{"id":7316,"date":"2013-06-28T14:51:33","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T04:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=7316"},"modified":"2013-07-01T08:13:15","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T22:13:15","slug":"welcome-aboard-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/welcome-aboard-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome aboard, Minister"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Keep<\/a><\/figure>\n

With the news that we’re about to get another new Defence Minister, we thought we’d provide our thoughts on what the executive summary of an incoming brief should look like. We’re tempted to copy the approach of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/a><\/i> and print ‘Don’t Panic’ in large friendly letters on it. We’d also suggest that the incoming Minister probably shouldn’t dwell too much on how frequently in the past 15 years this has been a valedictory posting for long-time politicians\u2026<\/p>\n

Minister, welcome.<\/p>\n

First, a few salient facts. The\u00a0Australian\u00a0Defence\u00a0organisation\u00a0is an extraordinarily complicated enterprise. Its\u00a0military operational activities range from routine daily in-base administrative work through to\u00a0sophisticated foreign intelligence collection\u00a0and\u00a0high-intensity combat. The Defence Materiel Organisation manages\u00a0projects and equipment\u00a0costing\u00a0well over $100\u00a0billion. The Defence Capability Plan contains more than 100 projects, some of which will probably still be running in the 2030s.\u00a0Defence\u2019s\u00a0total workforce numbers around 100,000,\u00a0with staff located\u00a0in countries around the globe, including some inhospitable and dangerous locations.<\/p>\n

For all of those reasons, Defence will never be the easiest portfolio to manage. You can reasonably expect some tough times, and a crisis might be just around the corner. Some of the problems of Defence are deep and seemingly perennial, and a series of well-researched reform programs dating back decades have only partially ameliorated them. And at the moment there\u2019s also a significant\u00a0problem in the funding plans for future force structuring.<\/p>\n

Here are eight challenges in the Defence enterprise that you’ll have to grapple with. Others\u00a0will no doubt arise, sometimes with very little lead time, and we don’t claim that the list is exhaustive, but these challenges can be guaranteed to remain\u00a0\u2018live\u2019 for some time to come:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Funding defence: simply put, there isn\u2019t the money in the budget to cover future acquisition plans, and possibly not even enough to adequately support all of the plans already in train.<\/li>\n
  2. Increasing efficiency in the Defence enterprise:\u00a0the organisation has\u00a0become top heavy. As well, after well over a decade of reviews and reform programs, savings are increasingly hard to come by\u2014most of the low hanging fruit has been harvested.<\/li>\n
  3. Matching strategy, resources and capability: as noted above, the Defence\u00a0Capability Plan is unaffordable, yet the strategic and operational ambitions of successive White Papers continue to outpace resources. In the absence of new money, you’ll have to scale back ambition.<\/li>\n
  4. Maintaining the personnel strength of the ADF: Defence has to manage its workforce as part of the modern Australian economy. There’s already a shortfall in numbers in uniform compared to budget plans, and you can expect experienced people to drift away when they come off operations and are faced with much more mundane postings.<\/li>\n
  5. Delivering capability: complex\u00a0defence projects often run late and sometimes over budget (though the former is probably the bigger problem).<\/li>\n
  6. Managing defence industry: Australia needs a defence industry base to support and maintain the ADF, but it needs to be efficient. At the moment acquisition policy is confused regarding the relative priorities of cost-effective acquisition and maintenance for the ADF and the support of local industry interests.<\/li>\n
  7. Maintaining and replacing\u00a0the\u00a0Collins\u00a0class submarines:\u00a0we\u00a0need\u00a0to\u00a0remediate and extend the life\u00a0of an underperforming submarine fleet while concurrently designing and building a replacement<\/li>\n
  8. Being ready for the next contingency: the\u00a0\u2018default\u2019\u00a0way of dealing with inadequate funding\u2014especially as operational commitments in Afghanistan and elsewhere wind down\u2014is to let the readiness of the force-in-being run down; that’s what happened in the 1990s. INTERFET came as a rude shock at the time,\u00a0but the ADF could be similarly called upon tomorrow.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Note that we haven’t included cultural issues such as harassment, bullying and discrimination\u00a0on this\u00a0short list. That\u2019s not because they aren\u2019t important\u2014they undoubtedly are\u2014but\u00a0because others are better qualified to analyse them. However, the Defence leadership will need to show the same qualities to address both cultural issues and the eight challenges detailed here:\u00a0strong leadership and governance, clarity of vision and the ability to challenge established thinking and practices.<\/p>\n

    Once you’ve settled in, we’ll follow up this list of challenges with a paper that sets out our thinking on them in more detail and, perhaps more importantly, will provide you with what we think are the questions you should be asking of the department and others to help you to formulate solutions to them.<\/p>\n

    Until then, enjoy the honeymoon period of an incoming Minister. Oh, your phone seems to ringing\u2026<\/p>\n

    Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Strategist, and\u00a0Mark Thomson is senior analyst for defence economics<\/em>\u00a0at ASPI.<\/em>
    \n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With the news that we’re about to get another new Defence Minister, we thought we’d provide our thoughts on what the executive summary of an incoming brief should look like. 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