Defence analyst (and occasional Catallaxy commenter) Dr Carlo Kopp had an excellent piece in yesterday’s Age about the recent defence decision to buy Super Hornets as interim replacements for the F-111. Money quote:
The Super Hornet is the US Navy’s follow-on fighter to the “Classic Hornet”, currently flown by four RAAF squadrons. While slightly larger than Australia’s Hornets, the Super Hornet’s agility, supersonic speed and acceleration performance, critical in air combat, are no better than the earlier model, due to a Congressional mandate during development. With unique engines, radar, airframe and electronic warfare systems, the Super Hornet shares little real commonality with its predecessor, driving up support costs. All it offers is a better radar, improved avionics and 36 per cent more internal fuel, at a price tag estimated at $2.5 billion.
The bad news is that the Super Hornet is not competitive against the latest Russian Sukhoi Su-30MK fighters, operated or being acquired by China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, and it is also not competitive against the Boeing F-15 models being acquired by Singapore, South Korea, and flown by Japan.
The larger Sukhois are faster, much more agile, and have greater range and firepower than the Super Hornet. The Russians are now testing an advanced supersonic cruise engine in the Sukhoi fighter, which will effectively double the combat speed of the Russian fighters, putting them well out of reach of the lacklustre Super Hornet.
I highly recommend giving his piece a read; it’s available here. My earlier piece on the vexed issue of fighter acquisition and the JSF v F-22A debate is available here.
59 Comments
Very good stuff as usual.
Unfortunately an Age OpEd provides limited opportunity to expand on the problems we are seeing wih Defence planning.
Key strategic decisions appear to be made on the basis of bureaucratic opinion rather than analysis, and that opinion, no matter how lacking in intellectual rigour, is being fed to cabinet and the parliament at large as fact.
We are on a collision course with strategic realities and the Defence bureaucracy in Russell is doing its best to pretend ‘all is well, trust us, we are infallible and omniscient’.
When is the penny going to drop in Canberra?
What about sacking a lot of the non-combat defense bureaucracy Carlo?
Would that help any?
I don’t like this at all. It almost seems like a moral weakness. Like the insiders feel that we aren’t worthy enough to be massively superior within a thousand miles of own airspace as well as to the far side of Indonesia.
I think the very act of turning down the opportunity and going for second or third best is a bad signal to our friends in Indonesia.
Who need to know that when they look at their own security arrangements the idea is to face North knowing that we’d rather have any potential aggressor stopped before he got to their borders.
Stopped cold and if necessarily by their good and powerfully strong Australian friends.
And that worrying about southern defenses is just pointless and that they just have to put up with a bit of give and take with their Southern neighbour who after all are a bit of a soft touch with folks who don’t hold them in contempt.
Then the other thing is Australians hate getting their own guys killed. They really hate it. They hate it so very much. And they would rip apart the politician in charge who let it happen without good cause.
So we want to have such a level of superiority that we can take a calculated risk and send our guys out, knock any pretenders out of the sky and get our blokes back home alive.
This ability is such a force for peace since no militaristic coterie at the head of some fascist nation would like to be subject to one-sided humilitations of this sort……
…. and because of that it will greatly stay their hand whether or not they can theoretically beat us in a drawn out affair.
And on the top of that fascist regime-leadership can be hard to communicate with a lot of the time. And just having that capability would tend to make their listening skills better when we are talking.
If Parkinsons law is a feature of private industry one imagines that a public sector department and most particularly one that is actually necessary might suffer even more from a top-heavy management.
Mass-sackings Carlo?
Could they survive a twenty percent reduction in staff at the top?
Might that convince them that the rest of us are SERIOUS about them doing a good job in making us unbeatable and on a sound budget?
I think if we don’t sack a bunch of public servants out of a clear blue sky every now and then the lot of them aren’t likely to view the rest of us as SERIOUS people.
I think some mass-sackings could actually be good for morale. Could have a sort of bracing effect.
Hey skeptic can you keep this sort of post up?
A good Australian libertarian representative ought to be a military boffin.
I like those anarcho-capitalists and am most interested with their ideas on defense.
But lets face it. Very little of that stuff is going to be applicable to Australia in this half-century.
We have to be powerfully strong so our left-wingers don’t get frightened and start spending all their time selling the rest of us down river.
“We are on a collision course with strategic realities and the Defence bureaucracy in Russell is doing its best to pretend ‘all is well, trust us, we are infallible and omniscient’.”
Perhaps we could hold an LDP meeting outside their headquarters. And let it double as a protest.
Calling for sackings as well as for getting us the best technology for our lads to get about in.
Its just odd it is. Its like the last time the cricketers were on a losing streak in the mid-80’s.
Its like they’ve lost their pride.
I’ve got a couple of good defence pieces in the pipeline Graeme, including a very nice Catallaxy exclusive towards the end of this month - can’t say more just yet, story is still under wraps.
Can’t wait sister.
How’s that Flu? May I suggest brandy? Good for you skeptic. Make you feel better.
Actually I think I might rush out and get some myself.
Responding to GMB | December 31st, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Unfortunately as gratifying as mass sackings might be they usually achieve the opposite of the desired effect.
The last such exercise resulted in a large fraction of DoD and ADF senior talent being cast out by the bureaucracy, and is indeed the cause of the current round of silly decisions.
The problem with all such bureaucracies is that the people you want to keep are usually less adept at covering their posteriors since they are busy doing their jobs properly, and thus these people are the most vulnerable when a downsizing event of this type occurs. Ergo, you end up losing the people you need to keep and retaining those you least need or want.
What is required is very surgical pruning to remove a modest number of individuals who clearly are not qualified to be in their jobs and are inclined to play organisational politics rather than do what is required.
In any mature bureaucracy you tend to end up with several categories of personnel. The lower tail of the bell curve are the people who should never have been hired or kept in the first place, due to lack of aptitute, experience and education / training. This group is frequently unrepairable and cannot be kept.
The other tail of the bell curve are the ‘ladder climbers’ or whatever you want to call them - promotion driven political players who more than often lack leadership skills, professional mastery and ability, but have a talent for politics and get themselves promoted rapidly and usually to the detriment of the organisation. This group is also frequently unrepairable and cannot be kept in its entirety.
The gaggle around the peak of the bell curve are usually solid workers who are focussed on their jobs and with good leadership and supplementary education and training, can perfom effectively. This group is one which you can usually retain without difficulty, but needs an investment in time and training to deprogram from the defective work practices which they have lived with previously.
One of the other problems we have seen increasingly in Russell Offices is the rise of ‘uniformed bureaucrats’, or senior ADF officers who think like bureaucrats rather than warriors. Historically this species has been outnumbered by real warriors, but the bureaucratic culture in Russell has seen this group promoted at a much greater rate than officers who are deeply steeped in the warrior ethos and values.
This group is especially damaging to the ADF since they behave like civilian bureaucrats, but present as if they were real warriors. I have tangled with far too many of them in recent years and it is always a disappointing experience to encounter bureaucratic thinking and values in somebody whom you expect to think like a warrior.
