Major defence projects are still running more than 20% behind schedule, the Defence Department has no understanding of how many people are working on them, and major recommendations from both the auditor-general and Parliament remain ignored years later, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found.
Every year at the request of Parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, the ANAO checks Defence’s homework on a list of major projects to look at financial performance, schedule performance and risk management. This year, 21 projects worth $58 billion were examined, including the F-35, the now-abandoned submarine project and the dumped MRH90 Taipan helicopters.
The projects in the Major Project Report were a total of 405 months late, or 23%, with the chief offender being the already seven-years-delayed and trouble-plagued Taipan helicopters, which incurred another six-month delay before being abandoned last week.
The MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicle is more than five years late, after a two-year delay during the reporting period as a result of the United States announcing a production halt until 2023 (not much “sovereign capability” there, then).
As always, the biggest delays occur with Australian-developed projects, while projects that are modified off-the-shelf products, or pure off-the-shelf, incur fewer delays. The ANAO notes that after the 2003 Kinnaird review pointed out off-the-shelf projects were delivered with less delay and fewer problems than modified or fully developed projects, Defence had moved to source more projects off-the-shelf, but that this had been in reverse since 2014, signalling that delays are likely to increase in coming years.
And while cost overruns were kept to a minimum — the major cost increases were due to increases in project scope — the Defence executive doesn’t actually have a complete picture of how much projects are really costing because it doesn’t have a proper handle on the staff costs for each project, and hasn’t been able to establish any system to do that since it was asked by the JCPAA in 2018.
A number of projects don’t have proper risk management software in place, with tracking of issues done by spreadsheets only.
ANAO has also pressured Defence for some years to develop a more coherent framework for the way it identifies and more aggressively manages troubled projects via its Projects of Interest/Projects of Concern list, which still hasn’t been done. The ANAO’s concerns about the somewhat random nature of those lists was confirmed by the absence of the submarines project from either of those lists, despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison reversing himself in November — after being called out for lying by French President Emmanuel Macron — and claiming “there was [sic] a lot of issues in relation to delays in the project and of course, the costs”. Defence had told the ANAO regarding the submarines:
This risk was being remediated as follows: ‘Contracted requirements exist on program performance, behaviours and expectations and are supported by: ongoing engagement with CEOs; bilateral and tripartite governance arrangements; and ongoing independent critical peer review by the Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board and Submarine Advisory Committee.’ The ANAO was advised by Defence in 2020-21 that the Future Subs project was not considered as a candidate for inclusion as a Project of Concern or Interest because it was already subject to the most senior levels of governance and scrutiny.
So the exact reason why the submarines were abandoned — leaving a colossal hole in Australia’s naval capability in coming decades — remains a mystery.
ANAO is also unhappy about Defence’s tendency to declare that projects had reached major milestones but with “caveats” or “deficiencies” — terms that seem of art, not science. This has been going on since 2014 and the auditors aren’t happy with it. Among the prime examples is the decades-late F-35 plane. “Defence declared IOC on 28 December 2020, acknowledging a number of known acceptable deficiencies with the aircraft and support systems, including some delays to weapons delivery and integration.”
“Known acceptable deficiencies” seems an apt phrase for many of Defence’s major projects, and the process of managing them.
Imagine there was a war with this inept government in charge. I can just see the speeches.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; subject of course to our known acceptable deficiencies”
It’s possibly a silver lining that Oz is currently under-equipped. Otherwise our government would be even more eager to be coerced into fatal mischief (or another ‘illegal’ war) by the USA. Apart from being a base for US troops, satellite & surveillance operations, we may be more of a liability. Let’s hope so.
Not wars, just US military adventures into which the Lying Nasty Party marched off lock step…no war declared neither in the Congress of the USA, nor in the Parliament of the C of A
Those last two US military adventures, The Afghan Imbroglio and The Iraq Fiasco were started under previous GOP Administration of Dubya, The Faux Texan, a sock puppet for the NeoCOn Cabal, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz et al.
The GOP Eisenhower Administration started an early military adventure, The The Viet Nam Farrago in 1955 when Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. This marks the official beginning of US involvement, as recognised by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
By many accounts JFK was for getting out of the Farrago, but his successor LBJ did not follow the plan and so the US became further bogged down in the quagmire that spread throughout not just Vietnam., but also Cambodia and Laos.
