Greg Sheridan of The Australian is all upset (subscription) about the current government's broken promises with the faulty and ridiculous 2009 Defence White Paper.
He is of the belief that it was good to follow such a nonsense of a document. He believes that the Air Warfare Destroyer can "control an area of the sea", even if this was tried some years ago without an air umbrella with disastrous results.
Battleship admirals (armchair or otherwise) live.
The current government hasn't done anything about those 12 subs for the rent-seeking class. How terrible.
Somehow it is the responsibility of the taxpayer to provide a corrupt and broken military procurement system hundreds of billions of dollars over 20 years for gold-plated weapons systems that will be killed off by emerging threats. Note: One should always separate high-end battle capability with every other kind of war mission so as not to buy into the non-sense of always having high-end capability or nothing. The entrenched Defence bureaucracy has no grasp of this concept.
Although I am sure Greg doesn't believe it, his view will give Australia nothing.
We cannot afford to man Air Warfare Destroyers, Canberra-class amphibious ships and 12 large-crew submarines. And, those systems aren't especially useful.
Today, there is no budget surplus.
While the current governments Defence plan may resemble President Clinton's family bible (It only has 5 commandments and all those start with the word "perhaps"), the current Defence leadership--while faulty--beats anything in the last several years.
The entrenched Defence bureaucracy needs a budget haircut and a dose of reality.
Crying over broken promises of a faulty Defence White Paper, doesn't bring any value to the discussion of Australian Defence capability.
1 comment:
The only way the Royal Navy will be able to "afford" and operate planes off of the QE carriers in 5 years will be if they purchase Block ii/Block iii Super Hornets or Rafales.
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