True warriors are an endangered species in the Canberra bureacracy - the unjustified sacking of former Air Commander AVM Peter Criss was the turning point in this evolving disaster, since he was and remains a true warrior and a man of enormous personal integrity (I have known him for many years). That sent a message to all mid ranking and ambitious ADF officers - being a warrior is not going to get you promoted, being a bureacrat will. A number of recent promotions show exactly this perspective.
So to summarise, there are no simple answers. The organisation needs an injection of well qualified leadership talent, selective pruning to remove the most politically inclined bureacrats, removal of some deadwood, a large injection of professional and technical talent, large scale retraining, and deep changes in internal governance mechanisms to restore the checks and balances the bureacrats dismantled over the last five years. These reforms have to be implemented by people not inside this bureacracy, since the bureaucrats will sabotage and stall as they have repeatedly since the 1970s.
Fixable? Yes. Simple? No.
Criss got sacked? I didn’t know that. I thought they pensioned him off honourably or something. That’s fecking nuts. Is the full story available anywhere? Christ on a motorbike, now I’ve seen everything.
“The last such exercise resulted in a large fraction of DoD and ADF senior talent being cast out by the bureaucracy, and is indeed the cause of the current round of silly decisions.”
But then thats the leftist tax-eater bureaucracy throwing out the serious people and the ex-soldiers?
Thats what it sounds like to me.
Is the above an almost? fair characterisation?
I wasn’t thinking of the bureaucracy turning on itself to maintain the fat and get rid of the muscle.
I was thinking more of a way of doing things where an elected representative can pretty much fire whom he likes just so long as he does so DIRECTLY.
Like he as being a man who has gained the votes is pretty much expected to fire fire fire fire on the basis of his own first-hand hunches while retaining the right to be arbitrary.
Just fill me in on what happened here.
I mean I wouldn’t ever think that the bureacracy could ever reform its own institutional imperatives by using those same institutional imperatives to turn on itself and fire those who go against those VERY institutional imperatives.
I’m more talking a voted rep cutting a swathe through the place.
And bringing the message to the heretofore comfortably ensconced that the rest of us are SERIOUS PEOPLE and not to be trifled with.
Responding to skepticlawyer | December 31st, 2006 at 4:43 pm
That sorry tale, and many others, are detailed here:
http://www.rar-sa.org.au/RAP/Bulletin.htm
AVM Criss was not alone. In the subsequent purges the bureaucracy ‘MIERed’ (Management Induced Early Retirement) the cream of the RAAF senior officer corps, and effectively wiped out all opposition to their power in the Russell bureacracy. I can think of at least half a dozen RAAF generals lost in that period who were until then the backbone of the organisation - warriors and true professionals.
There is still talent within the organisation, but more than often it has been sidelined or parked. Bureaucrats love to ‘encapsulate’ people with talent much like spiders wrapping their prey in a web. If the victim struggles against this, it is cast out.
So its a fucking leftist Gramscian-lite takeover?
But god there’ll be hell to pay.
In your experience are these people you are finding a tad hard to reason with………. broadly speaking………….. LEFTISTS!??????!
A hard rain will have to fall.
Responding to GMB | December 31st, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Refer previous post on the history issues.
The problem with cleaning out the Russell Offices shambles is that is has to be done by a team of experts who know the prior history of the organisation and its internal players.
Yes it would be nice if we had a Minister who would hunt down problem personnel and remove them. We have not had such a Minister in living memory. Moore had his heart in the right place and had the backbone, but he lacked the expert support staff to enforce and implement his aims. The bureaucrats exploited that to their own advantage, made things worse, and put the blame on Moore in the end.
An elected rep like a Minister is these days flying blind since the bureaucracy very adeptly only lets him hear and see what they want. So having the Minister effect a clean up would mean the bureacrats would win again. The only answer is an external and independent entity, comprising people who know the organisation intimately, and with a very specific charter to week out personnel who lack skills, integrity and in senior positions, leadership ability and true professional mastery. Such as entity would make recommendations the Minister would action.
See here Jason.
This is exactly what I was trying to tell you about the paper-pushing side of American-Spook-Town.
As exemplified by Wilson and his airhead piece of crumpet wife.
There is just no cause or reason or evidence to believe that our human institutions are FUNCTIONAL as opposed to be more or less totally DYSFUNCTIONAL.
With the exception of competitive business under conditions of sustained low taxes and hard money.
Responding to GMB | December 31st, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Depends on how you define a leftist….
If Eurosocialist big bureaucracy / hate the private sector / hate the US / worship state power / believe their own interests are the national interest / … qualifies as left wing, then probably yes.
If you define left wing as card carrying socialist party ideological demagoguery, then probably no.
Socialists usually believe fervently in the power of the state as a tool to effect their agenda.
Bureaucrats usually believe fervently in the power of the state as a mechanism to slef promote and enhance their job security and power.
One must be careful here to see things for what they are, and not necessarily what they might appear to be.
“The problem with cleaning out the Russell Offices shambles is that is has to be done by a team of experts who know the prior history of the organisation and its internal players.”
Right but think of Andrew Jacksons way of doing things.
Later to be known as the ’spoils system’ it was really a way of Jackson saying that no-one had a priviledged public teat to suck on or vein to bite into. And so when a new administration came in they had the impicit right to turn out the entire bureaucracy and bring in their own coterie, hangers on and even relatives.
Those staff that were injustly fired. We could bring 1 of them back for every 5 of the dead wood we arbitrarily got to clear their desk.
Consider this.
Skeptic is convinced by your argument.
Skeptic posts this stuff.
I consider the matter. I look up what actual pilots have to say about it. I check what Loren Thompson and others have to say about it.
I consider the fuck-off-factor and the fact that you can match one move against another but nothing matches speed, reach and stealth.
Then I check with you about the range of the Joint Strike Fighter. And whether its at least a tad superior within this circumscribed range.
And you say no.
So that I don’t wonder about things too much after that and just suspect organisational dysfunction until its proved otherwise.
Now I suspect I could be interviewing people all the time and asking them for ideas.
And 5 of them a day might be getting the red rose.
“Baby it was beautiful while it lasted but its OVER”
And I fancy that 4 in 5 would be dead wood and only 1 would be the meat.
And we’d hire back some of the old guys.
To me it would be easy.
And something of a pleasure.
We need a new relationship between the reps and the lifers.
And we have to expect the reps to be consistently sacking people whether they know for sure its needed or not.
Because once they are fired they aren’t a problem and their firing is already saving you money from day 1.
And if you make a mistake a proportion of those that you have made a mistake with might be willing to get their old jobs back.
Its about the reps taking control of the lifers.
I don’t get it. I’m no authority on defence (the army reserve is no training ground, believe me), so I’m ignorant about defence matters.
Is Carlo Kopp claiming the F111 should be kept operating until the JSF comes along? Or is he suggesting the Raptor be purchased either as an interim measure or instead of the JSF?
What is the significance of the Sukhoi superiority?
Why is this a big deal?
“If Eurosocialist big bureaucracy / hate the private sector / hate the US / worship state power / believe their own interests are the national interest / … qualifies as left wing, then probably yes.”
Well thats it then. A very grave matter which ought to be on the intray of every libertarian.
