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 before we pop the champagne corks, it’s worth looking behind the hoopla. Like the “Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz, who turns out to be a small but jovial carnival showman from Kansas, the truth is something much more mundane hiding behind the Government’s curtain of hype.

Mr Conroy’s flashy number is window dressing. The practical reality is that the Government’s plans are leaving our military exposed and under equipped in a critical area for the next ten years, maybe longer on current plans.

The $7 billion sounds great.  So the natural reaction is that a lot must be happening, but it’s not.

For a start, the $7 billion figure is spread out – peanut buttered – between now and 2036. And it’s being spent mainly on a grab bag of pretty traditional but very expensive stuff like conventional naval missiles, an existing missile defence system, and improvements to aircraft like the Air Force’s F-35 and Super Hornet jet fighters. The government has a list of these plans buried deep in its revised investment plan for Defence that came out last week (page 74 of the new investment plan).

Those traditional – and mainly existing things – our military has will soak up billions of the dollars in Mr Conroy’s press release, leaving a trickle for creative Australian companies. This also means that only a trickle of the $7 billion, let alone the total  Defence budget, is going to equipping our military with the new essential tools of war – cheap drone and counter drone systems available to our military in large numbers when they need them.  Our military is failing to adapt at any scale or speed that matters.

The actual amounts going to innovative Australian companies like SYPAQ and AIM Defence aren’t in the same universe as the billions Mr Conroy trumpets.  They are being drip fed $10 million and $21 million contracts to develop a small fast drone interceptor that can intercept systems like Iran’s Shahad kamikaze drone and to develop a laser that can shoot down smaller quadcopter-type drones. 

Good. This will hopefully allow these two creative local companies to develop effective systems that our military might actually operate at some time in the future.  But these contracts are not going to actually equip formations across our military in any way or at any scale that matters.  The companies know the contracts are tiny, but they have to smile for the cameras to not upset their Government customer.

This is the situation after our Government ministers and defence officials have witnessed four years of intense drone war and technological development in Ukraine and now more recently in the Persian Gulf.

To put things into perspective, while Mr Conroy is celebrating our military paying to develop two types of capable small counter drone systems for a total of $31 million, Defence is spending $3.9 billion just this year on the AUKUS subs program and plans to spend between $71-96 billion on the AUKUS program over the next ten years.

Yes – $3.9 billion out the door this year alone on the AUKUS subs, contrasted with $31 million on counter drone contracts.

So, more than 125 times the cash going to SYPAQ and AIM-Defence is going out the door this year on subs we don’t even start to get until next sometime next decade.

It’s obvious who should be celebrating and it’s easy to see where the Government’s real priority is. Unfortunately, that’s not Australian made counter drone systems, or even adapting our military to the new era of cheap, high volume drone warfare. Real contracts valued at $1 billion with a diverse set of Australian companies – including SYPAQ and AIM Defence – making small, high volume drones and counter drone systems would start to show change is happening.

The Ukraine war and Iran war both show that large numbers of small systems are essential – thousands is the minimum.  The Ukrainians are on track to produce some 4.5 million small drone and counter drone systems this year – and use them in the war with individual units firing small fast interceptor drones to destroy incoming Russian drones in numbers that would deplete the Australian military’s stocks in days.

Defence just isn’t doing anything remotely like this Ukrainian approach to set the foundations for our military to have anything like this flow of cheap essential weapons should a conflict happen in our region. The Ukrainians have built a drone empire while Australia has sat on its hands and watched, but not learned.  And meanwhile, the Government tells us our part of the world is more dangerous than it was just two years ago.

Even the money the Government does plan to spend on actual drones – rather than counter drones to defeat them — over the next 10 years comes with a catch. The bulk of this money is going towards a small number of large drones – like the Ghost Bat uncrewed aircraft and the large Ghost Shark unmanned submarine that each cost in the $ tens of millions per drone.  Then there’s the even more expensive complex surveillance drone Defence also celebrates – the Triton made by Northrop Grumman.  Australia is paying over $3 billion to get just 4 of these long distance machines. 

The problem is obvious: Defence is doing with drones what it loves to do with its manned systems like warships, submarines and tanks: buying complex, very expensive items that are just too expensive to buy many of.  In the drone era it’s stuck thinking 50 of something is a lot.

This leaves Australia equipping its military with tens of expensive large drones and a meaninglessly small amount of cheap counter drone systems. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is adapting fast and knows that effective militaries now need thousands – even millions – of small, cheap disposable drone and counter drone systems. 

Less over-hyped celebrations and more achievement is what Australians want from the Government when it is spending our money on our security.