Ming the Mendacious decided to march the C of A off lock step in to that mess, just as The Lying Rodent© Senator G Brandis, marched off into not just one but both The Afghan Imbroglio and then The Iraq Fiasco, that which led to the Da’esh Disaster, whose fighters are now appearing in Afghanistan.
“Die Geschichte hat noch nie etwas anderes gelehrt, als dass die Menschen nichts aus ihr gelernt haben.”. Georg Frederich Hegel
History has never taught anything other than that people have learned nothing from it:
and even more apposite now…
“Er hat vergessen, hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce.” Karl MarxHe,
(Hegel,) forgot to add this: first as tragedy, second as farce:
And now Oberst-Gruppenführer Kartoffelkopf is talking up joining a war against China, what a farce that is!
I actually think that Dutton and scottie from marketing are traitors rather than inept.
Oz is currently under equipped? I hate to tell you but the ADF cannot, and never have been able to, defend Australia. Our coastline is simply too long and we have too many remote areas. Our Air Farce would be taken out swiftly as would our Bathtub Navy. The Army is only able to conduct guerilla style operations if we are invaded as basically a “resistance” . This has been the plan for decades. Originally the “threat” was an invasion from Indonesia (which never eventuated obviously)!
Lots of supposed “threats”, but its all overblown in attemps to garner more funding for defense projects.
The only countries that we could defend successfully against would be NZ or PNG or the various pacific islands. We just don’t have the scale required.
Much used to made of the “unprotected north” these days the croc’s usually act as a deterrent.
More like: “We are defending this nation, but it’s not a race.”
Even Alice’s Caucus race didn’t last a minimum of 20-30yrs.
Except that both wanna-be hegemons have entirely legal – bought, paid & registered – access to the “landing stages” in Darwin port.
Stripping away defence capability has been an ongoing program of Australia for decades. It’s a sign of intergenerational incompetence, aka, our Australian culture is a culture of working class, servile incompetence.
Example: a friend was working in Sydney, in the early 1990s, earning $140 per hour writing code for real time navigation systems for missiles on an American Defence contract. When the contract ran out, he went and programmed poker machines.
There is no Australian program for missile development, we buy them off others.
Even our uniforms are made off shore. Australia is a defence joke. A disgrace and every government, post 1975, should be charge with treachery.
Yeah! Petee Dutton gets another fail!
We still have no contract to replace the submarines necessary to keep our shipping lanes open.
AUKUS or USUKAS is an agreement to think about an agreement.
Biden is less than happy with being blindsided by “that fella down under” and the Boris clown.
As they say “Good Luck with that”.
The picture above the article says a lot. One sub, seven crew. Gives the game away.
I see only five crew, with two officers.
Oberon class, we were invited to the US for war games and our Oberon’s being small and able to run on batteries sat outside of San Francisco Bay.
We won. we were not invited back.
Small is much more useful than the big and boastful.
Similarly with war gaming (sic! who does not cringe at such a concept?) – the Millenium Challenge 2002 ran from 24 July to 15 August and cost US$250 million (equivalent to about $360M in 2020) to attacking Iran via the Persian Gulf found the opposition obliterate all the hi-tek toys of the pride of the US Armed Forces in the early 21stC using mostly motor bikes, patrol boats and surface to sea short range missiles.
“Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Surprise, surprise, the same thing happened when it was tried for the South China sea.
Just so we know, the USAKA subs. promised on the never-never to guard the trade lanes are disposable, killer units, not sit & wait as has been previously claimed by our Vichy/Quisling administration
…oops, that of course is USUKA.
I prefer USUKAS that just about sums up the “deal”.
Crikey Pedant alert! 🙂
Can someone explain why we need to spend $1B on artillery and $32B on APVs? Howitzers may have been the rage in WW1 and WW2 but we live in the 21st century where aerial attack drones are more effective. The Howitzers and APVs suggest Australia is preparing to be involved in land wars. Given the size of Australia, a couple of dozen Howitzers seems pathetic. Maybe the ADF is planning to lay siege on some Asian city?
The majority of our Defense spending seems to be aimed at WW2 type conflict, and nothing to do with current warfare strategies.