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by Rex Patrick

“The AUKUS nuclear submarine project will bleed the Australian Defence Force white”, topping the billions in Defence spending waste each year. And there’s no one watching anymore, reports former serviceman and senator Rex Patrick. 

Anyone with kids will know the song, ‘Dumb Ways to Die’. 

Set fire to your hair
Poke a stick at a grizzly bear
Eat medicine that’s out of date
Use your private parts as piranha bait

Dumb ways to die
So many dumb ways to die

With 300 million views, it’s the world’s most shared Public Service Announcement. Launched in November 2012 by Metro Trains Melbourne to promote rail safety, it went viral through YouTube, quickly being shared all over social media.

Like many parents, I’ve suffered relentless annoying renditions of the song courtesy of my two, otherwise wonderful, daughters.

But that suffering is nothing like the suffering inflicted on Australian taxpayers and our national security by the Department of Defence as it has repeatedly bungled major Defence procurements. I’m not a songwriter, but what follows are all the elements needed for someone more creative than I to write a Defence procurement ‘Dumb Ways to Buy’ jingle.

Defence procurement is a shambles and national expenditure disgrace. Project after project blows out in cost and schedule, with some projects being cancelled all together.

Every year the Auditor-General releases a Major Projects Report into Defence’s major projects. The most recent report covered 21 projects worth $58 billion dollars. Across those 21 projects, there had been $18.5 billion in cost increases – that’s 18,500 million dollars for those that can’t easily grapple with the large amounts of money with which Defence plays.

Across those 21 projects the schedule slippage was 405 months – 34 years. A number of projects, excluding the future submarine project for the moment, have either been binned or did not meet capability requirements. They are:

• The Multiple-Role Helicopter program – $3.8 billion wasted.
• The Sky Guardian medium altitude long endurance attack drone program – $1.3 billion wasted.
• The Army’s Battle Management system – a billion wasted.
• The Spartan battlefield airlift aircraft – $1.4 billion wasted.
• The Tiger helicopter program – another billion wasted.

That’s eight and a half billion dollars of taxpayers’ money just thrown away. That’s eight billion dollars of new capability our brave front-line Defence Force members don’t have.

What’s worse, there’s no-one watching Defence anymore. The Labor Party aren’t too interested in shining a light on Defence’s failures now they’re in Government. And the Liberal Party, having just left Government, are to blame for many of the programs. They’re happy to stay silent too.

And that leads us to the Future Submarine Program. It’s been in the news a bit last week after the United States offered, without any detail, to plug the capability gap that will be left by a first nuclear submarine only being delivered until in 2040 – the gap that the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd and Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison governments all pledged wouldn’t happen.

The Future Submarine project is the quintessential example of how not to buy a capability for the Australian Defence Force. Let’s examine that purchasing disaster.

Sensibly, the future submarine project was first stood up in 2009. The plan was to work through the purchase options and commence construction of the first futures submarine in 2016, with the first boat hitting the water well before 2025, when the first of the ageing Collins Class submarines was due to retire.

Figure One – the 2009 Defence Capability Plan Schedule for Submarines

But by the time we got to 2016, incredibly, we had only just selected a future submarine French partner and we were already talking about a life-extension to one of the Collins submarines. By the time we cancelled the French Partnership in 2022, Defence needed to life-extend all six Collins class submarines, at a $6 billion dollar cost to the taxpayer.

In February 2015, the Government commenced a Competitive Evaluation Process, not to select a submarine, but to select an international partner to design and build our future submarines. The taxpayers forked out $8 million to each of France’s Naval Group, Germany’s TKMS and Japanese Industry: $24 million to listen to each potential partner tell Defence how good they thought they were.

At the time I was writing extensively on submarines for a Defence magazine. My business experience made me take a different approach to Defence. I jumped on a plane and went to talk to other navies, not about their submarines, but about their experience with their French and German suppliers.

I went to Chile who had both German and French submarines. I went to Portugal who had switched from French to German submarines. I went to Israel who had German submarines, India who had French, German and Russian submarines and Malaysia who had French boats. It seemed sensible, when trying to select a partner, to make inquiries with others who had experienced a partnership with them.

