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F-35 Lightning II A35-025 from RAAF Base Williamtown flies off the coast of Newcastle. Photo: FSGT Mick Bott
Opinion: Our shrinking, self-bankrupting military
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Australia is spending more and more taxpayers’ dollars equipping our Defence Force, but it is buying less and less. We’re in a spiralling affordability crisis leading to a shrinking Australian military and a bankrupt Defence organisation. The problem comes from the increasing costs of the extraordinarily complicated ships, submarines, planes, tanks and missiles that our Defence organisation likes to buy. This is now reaching the point where equipping our military at any scale that makes sense is unaffordable, unless we start learning and applying the lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The biggest problem is that no one in the senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force or the civilian bureaucracy that supports it even seems to have noticed. And so far, the election campaign we just witnessed showed no evidence that either Labor or the Coalition had plans to fix things. The Coalition’s policy does talk about bringing some external – even industry – expertise in to inform directions, but both major parties seem to trust the bureaucracy’s abilities too much.
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