The government has released the new Defence Capability Plan, which is basically a military equipment capital acquisition programme.
The five most strategically significant projects detailed in this year’s document are the F-35 JSF, the future submarine, the defence force’s new battlespace communications, replacement field vehicles for the army and patrol boats for the navy.
Add to that a squadron of quasi-bombers in the Boeing 737 maritime patrol aircraft. I’d like to echo recent sentiments expressed in letters to the UK’s Daily Telegraph about the UK’s Defence spending programmes:
The Armed Forces make better use of public funds than many a wasteful scheme…The real problem is profligate spending on a myriad public-funded schemes, many of which have wasted billions of pounds and achieved nothing.
I can think of every ‘watch’ programme that Rudd has come up with since his election, the Human Rights Commission, the ABC, SBS (look how they have ruined Top Gear Australia), the $42 billion ‘stimulus’ package including the provision of a $900 ‘tax-bonus’ to people that don’t even pay Federal taxes, the $14.2 billion education slush fund used to keep the CFMEU employed building multi-million dollar tin school sheds, the $100 billion + National Broadband Network, which is a sub-prime crisis in the making, etc… The worst Defence critics have come up over the last twenty years has been the $1.5 billion Super Seasprite project, that was cancelled because of contractual non-compliance due to a range of technical problems, and Defence turning against its former Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, because he couldn’t look past his pinko commie tendencies to manage his department in a professional manner.