And always be put back on the intray twice a week.
I didn’t say a Gramsican takeover. I said a Gramscian-lite takeover.
Meaning more a natural function of taxeater imperatives then any international conspiracy.
We have to get these people so punch-shy that they almost bow when a rep shows up.
And unconciously stoop a little in the prescence of the humblest taxpayers.
Except for those who have a soldiering background thats quite different.
But on the other hand we can’t as libertarians be subject to too much haughtiness even from these good men.
Responding to davidleyonhjelm | December 31st, 2006 at 5:27 pm
You might like to read this - http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-FAQ-2005.html
Well surely David the concept of purchasing some Raptors ought to be at least explored with as much enthusiasm as would still allow us to get a reasonable price off the Americans.
If this is the superior fighter and its available now… Why would we lease a third-best option to tide us over for a second-best option on account of the second-best option NOT being available now?
But its worse then that. Because the failure to at least attempt to get hold of the Raptor means that the gardeners have taken over the estate and are under the sway of some universal gardeners-guild-sensibility and not working for the owners.
And thats far more scary then us blowing all our cash on a second best option as well as a third-best interim option.
Only libertarians will have the heart and committment to deal with this far more scary problem of institutional dysfunction and leftist bureaucratic takeovers.
Onward.
David, Carlo is the real deal. I’ve been dealing with him on defence issues in various forums for 10+ years and have found he’s always right on the money.
There are serious problems with acquisitition and Carlo (along with Peter Goon and Criss who I can’t believe was sacked) have always been very impressive. Their stuff is always fully costed with one eye on the main libertarian game of making sure that the state - in this vital area - does its job properly.
I’d visit his site, read his Age piece and then come back here. He is patient enough to answer any questions you may have - properly and carefully. Unlike some of the other arsehats around the place.
There’s a bloke thats been getting round the traps lately.
He’s a guy whose studied war from 1500 on.
And he’s been looking at what it is that is the main winning factor in war.
Well we know what gives us the advantages.
The weather. Military genius of individual Generals. Technology. Wealth and on and on and on.
But Max Boot says the thing that shines through is (the state of the war) BUREAUCRACY.
New technology on its own won’t do it. Because military secret can be fleeting.
A big economy and a wealthy citizenry aren’t enough. The number of smaller, less wealthy contries that have defeated their bigger richer adversaries are legion.
So taking these Max Boot lessons into account.
The idea that our defense bureaucracy are not the focused….. Churchillian…. red-blooded….. dogs-of-war….. that we more civilised types keep in reserve and pray……..
The idea that our defense bureaucracy are not the hard-core warriors that we hold in a glass case and pray that we don’t have to unleash…..
The idea that our defense bureacrats aren’t the dogs of war that we pray we’ll never have to use for the sake of our enemy…..
The thought that the Bureaucracy itself are not this springloaded peace-maker of the most appallingly explosive kind….
Well if this IDEA turned out to be the actual state-of-things-as-they-are….
Well thats no small failing.
Because check this out:
“We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be;
we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills.
We shall NEVER surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving……
….. then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.”
Yeah and we would have done it.
We would have fought on the beeches and in the fields and street by street and and THERE CAN BE NO DOUBTING IT.
But can we be sure that this generation would be willing to fight?
Later I’ll request that this be wiped because I’ll not have Chi-coms thinking that we would not fight to the death each and every one of us and beyond death still reach from beyond the grave to screw up the communist party.
But realistically speaking post-modern-city-living multi-racial Australia is unlikely to fight with the same fervour as did the brave Finnish and then the British Empire did in THAT rumble.
Which means we can be toppled easily and may well be a paper tiger if we do not have enough lead-time to get on a psychological war footing.
So this question of the failure to at least try and buy the Raptor at a decent price is one thing.
But the existence of a bureaucracy that is so dysfunctional as to not get this right and in fact get this totally wrong….
Well thats scary beyond anything at all.
It means that no-ones minding the store.
It means that a decisive foreigner, seeing the Americans snowed under, might take the risk to take us out.
And because we are ethical people and without fear this chink in the armour is not acceptable on a moral level.
To suffer a dysfunctional bureaucracy at the very least is an invitation to violence and failure.
And so has to be on the main agenda for a sustained clobbering-time.
Kopp’s position is two fold. He argues that we should buy the F-22 instead of the JSF, because the JSF is not good enough to beat the types of fighters it will be opposing next decade.
And since the F-22 is primarily an air superiority fighter, not a bomber, we should retain the F-111 until 2020 or afterwards to fill the role of regional bomber, at which it excels. I think it’s also part of Kopp’s position that, even in the regional bomber role, the JSF is not as good as the F-111, for our purposes anyway.
I concur with his view. No other air force intends using the JSF alone for air superiority. All have other, better performing, fighters to provide cover for their intended JSF forces, if necessary. The Americans designed the JSF to replace their A-10 and F-16 battlefield strike aircraft, not to mix it with Sukhois.
Regarding the F-111, the air force is concerned that it’s too vulnerable to modern SAMs, but there were programs in place to address this, including the use of stand-off missiles. They’ve been cancelled in a cost-cutting move.
As to the political context, my view is that this situation has been created by Howard government short-termism, focussed a bit too much on the bottom line. The JSF is cheaper than the F-22.
Within the intensely career-oriented Defence Force, ambitious people learn early on which directions earn good reviews, and I think that’s become more pronounced under the Howard government. Trying to promote alternatives to the received wisdom in such an environment is what’s described as a career-limiting move.
Good stuff Tony but tell me this:
If you’ve got it right and Carlo’s got it right and if people like me and skeptic THINK you’ve gotten it right….
Then what can you tell me about THE PRIESTHOOD?
Because anything I say is just speculation and gibber until someone who knows what’s going on actually fills us in on these matters.
The things I’ve said above;
What can you add to that or subract from it?
I’m not sure, GMB. It’s always a problem that a defence force bureaucracy atrophies in peace time, to be reinfused with effective people in time of war. Natural selection and all that.
Our people in uniform are first class and, to use an old-fashioned term, brave. We would have no problem enforcing our political decisions at the front line and in the supporting elements.
Back further in the decisions with 20 year life spans is where this discussion is centred. Here there has always been conflict between the armed forces and civilian advisers. That’s one reason the services established their own think-tanks. It lets them compete in the same space.
For Australia, this has also been overlayed by fighting for funds between the Army and the high tech services. Strategically Australia chose to favour the high tech services, and rightly so in my view. But the restricted budgets left the Army under equipped.
Howard has little understand of defence and, impressed by what he saw of the Army and the SASR in East Timor, seems to have switched the balance more to the Army, at the expense of the air force. That’s a s change that looks reasonably on the surface, but has the potential to greatly harm us from 2010 to 2020.
Allied to all this have been the usual changes that management consultants recommend, including greatly reducing the personnel in the air force. Since you can’t sack pilots and still be an air force, they sacked the engineers and technicians. Now they contract those services back, but without a lot of expertise that used to exist.
“Allied to all this have been the usual changes that management consultants recommend, including greatly reducing the personnel in the air force.
