Andrew Davies’ recent post on workforce skills and program continuity is a breath of fresh air. Andrew cuts through the rhetoric on this issue and rightly concludes that any proposals to bring forward production simply …
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 …
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 …