Two ministers, two defence policies — same old delusions
One Cabinet minister is good. Two must be doubleplusgood.

George Orwell would say: if one Defence Cabinet minister is good, two must be DoublePlusGood.....Image: Defence.

Written by

Peter Jennings

The Albanese government has given us two defence ministers: Richard “Call me Deputy Prime Minister” Marles and his tireless workmate, Pat Conroy.

No one should be surprised to learn the government also has two defence policies.

First there is the policy of expanding America’s military footprint across northern Australia as set out in the AUSMIN communique released on Wednesday.

It’s the defence policy the government doesn’t talk about because it acknowledges our dependence on the US and judges that China is the threat.

The second defence policy is the one Labor ministers highlight, focusing on a future Australian Defence Force to be built in just the next few years, faster than anything previous governments could do, with everything delivered on time and within budget.

The AUSMIN communique outlines major upgrades for our northern airbases, Darwin and Tindal (near Katherine); “potential upgrades” are noted for the so-called bare bases across the north and in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

There is now a “combined logistics, sustainment and maintenance enterprise”.

The US Army and other services are about to store a lot of equipment here “designed to enhance interoperability and accelerate the ability to respond to regional crises”.

There will be local “co-production of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems … by 2025” producing “viable volumes of GMLRS for global consumption”. US demand to restock what was passed to Ukraine will far outstrip the ADF’s need.

The US Army and Marine Corps presence will grow, as will air force “frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft”.

The infrastructure is being put in place to support a potentially massive short-notice increase of US military forces in the event of a regional crisis with China.

Labor has wisely continued Coalition policies to prepare for this US military presence, which will “disperse” out of vulnerable bases in Guam, Japan and elsewhere and head to northern Australia.

This is the 2020s version of what happened after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The choice then was to build up our own defence capabilities or support the US, the only country with the industrial and economic heft to win the Pacific War. Australia picked the US option.

This is the right strategy – indeed the only available one for Australia given that the ADF is on a long-term capability decline and will remain in that state for the rest of the 2020s.

Last April Marles claimed it “lacks wit” to worry about the “precise level of Australia’s defence capability in the short term” meaning the 2020s. Perhaps that helps explain the grounding of helicopter lift capability, retiring HMAS Anzac early and not modernising the other Anzac-class frigates, scrapping air defence projects, cutting planned numbers of armoured vehicles from 421 to 129 and many other decisions.

Labor has been trimming the current force to pay for the future one. By comparison, buying a few hundred loitering munition drones – enough for a quiet afternoon in the Donbas – barely amounts to a training capability.

Conroy claims “under Labor’s plan the first of our fleet of general-purpose frigates will be in service by the end of this decade”.

A foreign-built ship might arrive by then, but locally constructed frigates will be the product of a designer not yet selected, from a builder that has yet to build large navy ships, and a prime contractor yet to work with either.

Before the frigate replacement, Labor plans to have the same West Australian facility build a significant number of army heavy landing craft that Conroy claims are “as big as a frigate”.

On this plan, by the early 2030s the army will have as many large ships as the navy.

But note that no heavy landing craft design is selected yet. The army has not operated vessels of this scale since the World War II and there are no port facilities built for them. Perhaps the Army’s heavy landing craft will operate out of the Chinese-run Port of Darwin? This could all work brilliantly. Then again there may be complications.

Like Mulder in The X Files, with his UFO poster declaring “I want to believe”, I want to believe Labor is “speeding up major defence capability acquisitions to meet the strategic challenges we face as a nation”.

It is experience that prevents me from swallowing this delusional pap. Decades of political bipartisanship and alliance rent-seeking bring us to this point. The truth is out there.

This article was originally published in the Australian on 08 August 2024.

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