Antinuclear

Defence spending has the added allure of political expedience.The document is just 185 pages long, of which 21 are full-page glossy pictures or graphics and 7 are left “intentionally blank”. It’s skimpy……..a policy: flinging taxpayers’ money at defence and hoping it brings jobs and growth. It is rather Leninist of them to advocate such a grand scheme of taxpayer-funded economic growth – to swap a half-subsidised car industry for a fully-subsidised weapons industry – but it is a policy nonetheless.

Defence spending has the added allure of political expedience. Who can argue with a government bent on safeguarding its citizens from future unspecified invaders? Certainly not the opposition……

It may cost taxpayers $150 billion.

Although the cost to design and build each of the 12 submarines is mooted at $4 billion – just shy of a Medibank float – the cost of running them is far greater. They describe the submarine spend as the “largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history”.

Chance of attack is small

The white paper concedes there is but a remote chance of a military attack on Australian territory by a hostile foreign power. Further, it says Australia cannot afford to equip, train and prepare its military forces solely for the remote prospect of such a major attack.

This would leave the defence forces less capable of addressing the wide range of more likely threats Australia faced to 2035.

So the policy is therefore to devote unprecedented billions of dollars, the biggest defence outlay ever, to build submarines on the implausible chance of a foreign military attack.

China is not discussed much, though it is deemed by Defence to be the biggest threat. There are a few brief references in the paper though there is no discussion of what sort of force we would need if China were to attack.

And you don’t have to be a defence guru to work out that Australia would stand little chance of withstanding a Chinese military with its 70 submarines, 2.3 million frontline personnel and $US155 billion defence budget.

The  white paper’s submarine analysis is flimsy. The first subs only become operational in the 2030s, at the end of the strategic environment which the paper addresses.

It fails moreover to establish why this weapon system is superior to far more agile, responsive and modern air and surface weapon systems for meeting the faint threat of invasion, or how the huge outlay is justified……

The public deserves better than for this critical issue of defence spending to be treated as such a sacred cow that there is no debate about it in Parliament and no more than feeble inquiry in the mainstream media.

You could select the tiniest thing on the share market and bet it would boast superior disclosures to Defence  white paper  2016.

Rather than having cash thrown at them willy-nilly, the armed forces should undergo the same blow-torch as other institutions. You can bet there is a lot more fat in defence than the ABC (whose  white paper  coverage has also been lame).: http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/substandard-plan-for-defence-20160226-gn4cx3.html#ixzz41PkqKAgL