The Chileans had had a good experience with the French. So too had the Portuguese. The Indians, whose project was a mess, took a different view:

“The program’s difficulties centred about a contract which was not well defined and involved relatively small margins. When a dispute arose as to a contractual ambiguity, we almost always lost on account of a national imperative for the submarine capability to fall on the Indian side of the ambiguity.”

The Malaysians has a similar tale:

“Make sure the contract was watertight. If it is not clear … the discussion starts … and the French win. The contract must include everything explicitly; if it is not in the contract they will not do it [without a costly contract amendment].”

We proceeded to select the French as a partner, in taboo circumstances, where we didn’t have a comprehensively articulated contract.

After the partnership selection, Defence spent two and a half years trying to put in place a Strategic Partnering Agreement with the French, an agreement that was originally schedule to take 13 months; a first sign of trouble.

In the end, the whole partnering approach turned out much like a bad marriage. The engagement had gone well, the wedding was a hoot, but problems emerged when the two parties moved in together. Thankfully there was divorce before the children were conceived.

My worldwide submarine partnership investigation cost all of $15,000 dollars and gave me a much better answer than the $24 million taxpayer funded investigation.

Would you go into a Peugeot dealership and say “I’m going to buy a Peugeot. I don’t know exactly what I want and I’m not going to entertain any other brand, or buy it elsewhere. Now, can we talk about price”?

You would only do that if you’re spending someone else’s money.

But that’s exactly what Defence did. Unsurprisingly, they copped severe criticism from the Auditor-General in his 2017 first program audit:

The approach taken by Defence for the Future Submarine program removes competition in the design phase, and removes incentives for the international partner [Naval Group] to produce a more economical and efficient build.

Defence snookered itself on cost before it even knew what it wanted to build.

And Defence hasn’t learnt anything. They’ve now just signed up to an AUKUS nuclear submarine program without knowing the ultimate solution and with competitive tension lacking.

Would you take an electric vehicle and ask the dealer to change out the battery and electric motors for a petrol tank and a petrol engine, not for the market, but just for you?

That’s the equivalent of what Defence did when it asked the French to take its nuclear submarine design and replace the reactor and steam turbine with diesels and main batteries. And the ultimate irony in relation to this was that the 2021 decision to cancel the French submarine contract was to enable Defence to switch to a nuclear submarine solution.

The least of any Project Manager’s worries is contract performance, schedule and project resources (schedule and resources = cost). Rather the thing that keeps experienced project managers awake at night is ‘risk’. Risk causes reductions in performance, schedule blow-outs and increases in resourcing needs.

A couple of reports to Defence, one by Kinnaird in 2003 and another by Mortimer in 2008, warned Defence officials about the risks of departing from off-the-shelf solutions. But Defence has ignored them, at taxpayers’ – that is your – expense.

Underlying this is the embarrassing fact that Defence employs Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals and senior Defence bureaucrats, with very little practical knowledge of project risk, to make procurement recommendations to Cabinet members who have no knowledge of project risk.

Instead of buying 20 off-the-shelf submarines, which could be built here in Australia, for $30 billion, we chose the ‘special’ and risky solution that gets us twelve ‘special’ submarines for $90 billion; Defence’s decision came at a $60 billion cost premium to be borne by taxpayers.

When the Auditor-General did his second audit of the program in 2020 he noted that the signing of the Strategic Partnering Agreement was 16 months late. He also noted:

The program is currently experiencing a nine-month delay in the design phase against Defence’s pre-design contract estimates, and two major contracted milestones were extended.

And yet, when Australia decided the marriage was over, it didn’t terminate it for lack of performance, rather for convenience. The cost to the taxpayer of that approach was $830m in compensation.

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on September 16, 2021 that the Government was walking away from the French solution, he did so with great fanfare and gusto, announcing we were purchasing a nuclear-powered submarine solution. He made no mention of cost, or schedule. Irresponsibly, those details were not known at the time.

And then opposition leader Anthony Albanese irresponsibly signed up to the solution with 24 hours’ notice, principally because he and his shadow ministry were politically too scared to have a fight about Defence policy in the countdown to the 2022 federal election.

Our political leaders would have us think that we are special because the US has agreed to share its nuclear technology with us. But that’s simply incorrect. In 1958 the then US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Burke, supported the export of nuclear knowhow within NATO. Britain, Canada, Denmark and Italy started down the nuclear pathway. Denmark is on the record as terminating the idea because it was simply too expensive. All but the UK abandoned the nuclear path.

