Australia’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, said on Anzac Day: “The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war and be strong as a country, not to cower, not to be on bended knee and be weak.”
But how does this rhetoric about preparing for war match reality? We take a look at five significant defence projects that are either well behind schedule or have had major problems.
Submarines all at sea
This is the most high-profile defence acquisition debacle. In the process, two close partners of Australia – Japan and France – have been burnt.
Tony Abbott formed a close working relationship with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and was known to be keen on Japan building Australia’s future submarine fleet. In February 2015, however, the then prime minister fought off a leadership spill motion in part by promising a “competitive evaluation process” to shore up support from South Australian colleagues worried about shipbuilding jobs in that state.
Abbott’s defence minister, Kevin Andrews, said in 2015 it would be an investment “in the order of $50bn” and the next submarine “must be delivered in time to avoid a capability gap in the mid-2020s when the Collins Class submarine is scheduled to be retired from service”.
In 2016, Abbott’s successor Malcolm Turnbull announced France’s DCNS – now named Naval Group – had been selected instead of Japan or Germany “as our preferred international partner for the design of the 12 Future Submarines, subject to further discussions on commercial matters”. It took years to finalise the overarching strategic agreement, and the auditor general found the Australian government had “increased the risk of this acquisition” by going for a tailored solution rather than buying submarines “off the shelf”.
Fast forward to September 2021, when Scott Morrison pulled the pin on the $89bn French conventional submarines project in favour of the Aukus deal, under which Australia now seeks at least eight nuclear-propelled submarines at unspecified cost.
As it stands there is no contract – the details are subject to a joint study that runs until early next year. Morrison initially said the first of the new submarines should be in the water by 2040 but Dutton has since implied the mid-2030s might be possible.
This has all raised concerns about a capability gap before the new submarines are ready. The government is already planning to extend the life of the six Collins class submarines by 10 years, with extensive refitting set to cost between $3.5bn and $6bn. Labor supports Aukus but says it would consider interim options such as fitting Tomahawk missiles to the existing Collins class submarines.
Frigates up ship creek
The government is facing growing scrutiny about its $45bn future frigates program.
The Coalition wants nine Hunter class frigates, optimised for anti-submarine warfare, to replace the current Anzac class frigates. They are meant to provide the Royal Australian Navy with “the critical capability required to defend Australia well into the future”.
But the project is still in the early design stage and there are concerns about risks linked to the increased weight of the Hunter class frigate. A major projects report notes the plans have “experienced schedule variance due to delays in the United Kingdom’s Type 26 program, which is the Reference Ship Design for the Hunter Class frigate”.
In February, the Australian newspaper reported the Hunter class frigates could be “substantially” slower than comparable RAN surface combatants, have a shorter range than originally intended, and be vulnerable to detection by enemy vessels, based on a Defence engineering team assessment.
Dutton said his department had assured him it could mitigate the risks. “Yes, concerns are raised, but they are being addressed,” he told Sky News.
The defence minister said the government decided last year “we would push back the start of this [first] ship by about 18 months and the reason we did that was because of the lack of maturity around the design”.
Officials say the first ship is expected to be delivered in 2031 and the final one in 2044. Ships are usually operational one to two years after delivery.
Surveillance plans up in the air
A much-trumpeted $1.1bn upgrade to the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (Jorn) is running “several years” behind schedule. That is despite the announcement by the Morrison government in 2020 that it was expanding the Jorn site at Longreach in Queensland “to provide wide area surveillance of Australia’s eastern approaches and enhance Australia’s strategic situational awareness”.
Jorn supports the Australian defence force’s air and maritime operations while also providing “strategic surveillance”. The upgrade includes plans to modernise the command and control system at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh in South Australia and three radar sites at Longreach, Laverton in Western Australia and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
According to the latest major projects report published by the Australian National Audit Office, the upgrade project has “experienced persistent lag” in delivering the systems engineering program, mainly due to underestimating how complex it would be. Those delays are “considered unrecoverable”.
The upgrade was meant to be completed by January 2029 but the dates of all of the key milestones are now listed as “to be advised”. “The delays are anticipated to be several years,” the report said.
Armed drones on the backburner
This is a near-term capability that Australia won’t have for budget reasons. Officials revealed in a Senate committee hearing earlier this month the government had quietly scrapped the $1.3bn armed drones program to partly offset the cost of a cybersecurity package dubbed Redspice.
Under the now-cancelled SkyGuardian program, which the Department of Defence said provided “an excellent capability system”, Australia planned to acquire up to 12 armed drones. The then defence minister Linda Reynolds hailed the merits of the project in 2019: “Cutting-edge technology of this kind, with advanced sensors and systems, would complement advanced aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and ensure that Australian defence force maintains state-of-the-art capability.”
Vice Admiral David Johnston, the vice chief of the ADF, confirmed the axing of the project means “we do not have drones that are armed”, although he argued that type of capability “can be mostly replicated through other means”. The executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, condemned the “mind-bogglingly stupid” decision because it was “a rare Defence project that was going to deliver new combat capability in just a few years”.
Labor has will consider reinstating the program if elected. The shadow defence minister, Brendan O’Connor, told Guardian Australia he was concerned about a “very significant capability gap in the immediate future” and noted Ukraine was seeking armed drones.
Helicopters facing the chop
The acquisition of MRH90 Taipan helicopters can be put in the “long-troubled” box.
Australia bought 47 Taipans as a replacement for the Black Hawk and Sea King helicopter fleets, but the multibillion-dollar Howard government-era acquisition has been listed as a “project of concern” since 2011. The helicopters are used by the army – including to provide support to special operations – while the navy also relies on them for maritime support.
The entire fleet was grounded in 2019 amid serious concerns about the tail rotor blades and 27 aircraft were grounded in 2020 to fix cabin sliding door rails. In October 2020, Defence officials conceded the door was not wide enough to enable the safe exit of personnel from the helicopter while it was firing.
The Australian government has now formally requested advice from the US on the acquisition of up to 40 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters for the Australian army “as an alternative platform to the MRH90 Taipan”. Essentially this signals the likely withdrawal from service of the Taipan helicopters well before the original 2037 date.
In announcing the change of course in December, Dutton said the Taipans had been found to be “unreliable” and he hoped the new ones would be in service “over the next couple of years”. The new helicopters would not be built or designed in Australia, he said, because it was important to “achieve capability sooner than later”.
The defence department has previously estimated the total cost of the MRH90 Taipan program would be $15bn by the time the helicopters were due to be withdrawn from service in 2037, including $3.7bn for the purchase and $11.3bn to sustain them.
In a way, the helicopter plans have come full circle, now the government is pursuing Black Hawks again. The Australian National Audit Office previously found “significant implications” from the Howard government’s decision in 2004 to approve the acquisition of the MRH90 aircraft, instead of the initial defence department recommendation for Black Hawks.
Additional reporting by Khaled Al Khawaldeh