Since you can’t sack pilots and still be an air force, they sacked the engineers and technicians. ”
Oh Lord save us! I’ve got the worst of hangovers but this is hurting my head still more. I think I’m just going to have to walk away for awhile and recover or just start drinking again.
Because in peace-time you don’t have to keep all these planes in the air. But in wartime you do. So you want the sub-contracting lined up for war-time conditions and enough, or a bias towards having too much, in-house for peace-time.
It would be better if you had massive in-house over-capacity and were subcontracting these guys out to the private sector….. So during wartime you can keep the maximum number of planes (even those hurriedly bought or leased duriing a scale-up in the tension) round the clock indefinitely.
What are these people doing to us?
This is upsetting just to think about it.
Maybe if you had a vast net of subcontracted personal all working part-time for you and you had them sign up to a contract where at any moment you could have them working full-time then that might give you the scalability of effort that you need.
“That’s one reason the services established their own think-tanks. It lets them compete in the same space.”
Is that where you guys come out of? You and Carlo?
“Howard has little understand of defence and, impressed by what he saw of the Army and the SASR in East Timor, seems to have switched the balance more to the Army, at the expense of the air force.
That’s a s change that looks reasonably on the surface, but has the potential to greatly harm us from 2010 to 2020.”
Right. Thats actually quite terrible given our peculiar geography.
We WANT that impressive army of course. But we NEED the ability to keep submarines, ships and planes right away from the continent.
Look I cannot emphasise enough how much libertarian types need for you guys to be on their sites and hammering your message home.
And just basically educating us all.
And particularly tell me if I’m getting the wrong end of the stick with this stuff on any matter.
Libertarians are pretty gentle folk and don’t like to think about this dirty business. And they hate government spending more generally.
So I don’t think they think too much about defense matters.
As well the movement is influenced by American libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who imagine that we can get by with bugger-all spending and an armed citizenry alone.
The lesson that they’ve taken from Americas post World War II wars is that Guerillas on their own territory can’t be beaten. A bullshit lesson but thats how they tend to view things.
Which has some passing plausibility in the American situation. But is a very dangerous notion for this continent and this half-century.
“I’m not sure, GMB. It’s always a problem that a defence force bureaucracy atrophies in peace time, to be reinfused with effective people in time of war. Natural selection and all that.”
We don’t have time for that. That was the thing about the English-Speaking world. Always had a moat. Offshore Islanders the lot of us.
Always had time to gear up.
We don’t have that now. Its like we have a sort of 1000 year notion of our own invincibility.
But if we don’t reform this bureaucracy so that all the other reforms can be made we are in danger or being stomped.
Don’t be afraid, Graeme
Seriously, who is keeping an eye out for our defence purchases waiting to ’stomp’ us?
You idiot.
Its not personal fear. Its ethical outrage.
We were talking public policy and all of a sudden you changed the subject to personal fears.
Don’t be such an idiot. You might be some sort of animal only motivated by such base emotions like fear and so forth.
But don’t project that sort of thing onto your betters.
Third parties gather round. Now you might find it hard to even BELIEVE the sort of 100% dysfunction that we see in bureaucracies in Canberra and Washington.
But here we see a like attitude right here with Jasons stupidity.
Actually fella. What the hell is your question?
I don’t even understand it?
Rewrite it and try again.
And this time try not to be such an idiot.
I suspect the bureaucracy is fear stuffed full of people that think about defense like you.
Its a totally dysfunctional attitude and could not be more stupid and billions are squandered no doubt because of it.
“Seriously, who is keeping an eye out for our defence purchases waiting to ’stomp’ us?”
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Its not even understandeable.
Have you gone and deconstructed defense?
Have you pulled it apart and found that you’ve made the marvellous discovery that we don’t need defense?
Perhaps you could have come in earlier with this marvellous theory.
What is defense supposed to do Jason?
What are they supposed to be good at?
Put the nihilist Hume-nuke away. And deconstruct no more unless you are going to follow through.
Isn’t it strange that wars happen.
Wars and terrorism, hostage-taking, intimidation and appeasement and all that.
Why can’t we just all get along. Weren’t our forefathers so very silly getting into wars.
Wasn’t the times of piracy, slavery and people who prey of trading merchants… Weren’t they all such strange practices.
My goodness and look at all that money we waste on defense. Surely thats just a waste and a holdover from a more barbaric time.
And look at how the Chinese treated the Tibetans. Hacking off arms and the like. And see how now they rip out the vital organs of Fallun Gong.
They remind me of those brutal harsh Australians who want a strong defense. Surrounded by barbarians we are.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Have you managed to deconstruct and dismiss defense yet Jason?
Managed to lever in the Hume-Nuke and dissolve it all the way to nothingness?
Responding to Jason Soon | January 1st, 2007 at 2:16 pm:
ANAO monitor projects in progress but are underesourced and often hindered by Defence.
Australia Defence Association - funded by membership
Air Power Australia - website hosting and time investment by supporters, plus time/resource support by founders.
I finally read your article.
Its like these nincompoops want to turn us into some sort of neighbourhood weakling.
Maybe I should just go round there and punch someone in the guts. If only to get some publicity.
Do they themselves have any articles justifying their point of view?
Responding to GMB | January 1st, 2007 at 4:24 pm:
I finally read your article.
There is a lot more on the ausairpower.net website
Its like these nincompoops want to turn us into some sort of neighbourhood weakling.
It seems that way. Many folks I know have concluded it is a conspiracy but the facts indicate deskilling and strategic illiteracy.
I recently gave a 2 hr lecture to an interested group, in large part retired RAAF. After the lecture I heard a good number of the old timers discussing whether it qualified ats treason.
Unfortunately it does not since deskilling and strategic illiteracy are not ‘intent to aid and abet a foreign power in times of war’.
Maybe I should just go round there and punch someone in the guts. If only to get some publicity.
The wrong type of publicity - they would use it to show how unreasonable their opponents are.
You would do a lot better writing a measured and considered letter to the editor of the Age to show your displeasure. Or write to your local federal MP. Or both.
Do they themselves have any articles justifying their point of view?
They produced one ASPI paper, one ADM article, and a pile of submissions to parliament. Most are replete with technical errors and other errors of fact. In one parliamentary submission we found no less than 49 errors of fact on the record. All have been forensically and comprehensively rebutted. Most of the rebuttals are available on APA (http://www.ausairpower.net/) under the following items:
JSF Button: HeadsUp Newsletter - Issue 318 - HEADSUP SPECIAL - Is the JSF really good enough? analysing the ASPI paper
JSF Button: HeadsUp Newsletter - Issue 322 - HEADSUP SPECIAL - F/A-22As, JSFs and 21st Century air combat
F-111 Button: under F-111 Early Retirement Articles
The parliamentary submissions - worth reading - are accessible via the ‘The Parliamentary Debate [Page]‘ links.
Responding to GMB | January 1st, 2007 at 4:24 pm:
Rather than effecting bodily harm on those whose acts are indefensible, better to point out to their masters what is the root cause of what ails Defence, today.
There is much history and the actions of successive governments, ministers and senior officials/bureaucrats that have created the present day situation. We can’t change history but we can learn from it.
