ARTICLES
New plan to save the Navy, old approach to implementation
It has taken two reviews and 19 months for Defence Minister Richard Marles to understand the Royal Australian Navy is broken. The plans it had to get new warships into the fleet were delivering too late to matter, and the navy’s eight elderly Anzac-class frigates have...
Reversing the slow-motion collapse of our Navy
The Government’s challenge is to get new, properly armed warships into the Royal Australian Navy before the ageing ANZACs break and well before the first underarmed, over budget Hunter class frigate makes its way into service sometime from 2033 – and have these ships...
Richard Marles: stop digging, start leading
Richard Marles and Pat Conroy, our Defence and Defence Industry ministers, are living the lonely nightmare of seeing their careers sputter from a succession of policy and implementation failures. They are hardly alone. Marles is the 10th defence minister since the...
Getting a clear view of the cloudy budget for Australia’s nuclear submarine program
This brief has been updated since Senate estimates hearings on the Defence portfolio on 14 February 2024 to incorporate discussion at that forum. What do we know about the budget for Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) program? Much commentary has focused on...
Grasping the Defence nettle
Recent days have covered the apparent—and to insiders, longstanding—differences between the defence minister and his department. First reported in the Australian Financial Review last week, the fractures include a mutual disregard, frustrations over slowness on...
Poor performance won’t improve while it is kept hidden
The Government has just tabled its ‘Portfolio Additional Estimates Statement’ in the Parliament to provide foundational information for our elected Senators to understand what the Department of Defence is trying to achieve with the $52.6bn of taxpayers’ money it has...
Questions on Defence’s mid-year budget update
The Defence 2023-24 Portfolio Additional Estimates Statements (PAES) were published on Thursday 8 February. The PAES outlines changes to the Defence budget since the Portfolio Budget Statements were released in May 2023. In essences, it is the most current information...
Megaprojects: Taking Flyvberg’s ‘outside view’ on Australia’s nuclear submarine program
Will Australia’s AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) program deliver as promised? The unavoidable answer is no. That’s because megaprojects virtually never deliver. That’s the finding of the person who has probably studied more megaprojects than anybody else:...
Lavishly funded but broke: Australia’s Defence Department needs a zero-based budget
The Australian Defence Department is broke. That must sound outrageous to almost every other military on the planet – and to pretty much every other part of the Australian Federal bureaucracy who are looking at efficiency dividends and a government obsessing...
2024 with a bang: Escalating war with de-escalating words, May Budget expectations & broken disposals
2024 with a bang: Escalating war with de-escalating words, May budget expectations & broken disposals | RSS.com The Grumpy Strategists look at the escalating conflict in the Middle East, the expectations and pressures the Albanese Government's reviews and delay have...
Will Trump sink AUKUS if he wins?
A second Trump presidency is not a certainty, but a forward-thinking Australian government would start planning for that possibility. Much more is at stake than bonhomie about alliance relations. If Trump trashes the AUKUS partnership on the false grounds that it...
Labor’s evasive action on grounded choppers won’t fly
There is something deeply suspect about the government’s decision to disassemble and bury 45 MRH-90 Taipan utility helicopters. Attempts to justify the decision have been incomplete, evasive and at times incoherent. What’s at stake is potentially $900m to $1bn of...
Ukraine and helicopters: Mr Albanese needs to dig Defence and Pat Conroy out of a hole of their own making
“Australia stands with Ukraine. We pay tribute to the unwavering resilience and courage displayed by the Ukrainian people.” That’s what prime minister Anthony Albanese says when asked about Australia’s support for Ukraine in its fight against Putin’s invasion. ...
Island recruits a win-win solution to ADF shortfall
Generation Z, hooked to smartphones, isn’t signing up to serve in the Australian Defence Force. Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh recently pointed out that the ADF allows transfers for personnel from the British and US armed forces. Now the Albanese...
Who will PNG call for assistance when Port Moresby is burning?
Large-scale rioting, looting and burning took place in Port Moresby last week, sparked by a payroll “glitch” deducting up to $120 a fortnight from public service pay packets, including Papua New Guinea police, defence and corrections personnel. Several hundred...