It’s only now we know that the cost of purchasing eight nuclear submarines will be at least $170 billion and the solution won’t arrive for two geo-strategically tense decades.

It’s like we’re hunting for the most expensive and best football team, but planning for it to arrive after the grand final has been played.

The AUKUS nuclear submarine program will bleed the Australian Defence Force white. The opportunity costs are huge in terms of other capabilities, for the Air Force, for the Army and indeed for the Navy, that won’t be affordable because of massive over-investment in one project with a delivery date close to two decades away. This will unquestionably jeopardise our national security. Sadly, Defence Minister Richard Marles is out of his depth and drinking the Defence Department’s Kool Aid.

There are only seven countries that have nuclear submarines or a nuclear submarine program. They are the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India and Brazil. 

All have substantial nuclear power industries.

The United States amortise their nuclear safety and regulatory regime costs over 90+ naval reactors and 90+ civilian reactors. They have 185+ reactors with which to build up and maintain their nuclear engineering and safety experience and expertise.

Australia has just one nuclear reactor operated for scientific research and the production of radioisotopes for medical purposes. We don’t have a civilian nuclear industry, and the Labor party has ruled it out. That will make for some very expensive ongoing costs for our Navy, which really means ongoing costs for the taxpayer.

A huge effort will have to go into building up a pool of nuclear experts – across engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry, reactor operations and safety, and environmental monitoring. The Navy, Defence, our small nuclear regulatory agency and industry will all be scrambling to recruit experts from a very small pool that will only grow slowly and at great expense. Still, the Albanese government proceeds with reckless indifference to the taxpayer.

I’m very sympathetic to the idea that we need to spend more on Defence in the current and near future geo-strategic situation. There is a compelling case to improve our modest capabilities, especially in the short to medium term. 

Part of me says, yes, it’s absolutely necessary we hand more money over to Defence.

The bigger part of me says, no, not until they abandon their dumb ways to buy.

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By Andrea Mazzarino | TomDispatch

By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. Indeed, the Pentagon has been granted more money than the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined. And that doesn’t even take into account funding for homeland security or the growing costs of caring for the veterans of this country’s post-9/11 wars. That legislation also includes the largest pay raise in 20 years for active-duty and reserve forces and an expansion of a supplemental “basic needs allowance” to support military families with incomes near the poverty line.

And yet, despite those changes and a Pentagon budget that’s gone through the roof, many U.S. troops and military families will continue to struggle to make ends meet. Take one basic indicator of welfare: whether or not you have enough to eat. Tens of thousands of service members remain “food insecure” or hungry. Put another way, during the past year, members of those families either worried that their food would run out or actually did run out of food.

As a military spouse myself and co-founder of the Costs of War Project, I recently interviewed Tech Sergeant Daniel Faust, a full-time Air Force reserve member responsible for training other airmen. He’s a married father of four who has found himself on the brink of homelessness four times between 2012 and 2019 because he had to choose between necessities like groceries and paying the rent. He managed to make ends meet by seeking assistance from local charities. And sadly enough, that airman has been in all-too-good company for a while now. In 2019, an estimated one in eight military families were considered food insecure. In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, that figure rose to nearly a quarter of them. More recently, one in six military families experienced food insecurity, according to the advocacy group Military Family Advisory Network.

The majority of members of the military largely come from middle-class neighborhoods and, not surprisingly perhaps, their struggles mirror those faced by so many other Americans. Spurred by a multitude of factors, including pandemic-related supply-chain problems and — you guessed it — war, inflation in the U.S. rose by more than 9% in 2022. On average, American wages grew by about 4.5% last year and so failed to keep up with the cost of living. This was no less true in the military.

An Indifferent Public

An abiding support for arming Ukraine suggests that many Americans are at least paying attention to that aspect of U.S. military policy. Yet here’s the strange thing (to me, at least): so many of us in this century seemed to care all too little about the deleterious domestic impacts of our prolonged, disastrous Global War on Terror. The U.S. military’s growing budget and a reach that, in terms of military bases and deployed troops abroad, encompasses dozens of countries, was at least partly responsible for an increasingly divided, ever more radicalized populace here at home, degraded protections for civil liberties and human rights, and ever less access to decent healthcare and food for so many Americans.

