Car companies go--welfare for Defence continues

You wouldn't know it from reading this blog, but I am the team-player guy. It just so happens though that there are a lot of bad Defence ideas over the years.

Today, we explore another bad idea. Distorting facts to support a theory. That is our Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy.

The Australian Government has approved the acquisition of 8 Boeing P-8A maritime surveillance aircraft.

You can read the press release here (H/T to a reader Johnno).

This goes along with an effort to get the Triton (BAMS) large UAV as the rest of the team.

Here are some of the problems.

The number one "threat" to Australia is not having proper control over its surrounding waters. The current government has only started to get control of the illegal boat people problem.

Without the assistance of a P-8A or Triton UAVs.

The other part of the maritime "need" for Australia is to positively identify everything in its area of interest.

Canada had an interesting solution for this. They took King-Air sized aircraft setup for this mission. They would photograph a ship of interest. Photos would be net-centrically passed back to a command post which would verify the boats authorization to be in specified waters.

Australia just gave away C-130H aircraft that could have been modified to do maritime surveillance.

The P-3 aircraft can be made to do this duty for a very long time. It also has significant growth-room for a variety of modern sensor technology.

Both the C-130H and P-3 can carry stand-off anti-ship weapons large and small.

The C-130J as the SC-130J "Sea Herc" brings that and anti-submarine warfare. In time, this could be a potential transition from the P-3.

For Australia, the spend on the 8 P-8A aircraft will be $4B.

A small handful of Triton UAVs will be around $3B.

Neither of these aircraft are ready for prime time. The P-8A has significant issues in weight-growth vs. range. Various systems are a long way from being proven. Including ...software issues.

Australia was here before with the Boeing  Wedgetail. It is a radar surveillance aircraft based on a 737 airframe. Early on, many development risks were ignored. Later, these ignored items stopped being risks. They became show-stopping problems causing years of delay, money penalties to Boeing and an unknown kind of 90 percent capability to the original specification.

Cost per flying hour for this P-8A 737 airframe? Who knows? The Wedgetail 737 is around $57,000 per flight hour.

ADF cost per flying hour for the P-3 is $13,000. The C-130J in common cargo aircraft form is about $11,000 per flight hour.

And, more on ASW. If Australia was serious about having more knowledge about threat submarines, it would have invested in SOSUS. This combined with aircraft, ships and subs helps to give a good capability.

The government is far from having figured all of this out. Trying to "replace" a proven ASW airframe like the P-3 will be an interesting trick.

What is left is rent-seeking.

Australian military analysts that don't depend on government handouts know the long track record of Defence incompetence when it comes to procuring weapons systems.

With no hard systems maturity, the P-8A is at high risk of not giving us what we need.

And when it arrives, whatever it does, every flight hour will be too expensive for what is delivered.

Recently the government showed that it had enough of paying corporate welfare to car companies. They are now in the process of going away.

Yet, corporate welfare for Defence interests continues.

Hardly a consistent message.