Getting on the front foot to help pave way for Gaza’s future
Foreign Minister Penny Wong arrives in Israel this week with an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of key developments to better inform our approach to the Israel-Gaza war. The minister will also be able to convey Australian ideas that might be...
Decision to bury Taipans dents our support of Ukraine
On Monday, Acting Defence Minister Matt Thistlethwaite farewelled 90 Australian Defence Force personnel departing for Britain, where they will train Ukrainian soldiers. This is the fifth ADF training rotation, providing basic infantry skills to Ukrainian new recruits...
What’s next in Middle East? Consider these six factors
Sunday, January 7, is three months since Hamas’s terrorist attack in southern Israel, where more than 1500 jihadists crossed over from Gaza on the morning of a Jewish religious holiday, killed 1200 people, raping and torturing many, and taking several...
Indicators & warnings for a troubled Defence Force – & an unwanted but necessary Christmas gift
The Christmas-New Year Edition - indicators and warnings for the Defence Force - and a Christmas gift to a troubled department | RSS.com In Episode 10, SAA's Marcus Hellyer and Michael Shoebridge discuss the indicators and warnings about the state of Australia's...
Labor adrift in a sea of foreign policy impotence
The Albanese government ends 2023 adrift on national security and foreign policy, like the HMAS Toowoomba in the Sea of Japan a few weeks ago, propellers snarled and hostile forces looming. Four examples from late December expose Anthony Albanese’s malaise: failing to...
Refusing Red Sea mission is a failure of kit and conviction
The Australian navy is small and its ships are ageing. In our region and elsewhere, it has fundamentally failed to keep up with the threats that confront Australia. The Albanese government’s response to an informal US request to send a warship into the Red Sea to...
A grumpy strategist meets a China business consultant
In this 15 minute interview, the ABC's Geraldine Doogue talks about Australia and China with SAA's Michael Shoebridge and China business consultant Geoff Raby. They cover the political relationship and security, economics, China under the Chinese Communist Party,...
Gaza statement a prime example of moral posturing
The biggest flaw in the joint statement on Gaza from the prime ministers of Australia, Canada and New Zealand is that there is not a single sentence offering practical advice about how Israel might exercise its “right to defend itself”. In just 429 words we have an...
Prime minister Albanese’s strategic fleet folly
It’s long been Labor policy to stand up our own flagged and Australian-crewed merchant navy for the nation and its defence. Less than one per cent of Australian seaborne trade is carried by Australian ships. The Australian fleet currently stands at 15 vessels over...
2024: elections in a fragmenting world; Future Fund forgets Australian industry – & export controls, again
Episode 9 - 2024: global elections bring a fragmenting world, investing everywhere but into Australian industry, and those pesky proposed export controls | RSS.com Marcus Hellyer and Michael Shoebridge look at the implications of elections from Taiwan, to India,...
Awkward truths about US and UK AUKUS challenges
Three reports over the past two months are required reading for anyone involved in or scrutinising the Australian Government’s work on AUKUS. Two are US reports and one is from the UK. None are from the Pentagon or the UK Ministry of Defence, instead each...
A glimpse of things to come – AUKUS hastens slowly
Last weekend the three AUKUS defence ministers met in California to reflect on what their joint statement called the “exceptional progress” in the agreement. Richard Marles was effusive: in what has been “a truly momentous year” the three countries had made “an...
Where to after the dust settles in Gaza
In agreeing to ceasefires Israel has been put in a terrible dilemma. It must weigh one clearly stated war objective of freeing hostages against the other key objective of the permanent elimination of the Hamas terror and war making capability in Gaza. But...
As Defence’s core functions fail, what’s the plan for change?
A defence force has to have three things work well to be effective: it has to recruit and retain the skilled people it needs, it has to choose the equipment a military needs to succeed in conflict, and it has to operate and support that equipment. On all three...
Landing craft create paths for shipbuilding
Finally there is some good news in the defence shipbuilding space. On Thursday 24 November, the Australian Government announced that the West Australian shipbuilder Austal would build the Army’s new medium landing craft designed by NSW shipbuilder, Birdon. That’s good...