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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. “

“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

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.

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.