ARTICLES
Australia’s Defence budget 2026-27: The $14 billion disappearing act
The 2026-27 Defence Portfolio Budget Statements (PBS) are a very strange document. In fact, we’ve never seen anything quite like it. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is the paradox that in an age of increasing defence budgets, funding actually goes...
No Asian Century – instead, a century of multiple of Asias
The Australia in the Asian Century white paper zoomed across the Canberra policy radar with the appointment of Meghan Quinn as secretary of the Defence Department. Quinn was head of the secretariat that produced the 312-page Asian century report. Seldom has a policy...
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy – by the numbers you will know it
The Albanese Government has released its second National Defence Strategy (NDS) along with a supporting Defence Integrated Investment Program (IIP). This follows the 2024 version. That was the first in a new approach to defence strategic policy planning which was...
Zen and the Art of Defence investment: big numbers for everyone – Episode 70
Zen and the Art of Defence investment: big numbers | RSS.com A Zen temple helps Marcus seek balance between the contradictions in Australia's defence Strategy, while Michael struggles with a noisy kettle in the bunker. Australia's new Defence Secretary takes over the...
Bondi Royal Commission: Bell’s first test
Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell faces her first test on Thursday with the reception of her interim report on the horrific Bondi shootings. It’ll have been a rushed effort to get the core information needed to deliver this first report by the April 30 deadline. That’s...
Is United States submarine production speeding up? Not according to US Navy data
Unlike the Australian Department of Defence, the United States’ Department of Defense (or War, depending on where you stand in the whole culture wars thing) publishes real data that allows Congress and the public to assess the Department’s performance in spending the...
Behind the hoopla, the Government is leaving our military badly under-equipped in the drone era
We’re meant to be celebrating the Albanese Government’s amazing new plan to adapt the Australian military to the drone era, with Minister Pat Conroy telling us yesterday about an apparent $7 billion the government is investing in counter drone systems. But...
Deterrence Without Resilience: Australia’s strategic risk gets real
Australia’s strategic environment has deteriorated faster than its defence posture has adapted. The issue is no longer simply whether Australia is spending enough on defence, it is whether it is investing in the capabilities required to withstand the kind of conflict...
Australia’s brand new, but old, Defence plan: a strategy of denial – that the world has changed
The Grumpy Strategists cover Australia's new defen | RSS.com The Grumpy Strategists respond to Australia's defence minister, Richard Marles, discussing and releasing the 'new' 2026 Defence Strategy and investment plan. Marcus sees the spirit of Hiroo Onoda, second...
Australia’s National Defence Strategy: Canberra is yet to have its Carney moment
There’s something very familiar about the Albanese government’s new 2026 National Defence Strategy, launched yesterday by Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles. It continues the trajectory first set out in the previous Coalition government’s 2020...
The 2026 National Defence Strategy & investment plan: The world has changed – but Australia’s defence plans haven’t
Having read the 215 pages of the Australian Government's revised strategy and investment plan, two things stand out as particularly important. The first is the almost complete absence of engagement with the changed America that is now our major ally. There...
Trump’s FY27 budget: $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, $33bn for the State Department. Peace through missiles?
Since my planned birdwatching trip to western New South Wales was cancelled due the current fuel crisis temporary supply uncertainties caused by unpatriotic Australians panic buying and I didn’t want to spend Easter solely doomscrolling conducting deep research into...
America’s wartime defense budget: $1.5 trillion to deliver a military able to fight everyone – except China…..
America's wartime defense budget: $1.5 trillion to | RSS.com Back in the SAA Bunker deep in the Brindabellas, Marcus & Michael declare energy independence (okay, thanks to government subsidies) and ponder the details of the Trump Administration's new Defense...
The Gulf collective defence exercise: a war no one admits to fighting
The Gulf collective defence exercise: a war no one | RSS.com Marcus calls into the Grumpy Strategists' Brindabella bunker with unwelcome news on more diesel supplies. After this disappointment, the Grumpies ponder the mystery of the Gulf War - a war without...
Tired of winning: US government shows how to lose an industry & hurt its friends
We’re told the Trump Administration is playing 16-dimensional chess in its reshaping of the world economy to make America great again. But the chess moves we’ve seen so far in the key auto manufacturing sector are damaging own goals that hurt America’s homegrown...
