In a long peace, the ideal military is a sleepy one.  An outfit and bunch of people that resemble stewards looking after a creature put into cryogenic hibernation, with vital systems barely ticking over.  The stewards in charge do routine health and system checks, guard the perimeter and gates, monitor temperature, fluid levels and vital signs.  Their job is to keep things as quiet and stable as possible but to be able to wake the thing up if their masters require it.

Australia has been experiencing a very long peace, with no major Australian commitment to a war since Vietnam in the 1960s and ‘70s.  Small scale commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan, however demanding for the individuals involved, are blips in this picture.

So, it’s no surprise that Australia’s Defence Force and Defence Department are what they are and operate as they do.  During long periods of peace, no government wants to spend more than the bare minimum on its military – for us that’s been about 2 per cent of GDP for a while now. And the last things they want is an activist military or Defence organisation that is brimming with creativity, energy and urgent demands for funding and support. Slow-moving complacency is the goal.

And Australia has achieved this ideal with our Defence Force and the Department that supports it.  It is quiet and complacent to the point of hibernation, and exists solely to slowly self-replicate itself with updated ‘new generation’ items as the things it has age out and have to be replaced.

Its leadership show all the indicators of careful, if sleepy, night watchmen.  Four recent examples tell the story.

There’s the Chief of Navy who is delighted with the performance of his ageing ANZAC frigates recently because some could put to sea when 3 Chinese warships circumnavigated Australia. 

Despite this success, Defence was unable to tell the prime minister if the Chinese warships had actually fired their weapons, with that news instead coming from a Virgin airline pilot. No one in Defence has seemed troubled by the fact that even if the prime minister had sent all 7 of our old ANZAC frigates to confront the three Chinese ships, they would have been outclassed and outgunned by that single Chinese Navy cruiser, without it needing the assistance of the frigate or replenishment ship along with it. 

Given the Hunter program bumbles along unchanged, it’s clear that our Defence hierarchy are also comfortable with the fact that, sometime after 2040, when we have spent $27 billion on the 3 Hunter class frigates that UK firm BAE has been designing and building for our Navy since 2018 and they’re all in service, these 3 ludicrously expensive warships together will still be outgunned by the single Chinese cruiser we’ve just seen sail by. Its 112 missile cells will outmatch the Hunters’ combined 96 missile cells.

And the Chinese cruiser is probably faster than these Faberge egg level of indulgence  frigates. The only more expensive warships on the planet than our future Hunter ships are nuclear powered aircraft carriers according to our Defence officials. That doesn’t show that our Defence organisation, from the CDF and Secretary down, understands what getting bang for your buck might mean. It also doesn’t shout out as a demonstration that our Defence officials are spending the $59 billion of taxpayers’ funds they’re getting every year at all well.

Then there’s the head of our Air Force who has recently told us how happy he is with the Air Force he has and will have over the next ten years under current plans. 

The background here is that our Air Force doesn’t have a single armed drone in its inventory and no plans to acquire one over the next decade.  The RAAF is also not getting a single new combat aircraft over the next ten years.  Orders for the missiles our 72 short range F-35 and 24 F/A-18 Superhornet fighters use are backlogged, with US producers meeting their own needs before they start to think about ours’. That means there’s real doubt about these US suppliers being able to resupply our air force if there actually is a war. So, it’s very unusual for an air force chief to be in this situation and still be so content.

From the civilian department side of our Defence organisation, there’s a similar sleepy complacency.  One senior official recently explained to the Australian Parliament that of course it was taking about a year to get the first of 49 retired Australian tanks delivered to Ukraine – because tanks are very big and heavy items that are difficult to move.  It sounded as if he expected to be thanked for this vital and useful explanation and would have been mystified by any concern this might raise outside Defence about the organisation’s capacity to do something even more difficult: deploy and support tanks into battlefield conditions at any distance from their storage or training areas in less than a year.

