Defence Business: ADM 2012 - From the outside looking in | ADM April 2012
Daniel Cotterill
After being immersed in local defence industry issues for over a decade in one role or another and then not paying too much attention at all for the past three years, a few things stood out for me at ADM 2012.
How startling is the change in rhetoric surrounding our acquisition of the Joint Strike Fighter? Long gone are the days of being firmly committed to up 100 stealthy F-35s. Now we are accepting two aircraft for tests and trials in 2014, because we are contractually obliged to, and government will apparently make a decision later this year on the delivery schedule of another 12 aircraft for sometime after that.
Everyone that I have ever spoken to who was genuinely in a position to understand the capabilities of the JSF has been firmly in favour of Australia’s involvement in the program, and the Minister still expressed very cautious support. The change in rhetoric is, however, so dramatic that something (if not many things) must be very seriously amiss with the JSF.
One thing that hasn’t changed is industry’s call for their customer to smooth out demand so they can better manage their workforce, and if you have been around defence industry long enough that seems a perfectly logical and reasonable request. An outside perspective is somewhat different though. Even if the various functions of government, bureaucracy and industry performed like a Swiss watch (and they clearly don’t), it would be simply unrealistic to expect consistent co-ordination over any length of time. Also, depending on your political persuasion, mainstream views of such a scheme are often less charitable, leading people to refer to the creation of non-competitive, inefficient, sheltered workshops and the like. They have even been heard to ask if workforce management and the preservation of corporate memory wasn’t something that senior industry executives were well paid to deal with.
I listened carefully to a number of conversations between uniformed grown-ups and their reaction to news that the number of defence committees will be rationalised. These people were senior enough to be in charge of serious business but not so senior as to have evolved into politicians – yet. Rationalising the committees was a good start they said, but it wouldn’t amount to much unless various processes that had been heaped layer upon layer, in both the DMO and Capability Development Group, after successive well intended reviews were well and truly pruned.
The senior defence leaders that headlined ADM 2012 are all very experienced, intelligent and resourceful campaigners, and they seem to be well focussed on a realistic number of priorities. Perhaps they are the team that can begin to cut through some process to deliver lasting reform and genuine results.