That hunger is an issue at all in a military so wildly well-funded by Congress should be a grim reminder of how little attention we pay to so many crucial issues, including how our troops are treated. Americans simply take too much for granted. This is especially sad, since government red tape is significantly responsible for creating the barriers to food security for military families.

When it comes to needless red tape, just consider how the government determines the eligibility of such families for food assistance. Advocacy groups like the National Military Family Association and MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger have highlighted the way in which the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), a non-taxable stipend given to military families to help cover housing, is counted as part of military pay in determining the eligibility of families for food assistance. Because of that, all too many families who need such assistance are disqualified.

Debt-Funded Living, Debt-Funded Wars

The BAH issue is but one part of a larger picture of twenty-first-century military life with its torrent of expenses, many of which (like local housing markets) you can’t predict. I know because I’ve been a military spouse for 12 years. As an officer’s wife and a white, cisgender woman from an upper-middle-class background, I’m one of the most privileged military spouses out there. I have two graduate degrees, a job I can do from home, and children without major health issues. Our family has loved ones who, when our finances get tight, support us logistically and financially with everything from childcare to housing expenses to Christmas gifts for our children.

And yet even for us, affording the basics has sometimes proved challenging. During the first few months after any move to a new duty station, a typical uprooting experience for military families, we’ve had to wield our credit cards to get food and other necessities like gas. Add to that take-out and restaurant meals, hotel rooms, and Ubers as we wait weeks for private contractors to arrive with our kitchen supplies, furniture, and the like.

Tag on the cost of hiring babysitters while we wait for affordable childcare centers in the new area to accept our two young children, and then the high cost of childcare when we finally get spots. In 2018, during one of those moves, I discovered that the military had even begun putting relocated families like ours at the back of wait lists for childcare fee assistance — “to give others a chance,” one Pentagon representative told me when I called to complain. In each of the five years before both of our children entered public school, we spent nearly twice as much on childcare as the average junior enlisted military service member gets in total income for his or her family.

Our finances are still struggling to catch up with demands like these, which are the essence of military life.

But don’t worry, even if your spouse isn’t nearby, there are still plenty of social opportunities (often mandated by commanders) for family members to get together with one another, including annual balls for which you’re expected to purchase pricey tickets. In the post-9/11 era, such events have become more common and are frequently seen as obligatory. In this age of the gig economy and the rolling back of workplace benefits and protections, the military is, in its own fashion, leading the way when it comes to “bringing your whole self (money included) to work.”

Now, add the Covid-19 pandemic into this fun mix. The schedules of many military personnel only grew more complicated given pre- and post-deployment quarantine requirements and labor and supply-chain issues that made moving ever less efficient. Military spouse unemployment rates, which had hovered around 24% in the pre-pandemic years, shot up to more than 30% by early 2021. Spouses already used to single parenting during deployments could no longer rely on public schools and daycare centers to free them to go to work. Infection rates in military communities soared because of travel, as well as weak (or even nonexistent) Covid policies. All of this, of course, ensured that absenteeism from work and school would only grow among family members. And to make things worse, as the last Congress ended, the Republicans insisted that an authorization rescinding the requirement for military personnel to get Covid vaccines become part of the Pentagon budget bill. All I can say is that’s a bit more individual freedom than this military spouse can wrap her brain around right now.

Worse yet, this country’s seemingly eternal and disastrous twenty-first-century war on terror, financed almost entirely by national debt, also ensured that members of the military, shuttled all over the planet, would incur ever more of it themselves. It should be no surprise then that many more military families than civilian ones struggle with credit-card debt.

And now, as our country seems to be gearing up for possible confrontations not just with terror groups or local rebel outfits in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but with other great powers, the problems of living in the U.S. military are hardly likely to get easier.

The Fire of War Is Spreading

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has at least publicly acknowledged hunger as a problem in the military and taken modest steps to alleviate the financial stresses on military families. Still, that problem is far larger than the Pentagon is willing to face. According to Abby Leibman, MAZON’s chief executive officer, Pentagon officials and military base commanders commonly deny that hunger exists among their subordinates. Sometimes they even discourage families in need of food assistance from seeking help. Daniel Faust, the sergeant I mentioned earlier, told me that his colleagues and trainees, concerned about seeming needy or not convinced that military services offering help will actually be useful, often won’t ask for assistance — even if their incomes barely support their families. Indeed, a recently released RAND Corporation investigation into military hunger found that some troops worried that seeking food assistance would jeopardize their careers.