In the fourth example, the most senior official responsible for naval shipbuilding patiently explained to parliamentarians that it normally takes the Department and Navy 7, 8, 9 or even ten years to evaluate complex warship designs – and so of course, it takes longer still to actually contract for, build and receive such warships into the Navy.  His air in doing so was similar to the tank explainer, seeming to invite understanding and even congratulations from elected officials who were taking an interest in Defence’s work.

None of these four sleepy responses to the security challenges Australia faces show that these military leaders and senior officials understand or believe what they have been reading in government defence policy statements since 2020, or, no doubt, in even more frank and alarming intelligence assessments about the growing risks of conflict in our world and region.  Their actions don’t show that they are learning from watching the wars our world is experiencing in the Middle East and Europe, let alone the growing tensions nearer to home, whether across the Taiwan Straits or in chunks of North and South East Asia.

Our Defence organisation’s civilian and military leadership seem to be unaffected in their day jobs or routines by the startling new fact – revealed in 2020 and in multiple government documents and parliamentary speeches since then – that Australia now does not have the luxury of time to prepare to fight in a war not of our choosing.  And that we must get our military in a position to do so fast.

5 years on, behaviour and results have not changed. Speeches have – they are routinely steely-eyed and resolute.

Right now, our military would be unlikely to be able to operate at any wartime tempo for more than a few weeks before it ran out of all the consumables – missiles, ammunition, spare parts ­– it needs. And it would be unable to replace combat losses in any time that mattered – in fact until years after any war has concluded.  It would be discovering the value of armed and unarmed drones as they were used against it in numbers by an adversary. That’s a very unpleasant way to learn.

The problem is we have been so successful in creating the slumbering, quiet passive military and defence department we have liked so much during the long peace that now we are in a period of potential crisis and conflict, we can’t seem to wake it up.  And its leaders – the stewards of this hibernating beast – don’t seem to have even received the message that things need to change.  They’re still quietly monitoring things and telling us all is well from the system reports they are getting.

So, Australia has the military it wanted.  How do we get the one we need?

What can change this cosy but disastrous state of affairs? War would, because, as we have seen in Ukraine, war is the great catalyst of change and action.  A sceptical public and a distrusted set of government institutions from the President down crystallised into the courageous, creative and unified nation we see now, leading the world in many areas of military technology and warfighting capability.  Wartime leaders emerged – the first one the world saw being President Zelensky himself, with his famous line ‘The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride’.

But before Australia finds itself in the crisis of a war with an entirely unready military and Defence organisation, one thing can act as a catalyst for change: leadership change within the Defence institution itself.  The kinds of leaders who are valued stewards of slumbering militaries during peacetime are simply not the type of activist, results-orientated people needed in a period of growing crisis or war.  Instead, people who have been expelled from higher leadership paths and put into peripheral jobs – training organisations, defence colleges, secondments to outside organisations or given early retirement – tend to be the personality types with the skills and drive needed. 

A classic example is General George Patton, who was reluctantly put into a major wartime command in World War Two after a very long period in the wilderness in the US Army before the war.  A civilian example of the type of leader Australia needs now is Essington-Lewis – a private industrialist who in the late 1930s took on the huge task of readying Australian industry to support the Australian military if war broke out, as it did in 1939.  He then ran much of Australia’s war economy and planned for our post war reconstruction.

The simple fact is that peacetime military leaders and peacetime Defence administrators are routinely sacked, sidelined and replaced when a war starts because they are not the right people for the tasks at hand.  And as those quiet, passive stewards leave the building, the convoluted processes and committee structures they loved so much are comprehensively dismantled and binned, replaced by simpler, faster approaches that are fit for purpose.

No more warship programs that take 15 years to deliver the first outgunned ship to our Navy, and a fast tack to equip our air force with armed combat drones and to build factories that can produce the flow of munitions, missiles and drones our military will need if there is a war.  An Essington-Lewis of our times is desperately needed – and a Patton if we can find one.

It’s time to break the glass on the emergency alarm clock governing Australia’s sleepy military and Defence organisation and wake it up to be ready for the dangerous world we’re living in.  We should have set the alarm for earlier, but waking now will be much healthier than having an even longer sleep in.

This article was first published by Defence Connect.