Our Kentucky Colonel masters deflection, the War & AUKUS sub outcomes – magical thinking meets US & UK partner realities
Our Kentucky Colonel masters deflection, the War & | RSS.com Well, despite the great news from Energy Minister Chris Bowen that Australia faces no energy crisis other than silly unwashed Australians panicking, the Iran War has already created a global energy crisis,...
AUKUS submarines: US and UK partners show the realities facing Australia’s small fleet
In 2056, 30 years from now, when Australia has eight nuclear powered submarines (SSNs), we will have two deployable submarines consistently available. That’s assuming all goes well with AUKUS’ “optimal pathway” and we do in fact have eight SSNs in service. Expecting a...
Sea lanes, straits & subs: How many nuclear subs to open Hormuz?
The war between the US, Israel and Iran is now entering its fourth week, and despite the loss of many senior figures, the Iranian regime survives. It is very difficult to bomb people into democracy. And so this war risks becoming a trial of strategic endurance....
The tragic death of the Major Projects Report: a crime with 3 culprits & 27 million victims
6 March 2026 is the day we can say that transparency around Australia’s Department of Defence died, or more accurately, was executed. It’s now sleeping with the fishes, mafioso style. On a Friday, the traditional day for burying controversial news, parliament’s...
A lonely America experiences its unipolar moment
Donald Trump’s greatest legacy is not going to be some kind of American economic renewal. It will be an America that is alone. His America First instincts have now reached a peak with his war against Iran. Aside from his Israeli partner, who has far more...
Victory in the War for Influence & Invoicing: Australia’s Mandarin Advisory Complex at work in two reports
Victory in the War for Influence & Invoicing: Aust | RSS.com President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address warning of the US Military Industrial Complex echoes in Canberra today - but with industry and products replaced in the Canberra version by advisory services,...
Trump the unilateralist becomes Trump the multilateralist – for now
After making a global mess, US President Donald Trump wants everyone else to clean it up. Luckily for the Albanese government – but also as a reward for their steadfast pursuit of a perfect, early 2000s-style small military sometime in the late 2040s –...
With the Wedgetail deployment, Australia is now part of the Iran War
Is it believable that the world’s most advanced airborne early warning and control aircraft, the Royal Australian Air Force’s E-7A Wedgetail, is going to be flying around in the Middle East but limited to only providing defensive information about incoming missiles...
The Iran war: Australia joins the “Coalescing of the Partly Willing”
A less needy more capable Australia – recognising the new American reality for allies
It’s time to notice big changes in our world when it comes to how Australia equips its military and spends the $59 billion annual defence budget. As ministers Marles and Conroy put the finishing touches to their brand new National Defence Strategy, they also...
Iran War: bad guys, rose petals and donuts – Trump tries for the Big Maduro
Iran War: bad guys, rose petals and donuts - Trump | RSS.com Marcus and Michael reflect on their wisdom in modifying the Grumpies bunker to hold thousands of litres of diesel and 8 pallets of tinned tomatoes, as the war escalates in the Middle East. They set out three...
The new Trump doctrine: ‘We break it, you own it’
America’s approach to the world has changed fundamentally. The era of its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is over, along with the big idea behind them. That was then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous line “You break it, you own it”, based on the...
Out with the old in with the new: Ambassador Rudd’s legacy and replacement
Kevin Rudd’s 3 years as Australian ambassador in Washington have shown he can ride rollercoasters and survive. In 3 short years, Kevin Rudd has had a box seat not available to any other Australian to watch the whiplashing changes in the US – and in American...
Plumbing new depths in politics. And Chinese sub numbers & PLA purges – actually mindboggling
Plumbing new depths in politics. And Chinese sub n | RSS.com Marcus goes diving to try to find rock bottom in Australian political discourse, but has to come up for air. He at least found the curious case of a Canberra cafe that police found had put up satirical...
ISIS families: are we more afraid and less compassionate than we were in 2019?
How is it that Australians - and our political leaders across the spectrum - seem so afraid of 34 women and children who have been living in a camp in Syria for 6 years? And why do we lazily talk about them as “ISIS brides” when the majority are children?...