Hanwha Redback and Reinmetall Lynx (Sgt. Jake Sims for Australian Defense Ministry)
SYDNEY — Australia, in the midst of what could be a hallmark strategic review, has officially delayed any decision on the country’s largest defense program until the review is complete early next year, raising serious questions about whether the program will be reduced in size.
At the same time, the top civilian at the Department of Defence, Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty, made a rare public address Tuesday, saying his department had combed through lessons from the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine and warned of “hard choices” ahead.
“We do have limited resources — and there will be hard choices to be made about priorities. Defense is committed to communicating with industry early to give certainty for business,” he told a conference at Parliament House in Canberra put on by the Australian Industry & Defence Network (AIDN), according to Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter. “We know that working with industry is the best way to meet the requirements of the ADF and to build the capabilities that we will need for the future.”
He reportedly pointed to command and control systems, precision strike capabilities and the need for robust logistics systems as key lessons learned from Ukraine.
His comments made clear the stark strategic background against which the review is being conducted: “Australia needs to be able to preserve our freedom of action and to discourage and deter those seeking to disrupt the international rules-based order — especially through force, or the threat of force. We see the need for capabilities to deter conflict — and in a worst case scenario, defend against aggression. The war against Ukraine has highlighted this, in stark terms.”
The department, he told the gathering, “has already started thinking about how to implement the DSR [Defense Strategic Review] recommendations.” This will probably require a “comprehensive refresh” of what’s called the Integrated Investment Program, a broad swath of new capabilities and sustainment funding in the budget.
“Some of these [priorities] will need to be accelerated — some other capabilities might be re-profiled, de-scoped, or cancelled,” he said.
The review is expected to be completed in February by the department. Recommendations, Moriarity told the event, will then be made to the Labor Government, who will make those choices and is expected to release the results in March.
Among those programs that could see changes is the Infantry Fighting Vehicle program, Australia’s largest. The current plan, strongly supported by the new Army chief, is to buy 450 IFVs from either South Korea’s Hanwha or Germany’s Rheinmetall. But reports have been circulating for months that the number is now likely to be closer to 300.
The decision to delay the decision on the IFV until the SDR is released was made Nov. 25 by the minister for defense procurement, Pat Conroy. He was the one to decide because Defense Minister Richard Marles recused himself from all decisions on the IFV, as Hanwha has a large plant in this home district of Geelong, where the Redback would be built should Hanwha win. The winner of the contract, expected to be worth at least $18 billion AUD ($11.5 billion US), was supposed to be chosen in September, so the delay will be at least six months.
One of the top defense procurement experts here, Marcus Hellyer of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), said even those like himself who want to see “a lighter, more deployable army,” agree they need armor. But how much armor the island nation should have and how heavy it should be are key questions he expects the SDR to consider.
“I don’t know how the force structure the army is now building can be moved to the fight and, more importantly, get it home,” he said. There are signs the Royal Australian Army may not get as much armor as it wants. Greg Sheridan, the well-connected foreign editor of The Australian, penned a mid-October op-ed sharply critiquing the army’s plan to buy 72 Abrams tanks and the fighting vehicles.
“This is an insane program. We have not deployed a tank outside of Australia or anywhere near combat in more than 50 years,” he wrote. “We are planning to acquire 450 of the heaviest combat vehicles in the world. We cannot transport them effectively inside Australia as it is. We are acquiring infantry vehicles twice as heavy as those of the South Koreans. Our ships can carry only tiny quantities of them.”
In an interview with Sheridan on Nov. 4, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia would instead focus on missiles, missile defense capabilities and drones, including armed drones. He appeared to ridicule the basic tenet of the army’s argument that armor will be needed to defend the Australia landmass, known generically as the northern strategy since the assumption was that no one could possibly move many forces to attack the island continent’s soft underbelly.
“Are we going to be involved in a land war in central Queensland? Is that likely? Well, no,” Albanese told Sheridan.
Will the SDR make big decisions and refocus Australia’s strategy on long-range fires, transport, drones and C2?
“It ultimately comes down to the ultimate question that we’re not really good at answering in this country — what are we really trying do with our military?” Hellyer said. Breaking the iron budget triangle, where each service gets almost exactly as much as the others, will be bureaucratically and politically perilous.
In his talk, Moriarity said that the government is already focused on building resilient supply chains, along with acquiring stockpiles of high-end consumables, including weapons. Resources — in other words money — will need to be found for this. Every existing program already has a sizeable constituency ready to defend it and a long-established precedent that no single service gets much more than the others. That would seem to either mean personnel costs need to be cut to buy new weapons — the traditional American approach to tight budgets — or larger programs without a constituency so far, like the IFV.