See - Analysis: Volume II - APA-2005-01 on http://www.ausairpower.net/apa-analyses.html
The difficult part is to get the politicians to acknowledge and accept what is the root cause. Once this is done, the rest is standard organisational management 101.
I agree with you that people should be angry about all of this but I also agree with APA-Carlo that bringing this to the attention of the politicians in the only currency they seem to understand (public opinion that translates into votes) is the way to go.
“After the lecture I heard a good number of the old timers discussing whether it qualified as treason.”
People often cannot bring themselves to believe in institutional dysfunction that is next to TOTAL in its nature.
We had the CIA renditioning people to be interrogated in Arab and outright enemy countries like Egypt and (believe it or not) Syria.
Did they then expect that the information gained could have been the least bit useful to them?
They had basically outsourced part of their intelligence to Arabia and seemed to believe every damn thing they were told.
The sheer Alice-In-Wonderland nature of this level of dysfunction is just too much for people and so they think there must be some justification for it.
Its like those farm programs during the depression where they were actually throwing food away and paying people not to grow stuff to bring food prices up when people were struggling and going hungry.
The utter madness of it sweeps everyone along with it. And it becomes a sort of new normalcy.
Obviously we have got to win this particular battle because a massively strong Australia is what it takes to have a lawful international environment in our region.
But we could win this one battle and if the bureaucracy is at this level of dysfunction they will always be a liability to us and the culture will be transmitted down through the decades.
I don’t see that there is any substitute for relentless sackings and the rehiring of people who know what they are doing and don’t have “sophisticated” extra-defense goals.
That is to say goals that are not to do with enhancing our war-making ability.
I think the longer we try and tell ourselves that its all about educating people alone and mass-sackings are avoidable the more hazardous this institutional dysfunction will become.
I mean we can try and educate pollies about strategic matters and thats all good. But surely we need sackings. We cannot do without sackings.
A public sector corporate culture gone bad doesn’t just fix itself.
I suggest you ought to fight this one with sackings and hirings as being part of the program right from the start.
I think you’ll regret it if you don’t.
Horde is right, GMB. The best thing you can do is be publicly supportive of what people like Carlo are trying to achieve. He’s not alone, by any means, but the more people he gets onside, the harder it will be for defence to argue that he’s bullshitting.
Responding to GMB | January 1st, 2007 at 7:15 pm
As can be seen from the writings of Drucker, Janis et al, the surgical version of what you are proposing is a part of ’standard organisational management 101′.
However, the bureaucrats and senior officials in Defence have made CYA into an art form using their highly refined deception techniques against each other, the government and the people of Australia.
Australia is where the US was in the mid 1980’s when the US Congress declared the Pentagon and the US DoD to be busted and implemented what is known as the Goldwater-Nichol Act. It took ‘em over 4 years because of the level of resistance put forward by the Pentagon at the time (valuable lesson to be learned here). However the reform has been so successful that the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been advocating that a Goldwater-Nichol type reform needs to be undertaken on all other agencies with a national security mandate (eg. Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA, etc).
The key to learning from mistakes is to firstly acknowledge and accept they have been made. There is nothin wrong with making mistakes. The culpability is in not learning from them. The senior officials and bureaucrats in Defence have become incapable of admitting to mistakes in a way that acknowledges and accepts what the root causes of those mistakes are.
Therefore, the focus needs to be on their political masters to acknowledge and accept what is the roots cause of the ailments that plague Defence, today.
In summary, overall I agree with you. That is how it is done in the private sector, though any reformist CEO knows this needs to be done smart and surgically. Afterall, everyone has value - it is a matter of finding a way to tap such value.
However, the first hurdle needs to be overcome - getting the politicians to acknowledge and accept they have a serious problem and what is the root cause of that problem.
Right.
I wondered why the Pentagon appeared to be somewhat functional whereas the State Department and Spooktown appeared to be about 170 degrees out and virtually working for the other side.
But surely firings were part of this reform?
I mean you go to the pilots and ask them which is the best fighter to fly.
And then you look at the ability to update. The reach and so forth.
If they cannot get that right though its their full-time job to do so we are looking at pretty severe organisational dysfunction.
And I would think that this is akin to the buildings being possessed by demons.
I mean its not something thats just going to go away without some severe upheavals.
And because of this we are either playing offense or defense. We want to keep these guys wrong-footed the whole time.
Still the Goldwater thing.
What can you say about that?
How did they get the job done?
I sure wish they’d go over Spooktown with the same methodology.
Those guys are just complete idiots.
Taking an economists point of view, Carlo has argued well in favour of more “expensive” weapons platforms, which in combat require less sorties and are cheaper in terms of being better force mutlipliers and require less waste on SEAD and on so on.
Bring on the more expensive, more cost effective and less risky F-22.
As for Super Hornets replacing our strike planes, why haven’t we equipped our strike planes, fighters, frigates and subs with cruise missiles? Surely the compatability and conversion costs would be cheap when you look at stuff mentioned above like force multipliers and cost effectiveness?
Hmmm. Don’t know the technical details of rigging up a fighter with cruise missiles.
You see the first item of business for the fighter is to claim the high ground. Which in this context means the skies.
So the first priority for a fighter is to be able to knock out other planes to the far side of Indonesia at least.
Other considerations are important. But we want to make sure we can at least do that.
What sort of missiles do our ships and subs carry?
“You see the first item of business for the fighter is to claim the high ground. Which in this context means the skies.
So the first priority for a fighter is to be able to knock out other planes to the far side of Indonesia at least.”
In other words we should get F-22s.
Precisely.
They are less maneovreable then the enemy plane but they have stealth.
So if we have enough of them and a surplus of engineers and other maintenance staff so as to be able to keep the maximum number of them in the air, we stand a chance against this Russian critter because we may be able to sneak up on it.
Heretofore we just haven’t seen this principle in action because the Americans were so far ahead in aviation.
But if we lose the high ground then we can expect the body counts to go up to World War I levels even without WMD being used on cities.
Here is the enemy plane. And by the way it would be a good thing to have some of these as well. For daytime fighting and for exercises to make sure we can beat it and beat it easily.
I just cannot impress upon you how vulnerable we are if we lose air superiority. We do not have the sort of forests for guerilla warfare.
We have one of the most highly urbanised populations on the planet.
We would be sitting ducks.
Take a look at the enemy vehicle:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2002313961490667235
This is the baby we have to beat with a high margin of security to hold our head up high amongst the neighbourhood tuffs.
This bad boy in daylight, if the pilot can see our hornet and we have equivalently good pilots…. Well we would have to assume he can knock our guy out of the air nine times in ten. Because this is the most maneouvreable plane there is.
See how he shows off and puts his ass up to a batplane like dead stop in the air.
If we cannot beat this fellow we can’t be judged a reliable ally and someone not to push beyond our natural genourosity.
We want our good friends to the North to stay good friends and to all face Northward in their security thinking and realise it is futile to do other.
Carlo talks about getting a fleet of 50 and this being cheaper then the current fiasco for various reasons.
But if thats still a hard ask we can get 1 a month every month we can stooge a discount and then one a quarter every time we can get a discount indefinitely.