I’m lucky that I haven’t had to seek food assistance from the government. However, I’ve heard dozens of officers, enlisted personnel, and family members shrug off such problems by attributing debt among the troops to lack of education, immaturity, or an inability to cope with stress in healthy ways. What you rarely hear is someone in this community complaining that military pay just doesn’t support the basic needs of families.

Ignoring food needs in the military is, in the end, about more than just food. Individual cooking and communal meals can help individuals and families cope in the absence of adequate mental healthcare or… well, so much else. The combat veteran who takes up baking as a tactile way of reminding himself that he’s here in the present and not back in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia or Syria is learning to conquer mental illness. The family that gathers for meals between deployments is seizing an opportunity to connect. In an age when military kids are suffering from widespread mental-health problems, eating together is one way parents can sometimes combat anxiety and depression.

Whatever is life-enhancing and doesn’t require a professional degree is vital in today’s stressed-out military. Heaven only knows, we’ve had enough excitement in the years of the war on terror. Perhaps in its wake you won’t be surprised to learn that military suicide rates have reached an all-time high, while mental healthcare is remarkably inaccessible (especially to families whose kids have disabilities or mental illnesses). And don’t let me get started on sexual assault or child abuse, or the poor school performance of so many military kids, or even the growth of divorce, not to speak of violent crime, in the services in these years.

Yes, problems like these certainly existed in the military before the post-9/11 war on terror began, but they grew as both the scale and scope of our disastrous military engagements and the Pentagon budget exploded. Now, with the war in Ukraine and growing tensions with China over Taiwan, we live in what could prove to be the aftermath from hell. In other words, to quote 1980s star Billy Joel’s famous record title, we did start this fire.

Believe me, what’s truly striking about this year’s Pentagon funding isn’t that modest military pay raise. It’s the way Congress is allowing the Department of Defense to make ever more stunning multi-year spending commitments to corporate arms contractors. For example, the Army has awarded Raytheon Technologies $2 billion in contracts to replace (or even expand) supplies of missile systems that have been sent to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia. So count on one thing: the CEOs of Raytheon and other similar companies will not go hungry (though some of their own workers just might).

Nor are those fat cats even consistently made to account for how they use our taxpayer dollars. To take but one example, between 2013 and 2017, the Pentagon entered into staggering numbers of contracts with corporations that had been indicted, fined, and/or convicted of fraud. The total value of those questionable contracts surpassed $334 billion. Think of how many military childcare centers could have been built with such sums.

Human Welfare, Not Corporate Welfare

Policymakers have grown accustomed to evaluating measures meant to benefit military families in terms of how “mission ready” such families will become. You would think that access to food was such a fundamental need that anyone would simply view it as a human right. The Pentagon, however, continues to frame food security as an instrument of national security, as if it were another weapon with which to arm expendable service members.

To my mind, here’s the bottom line when it comes to that staggering Pentagon budget: For the military and the rest of us, how could it be that corporate weapons makers are in funding heaven and all too many members of our military in a homegrown version of funding hell? Shouldn’t we be fighting, first and foremost, for a decent life for all of us here at home? Veteran unemployment, the pandemic, the Capitol insurrection — these crises have undermined the very reasons many joined the military in the first place.

If we can’t even feed the fighters (and their families) decently, then who or what exactly are we defending? And if we don’t change course now by investing in alternatives to what we so inaccurately call national defense, I’m afraid that there will indeed be a reckoning.

Those worried about looking soft on national defense by even considering curbing military spending ought to consider at least the security implications of military hunger. We all have daily needs which, if unmet, can lead to desperation. Hunger can and does fuel armed violence, and has helped lead the way to some of the most brutal regimes in history. In an era when uniformed personnel were distinctly overrepresented among the domestic extremists who attacked our Capitol on January 6, 2021, one of the fastest ways to undermine our quality of life may just be to let our troops and their families, hungry and in anguish, turn against their own people.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

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