Tens of billions worth of department of defence projects are expected to be scrapped and reprioritised after a review into Australia’s national defence strategy tipped to recommend new missile purchases and uncover budget bombs.
A public version of the Defence Strategic Review will be released on Monday, months after being handed in by Sir Angus Houston and former defence minister Stephen Smith in February.
The review will look at the scale and nature of Australia’s military forces and comes against the backdrop of a recent commitment to a $368 billion acquisition of nuclear-powered submarine technology and the reconfiguration of America’s military footprint in Asia.
A well-placed source said the review would consider more than Australia’s strategic posture but more fundamental questions, such as the structure of the defence forces.0
Australia’s largely defensive military posture has for decades had a similar rough structure based on a dozen surface ships, half-a-dozen submarines, seven infantry battalions and three-to-four combat squadrons.
With the regional environment dominated by a rising China, Defence Minister Richard Marles has said this should be reorganised so Australia is more capable of “impactful projection”.
This rhetoric is coinciding with expected changes including spending more on rocket-artillery, including “long-range fires” and land-to-sea “maritime strike” precision missiles.
The ABC has reported that a planned acquisition of “infantry fighting vehicles” will be slashed from 450 to 129.
“It’s an incredibly important piece of work, because what it seeks to do is really restate Australia’s strategic posture for the first time more than 35 years,” Mr Marles told Sky on Sunday.
“We obviously live in a very different world today, to the one that Paul Dibb was looking at when he wrote the Dibb Review back in 1985-86, which has really been the heart of our strategic posture since that time.”
Another $14.9 billion will need to be returned to the spiralling cost of national defence, according to the Australian Financial Review, to cover the previous government’s underfunding of certain projects.
That will include, a well-sourced US defence industry news site reports, some $8 billion in new cyber spending for the Australian Signals Directorate’s ‘Project REDSPICE’, or what it describes as Australia’s answer to the National Security Agency.
“How is it that not a single voice from the entire Defence establishment piped up and told anyone?” asked David Shoebridge, a Greens Senator, about the unbudgeted programs.
“There is a dangerous culture of secrecy and disinformation within the Australian Defence Force and department that allows governments to hide these damaging truths, and that lack of honesty is clearly a threat to national security.”