Because Healy reckons we’ve wasted away our maintenance support. And we can build that up ahead of the aquisition of planes.
On account of the superiority in the region itself building up slowly and we can keep ahead of it in this incremental way.
You see your average Joe is used to the Americans coming in and owning the skies immediately and simply having to worry about knocking out anti-aircraft batteries.
We don’t even have anti-aircraft batteries to speak of and so we absolutely must own both the skies and the submarine territory to the edge of a massive buffer around the Continent.
Of course you cannot leave a hole in any part of your capabilities.
But these are two poles in the tent without which the rest will be largely useless.
>>>>>>>
REVENGE ATTACKS AGAINST SUPERIOR POWERS.
Now from the sea its foolhardy to go up against land-based anti-aircraft in a rumble of attrition.
But for a high-risk retaliation deep into regime-leadership territory stealth is absoultely essential.
You see without these stealth fighters there is any number of depredations that any major power but our near neighbours can subject us to.
And we have no comeback at all.
The ability to make some sort of humiliating revenge attack right to their capital…. even if it wouldn’t win a war outright… would certainly make a bunch of folks think twice about trying anything on us in the first place.
Such retaliation would be dangerous under any circumstances stealth or no.
But it can only even be contemplated with Stealth.
We need this plane and bad.
Even if we at first buy only half a dozen to get the whole thing started.
We need it so very very bad.
But if we are stuck for cash we can buy it incrementally and let it lag our capacity to keep the maximum amount of pilots in the air at all times.
We can scare off far superior powers with that level of readiness. Since most outfits bluff a bit and stay away from that level of readiness.
Horde, I disagree with your blaming of Defence Department staff over this, and especially with your citing of private sector practices as exemplars. Many corporations are dysfuctional and fail, often with huge payouts to greedy fools. They are hardly examples of best practice.
The problem our defence capabilities face go right to the top, where people believe so strongly in cutting costs that they will brook no questioning.
For serving officers or bureaucrats, under the Howard government, there is simply no useful outcome from questioning the established decisions. I think that is the heart of this problem. I gather you, and perhaps Carlo, disagree.
I think it would have been different under a Labor government. Certainly it would under Beazley. It’s perhaps a paradox for Howard government supporters to deal with; that their hero has screwed our defence.
I think some of the defence brass are pretty useless, Tony. The rank and file know what they’re supposed to do, and also - as is only reasonable - which side their bread is buttered on.
Although agree the Beazer knew his way round the defence portfolio.
The larger Sukhois are faster, much more agile, and have greater range and firepower than the Super Hornet.
Indeed, and they’re considerably cheaper to boot. So why the hell aren’t we buying Sukhois?
Would you purchase your most critical weapons system from a nation which is supplying much larger numbers of the same product to your potential opponents?
In any regional crisis, there would be a genuine risk that Russia would be forced to make a commercial decision and favour the larger client in the supply of spare parts and materiel, and Australia would be one of the smaller Asia-Pacific buyers of the Sukhoi. Accepting such an implicit conflict of interest is not a sound strategy.
Other more pragmatic problems also arise. Operating the same system as an opponent means that you can compete only in pilot skills and numbers, with numbers being more important in long range missile combat. Australia is not in the position to compete in numbers long term against any regional nation. Another problem is compatibility with US datalinks, electronic warfare equipment, and weapons, required for coalition operations. Integrating such equipment with the systems and software in the Sukhois would present genuine difficulties as neither the US or Russia would be happy for each others’ defence contractors to gain intimate access to such key technologies.
If you ask me we want both derida.
But this brings up a whole new topic: Can we be negotiating with all parties and guarantee their military secrets?
Military secrets tend to be fleeting things. This cannot be the case with us. But can we buy off the Russians and guarantee that we won’t reverse engineer the thing and be selling it ourselves. Or pass the secrets of it onto the Americans?
You see really we want to have the ability to buy off everyone so that our negotiating position is good and we can get a better price.
Earlier I talked about having an oversupply of engineers and maintenance staff.
So much so that you might be employing these guys on super-premium wages for (lets say) just 1 12 hour shift every 8 days.
Because in war-time you have to be able to draft them into working four 12-hour shifts per week indefinitely because you have to keep the maximum number of planes in the air.
And for the killer-punch you might have to get them doing double that.
And also you want to have this maintenance team building ahead of the purchase of the equipment because relatively speaking the planes are the most expensive thing.
But a few more can be bought quickly in situation of building tension (to stave off war), or after an international humiliation (to maintain the liberty of our citizens and/or our strategic position).
But having said that we end up with a massive disparate team of individuals who would be in the position to let down our suppliers and give away secrets to businesses and countries in such a way that our suppliers would not have made the original sale had they known we would dishonour our agreements in this way.
Countries ought to be very discriminating in terms of the committments they make. Because each one can be used to hem that country (the decision-making politicians of the day in that country…. which amounts to the same thing) in by people both within that country and by foreigners.
It would be a good thing if we tried to thin out the number of international agreements that we are a party to.
But having said that having steel and honour behind your committments can have real defense cache.
And its hard to imagine where this could be more true for a middle power then if we could guarantee to our suppliers that their defense secrets were safe with us.
Therefore this team of engineers and maintenance people have to be paid a super-premium wage for that (in the hypothetical example I’ve made up) one twelve hour shift every 8 days that we are requiring of them.
Because along with us being able to call them up for full-time duty at a moments (and I mean a moments) notice they are also signing up for various limits to their freedom. And various limits also to their privacy.
And in the first place we need to find a way to screen them for loyalty to this country and their ability to keep their oaths no matter what temptations are dangled in front of them…
I would want a bunch of these Russian planes and the surplus team of people to keep them in the air.
I would want that we had an open-ended agreement that we could buy 1 every time the discount was steep enough.
Same as for the Stealths.
We’ve got to start drawing up a sort of marginal utility for each new purchase so that we can play one item of defense spending off against another and one supplier off against another.
We need to war-game our pilots against eachother so effectively that we can deduce a sort of dogfighting DOCTRINE.
It might be that to be able to meet a Russian fighter of a foreign country with the assurance that we will get all our pilots and planes home and …. sometimes….. just as a bonus… Get to keep the other pilot alive and steal their plane (but here sadly I get a bit fanciful)
We might have to develop the doctrine that we need to match that one Russian fighter with 2 of our Russian fighters and 3 Stealths.
As well as 3 refueling vehicles, and mobile maintenance facilities (mobile maintenance facilities that are always moving might be even better), along with a surplus of staff hours, and carefully concealed fuel dumps all over the place.
It ought not be one or the other. We ought to have both planes.
But the priority is for the Stealth and for our American suppliers if we have to choose between one or the other.
Thats for many reasons.
But one important one you can read about above in post 43. Under the heading:
REVENGE ATTACKS AGAINST SUPERIOR POWERS.
“Would you purchase your most critical weapons system from a nation which is supplying much larger numbers of the same product to your potential opponents?”
If we are choosing between the two I’d say no.
But if we can buy both I’d say AND HOW.
But derida. While the Russian plane might be as good or better in one-on-one daytime dogfighting……….
We’ve got used to skeptic giving a terrific phrase or two to really make these esoteric defense issues concrete and to spark our thinking off.
And I think she gave us one of Carlos when she was talking about “THE FUCK OFF FACTOR”
I’m trying to flesh that most useful of concepts out for everyone by talking about dogfighting superiority to the far side of Indonesia and a submarine net so effective that no Chinese or Russian sub can poke its head up just off the coast of Canberra to make our post-modern pollies weak at the knees.
Its all about the fuck-off-factor as our bread and butter though man does not live by bread alone.
And here we see that while we have to be superior in terms of dogfighting to the far side of Indonesia thats not the only thing we require of our planes.
Our public will not put up with us getting our own guys killed nor many of the civilians of the other side.
And we don’t deter wars by murdering civilians in any case. We deter wars by having the capacity to murder regime leadership and destroy expensive items of their military investments.
And it must be remembered that we are NOT a nuclear power so we had better have some other ability to make up for this rather glaring lack of capacity.
Stealth is it.
STEALTH IS IT!
The ability to reach across and humiliate and even kill some regime leadership…..backed up by a clear fuck-off-factor superiority on our own turf……
…. can be the only way to get some particularly hard-of-hearing regimes to listen when we are talking and to empathise with our point of view.
Stealth is absolutely essential.
I’ll borrow off others and give two phrases for this concept in order to keep up a tradition that Good Queen Skeptic has started.
I’ll call it :
THE KICK DOWN THE DOOR FACTOR….
or alternatively we might know this concept as:
THE HORSES HEAD IN THE BED FACTOR.
GMB is right. Between you, me and gate post, one of the powerful capabilities of the F-111 is that it can reach Jakarta and the political infrastructure of Indonesia. Politicians understand these things.
Re buying equipment from the wrong people, the classic example in Australia was our Carl Gustav infantry anti-tank weapon, which we bought from Sweden. Sweden didn’t agree with us fighting in Vietnam, so wouldn’t sell us any more ammunition.
Damn and I used to like those people….
Must have been the sheilas.
More cute then sexy when it comes down to it.
Thats about all the criticism I can muster for the sheilas.
But where were the blokes?
Tony we must not rule out institutional dysfunction on the basis that we have a theory that a military savant like Kim would overcome it!
I’m not a natural labour man but I like Kim bigtime and I very much liked that other huge bloke who was a labour defense minister also.
But we want the bureaucracy so good that they can turn the politician of the day around with clarity and reason.
I think we need to explore a totally different relationship between the elected reps and the tax-eater lifers.
And we may have to break up the department lifers some way and get them competing against eachother.
Bipartisan committees don’t seem to work. (There…. I’ve said it).
But the fact of Carlo here (and perhaps yourself but I don’t know where you work)
plugging a different line from the official department guys bears witness to the usefullness of this approach.
We need competing boffinry so that we have effective laity-review.
We can’t have the reps saying to themselves…. shucks… they are the experts…. thats what we pay them for….
Much better with the essential areas like defense or intelligence that you set up competing factions that have to explain their case to the elected reps.
Because the thing is these guys are prone to get self-important and tribal.
I appreciate what you say about Kim.
But I’ll put in a plug for John.
When we went into that war we couldn’t hit what we aimed at.
But John rigged it that our planes got decked out with the J-dam (stop me if I’m wrong)….
Between now and whenever all these Russian fighters come onstream that gives our rather ageing and in some ways pitiful airforce this immense power.
Such that we could paralyse half a dozen countries to the North of us and do so in the context of low casualties.
Suddenly there is not the anti-Australian Mahartia-talk coming from out of the region.
Suddenly everyone is our good friend and I will labour hard to convince people that I’m not being the least bit sarcastic or nasty here.
We ought to be strong. A strong friend is a good friend in this context.
As to what you are saying about Indonesia thats true but I would want to go further.
I would want us to be SO VASTLY SUPERIOR to Indonesia that we TRANSCEND her rather then compete with her.
Or if there is competition we maintain such superiority that it stays friendly on our side of things.
So she always knows that the better angels of her nature must tell her that a rumble with us is futile. And that she better see that she’s taking care of business to her North.
Responding to Tony Healy | January 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm
“Horde, I disagree with your blaming of Defence Department staff over this, and especially with your citing of private sector practices as exemplars. Many corporations are dysfuctional and fail, often with huge payouts to greedy fools. They are hardly examples of best practice.”
Tony, you have put your finger on the very pulse of the problem. I am not ‘blaming’ Defence Department staff though I am sure that is what many of their chiefs are thinking because of the rather toxic environment they have helped create. It is this ‘culture of blame’, one of the recognised drivers of ‘group think’, that is at the root of the ailments and problems in Defence.
It should not be a matter of who is right but what is right.
What I and my colleagues and now many, many more Australians are saying is that what senior officials in Defence are recommending to Government will not result in the best solution in terms of capability, cost or risk. The current plans being recommended by these senior officials will result in the exact opposite. For the first time since WWII, Australia will not have ‘air superiority’ in the region and this will have been achieved by these senior officials at a much higher premium on cost (with the Super Hornet option, these plans are now over $7,000 million dollars more expensive than the alternative option, in FY’06 money) and much higher risk (the JSF is still very much developmental with huge programmatic risks, as is the Hornet Upgrade - HUG - Program) than the alternative solution. In relation to the HUG, you might like to take a look at the first section of the APA Submission 20 to the JSCFADT inquiry which can be found at -
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/jfadt/adfair/subs.htm
It is the risks in this program coupled with the potential delays to the JSF Program that have prompted the Minister’s Office to pursue the Super Hornet Option.
The alternative solution is a force structure based on the F-22 and Evolved F-111. This option is all about having a capability that enables the achievement of ‘air dominance’ - the next level up from ‘air superiority’ in the air power hierarchy.
I don’t recall putting the private sector up as the panacea. You are quite right when you say -
“Many corporations are dysfuctional and fail, often with huge payouts to greedy fools”.
But the practices espoused by Drucker, Janis et al are not just applicable to the private sector, only. Many of the case studies cited in their works are from the public sector. The practices they recommend are exemplars of world best practices in management, particularly organisation management. Shouldn’t these be applied to the Department of Defence?
“The problem our defence capabilities face go right to the top, where people believe so strongly in cutting costs that they will brook no questioning.”
Agreed but politicians are, by definition, the epitome of ‘people who don’t know what they don’t know’. Their roles in the governance structure of government is the directing role (the Government and its Ministers) and the oversight role (the Parliament and its oversight committees). Again, by definition, they rely upon the advice of experts in the various departments of government to enable them to do their jobs.
“For serving officers or bureaucrats, under the Howard government, there is simply no useful outcome from questioning the established decisions. I think that is the heart of this problem. I gather you, and perhaps Carlo, disagree.”
This is where the system of government has broken down.
“I think it would have been different under a Labor government. Certainly it would under Beazley. It’s perhaps a paradox for Howard government supporters to deal with; that their hero has screwed our defence.”
Having observed how all sides of politics, particularly the two majors, have responded to the challenges in Defence, there is an extremely low probability that this would be the case.
Politicians have every right to expect that the advice they receive from Government Departments is expert advice that is in the national interest.
However, politicians, in turn, have a duty of care to ensure, firstly, that this advice is, in fact, coming from experts with the right competencies, skills and expertise to provide such advice and, secondly, that these experts are appropriately resourced to do their jobs and, finally, these experts are doing so in an environment that is conducive to the provision of frank and fearless expert advice.
This is how Government is supposed to work.
The relative paucity of the latter (the politicians duty of care) and the resulting dysfunction within the Department of Defence (aka ‘institutionalised group think’) is how the current air combat capability plans for the RAAF have come about.
Horde
Errata: Previous Post
In previous post, Horde said -
“The alternative solution is a force structure based on the F-22 and Evolved F-111. This option is all about having a capability that enables the achievement of ‘air dominance’ - the next level up from ‘air superiority’ in the air power hierarchy. ”
This should read -
“The alternative solution is a force structure based on the F-22 and Evolved F-111. This option is all about having a capability that enables the achievement of ‘air dominance’ - the next level up from ‘air supremacy’ which, in turn, is one level up from ‘air superiority’ in the air power hierarchy. “
Why is it that the American concept of “total theatre dominance” seems to have been utterly rejected by our Defence Dpeartment?
Yes it is costly up front but it also serves the functions of deterrence and costs effectiveness as it is cheaper per mission to use such technology and this doctrine in warfare of any intensity.
Think of the mental environment as being parallel to what we find in Deltoid and other alarmist-fraudster climate science and DDT-holocaust denial sites.
You know realclimate.org. Dopey leftist sites like this.
Imagine that a government department has gone wrong in parallel type of way.
In these sites we have plenty of bully-boys with specialist skills but they always consistently come up with the answer that backs up the tribal policy decision.
If we followed defense types round with hidden tape-recorders we’d likely find the same snideness. The same ad homenim slightly buried. A similiar series of low-profile-Lamberting type techniques.
Horde and Healy seem to think that a little bit of strategic education is going to help. A few more PHD’s in the house perhaps (”Is there any Doctors in the house?”).
But would that help Deltoid not be dominated by idiots?
Being able to fire deltoid people and severe them from the public tit and ruthlessly applying that power would make them start being reasonable quick smart.
I don’t see any substitute and here is where I’m beginning to diverge strongly from our experts point of view.
If anyone in that place is not focused on trying to massively improve our war-making capacity….. If I could SMELL any hidden agendas or lack of crusading spirit in this regard I would fire him and a circle of people round him.
Its not collateral damage since no-one has the right to a public tit job in the first place.
Which is why a libertarian party is so critical to putting things to rights. This is the way we think and this is what is needed.
I’d try and hire some of our old pilots to work part-time sitting in on committees. Ideas like that anyway even if that one turns out to be impractical.
Think of Deltoid. And then try and think what education is going to do. It isn’t going to do shit.
This is serious.
Sometimes you’ve just got to hardline it.
Thanks Horde. That’s good stuff.
Mark Hill, that is indeed the question - why aren’t our defence plans seeking theatre dominance?
For me, the answer is that the current government attaches too much weight to trimming budgets, and is too ready to disregard the consequences. They decided the JSF would be good enough and then deterred any questioning of this.
The crucial question is how come no other air force is using the JSF on its own? Every one else is using it under the protection of other, better fighters.
Responding to Tony Healy | January 4th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
This is why this whole thing is so bizzare.
Before the Super Hornet option was announced, the plans recommended by Defence had then spending over $4,500 million dollars more to effect these plans rather than adopt the alternative solution aka “The Evolved F-111 Option” which includes 50 + 5 Raptors.
Now they are barrelling down the highway to spend over $7,000 million dollars more than is required.
How is this good economic management or financial governance or even common sense?
More to the point, they are not even prepared to debate the issues or argue their case in a mature or professional way.
As to what needs to be done or, moreover, what has to be done, I am curious to know whether any of you folks would be prepared raise this issue to their local members of Parliament or anyone else who will listen. In other words, work to turn around the apathy of our society on which the bureaucrats (and some of the politicians) rely to enable them to push their personal agendas as opposed to what they need to do for the national interest.
24 Super Hornets @ 2.5 billion AUD?
Super hornets are therefore priced @ 104 million AUD.
The cost for an F-22 would be about 124 million AUD for a single unit, assuming high unit costs and a stable exchange rate (92 million USD, eR = 0.74 USD).
This is nuts.
If we were to replace all the F-111s and F/A-18s, the F-22 option would be about 15% more expensive than the Super Hornet option.
In terms of cost effectiveness, purchasing the Super Hornet is truly nuts. We might even be lucky to reduce the number of multi role fighters and strike planes under the F-22 option and spend even less. Lets say, five squadrons of sixteen planes and better training before and shorter conversion training.
Right.
And from memory I think Carlo is saying that the F111’s can be kept and updated on the cheap.
So this is not an issue of demanding more money.
>>>>>>>>>>
Because if you’ve first set up a situation of air dominance and you have the horses-head-in-the-bed and the kick-down-the-door POWER that stealth gives you……
…… then that can be followed up by more standard pin-point hitting of military and regime-leadership targets from your older planes.
We want to think about our good friends at MacDonald Douglas.
How hard is it for them to be going in and out of the F22 production business?
Surely if we have a memorandum of understanding that we will likely buy another unit of this platform if each unit is less costly in real terms…..
Surely if we get with the Pentagon… and if the Pentagon were to also suggest that if each unit is cheaper they will likely buy 2 every quarter-year for a long time…. And we buy 1 every quarter for a very long time……
Then our friends at MacDonald Douglas can make the investments that will cut their costs, bargain with their own suppliers, never use overtime and so forth in order to bring the costs down.
You are always keeping your maintenance team buildup ahead of that.
And also you get your airborne refuelers, desert landing strips with hidden fuel dumps, and all this type of thing happening….
You have to have these fuel-filled converted Jumbo air-refuelers in the air the whole time also. Just out of the danger-zone.
With a view to being able to keep a massive percentage of these planes in the air indefinitely.
Its these tangential things that give you the force-multipication and the ability to respond to some sort of put-upon at a moments notice.
In an extended scrap with a superior power you might wind up that you are fighting thousands of miles from home with this arrangement and be slowly driven back.
But as you are driven back your out and back time is growing less and less.
The purchase and the conversion of these refueling Jumbos could also be arranged on this drip-feed basis. Its like an Ebay approach to buying this gear. Because you’ll be willing to take another unit if the price is good enough.
Its like an application of both negotiations theory and marginal utility theory.
And we would want to arrange a similiar deal with the suppliers of whatever missiles these things shoot and bombs they drop.
Just convince them that we will keep buying at a trickle so long as they slowly keep getting cheaper.
That way they have their work cut out for them and we get it together to be able to out-last all comers with a sustained air campaign.
But the thing is nothing can be acheived unless our Bureaucracy is the most functional outfit of its kind around.
If the place is full of hard-of-hearing smug dumb-left-wingers then nothing that they do can ever be right.
Left-wingers digest food above the neck and walk with their buttocks at the front.
They can never be relied on to make commonsense decisions and will act yet more dysfunctionally in an emergency.