The new more open and consultative Australian Defence Force
has confessed that it really wasn’t properly outfitting the diggers for much of
the time they were fighting in Afghanistan.
It can make this admission with less of a guilty conscience
because it can point to creation of the Diggerworks organisation as indicating
it finally got it right.
All this emerged in a new study commissioned by defence and
released the same day Kevin Rudd launched his successful challenge to Julia
Gillard, thus ensuring it attracted minimal media attention.
This intriguing study by a pair of outside management
experts says the procurement system for outfitting the soldiery evolved to
acquire large quantities of kit at lowest price with maximum propriety in
cycles of around seven years.
That assumed that the actual need for what’s termed soldier
ensemble – uniform, boots, webbing, body armour and load carrying equipment –
would remain static between procurements. It didn’t.
“Consequently, despite all the people in the procurement
chain outfitting the soldiers having the very best of intentions, the soldiers
in Afghanistan were going into the field ready to fight in Iraq, just as those
in Iraq had essentially gone into the field well equipped for East Timor,” they
said.
In hindsight, all this seems pretty obvious. Troops headed
into East Timor in 1999 with kit which had been perfectly appropriate in
Northern Australia. Fortunately the Vietnam-era body armour wasn’t put to any
great test. The same gear wasn’t nearly as appropriate in southern Iraq,
prompting rapid procurement of a range of new equipment including desert
pattern cams and improved body armour.
In southern Afghanistan this same heavy armour, weighing in
at some 11 kilograms and well-suited to mostly vehicle-mounted operations,
proved ill-suited for troops patrolling on foot in baking summer heat and
needing to be able to respond with agility to contacts with insurgents.
The complaints started to flow as growing numbers served in
southern Afghanistan. The soldiers knew there was better kit available,
although not necessarily because it was in use by their allies. This coincided
with the surge in availability of high quality after-market kit. Being good
Gen-Y consumers, the diggers could see what was on offer on the internet and
through a growing number of specialty stores, often conveniently close to their
barracks.
This study attributes part of the soul-searching which
resulted in the Diggerworks organisation to a “difficult” Senate estimates
committee hearing in mid-2010. There the head of the Defence Materiel
Organisation’s land systems division Major General Grant Cavenagh copped an
extended grilling over a wide range of shortcomings with the soldier kit and
the supply system.
Your correspondent generally follows the estimates committee
hearings but didn’t specifically recall this event. So, courtesy for the full
Hansard transcript on the parliament website, he went for a second look.
MAJGEN Cavenagh started soon after 9am, sharing the joy with
then DMO head Stephen Gumley, CDF Angus Houston and Chief of Army Ken
Gillespie. Shadow defence minister David Johnston was asking most of the
questions. This continued for the better part of 10 hours and covered a very
broad range of topics to do with procurement of kit.
It mightn’t have seemed such a big deal at the time but in
hindsight much appears to have flowed from this. According to the study by
Peter Cebon and Danny Samson, this placed the symptoms of the problem into
sharp focus.
Senator Johnston probably didn’t have in mind broad reforms
but on the basis that his persistent questioning pushed along the process, he
can take a modest bow. A fair bit has been written about Diggerworks,
unashamedly named after the US military’s Gruntworks. In simplest terms this organisation
works out what the soldiers need by actually going out and asking them. From
there, the idea is to buy small quantities of quality kit more often to equip
those actually in the field, not the defence force.
It would seem to follow that buying small avoids the
economies of large-scale acquisition. But the study said there were offsets in
other areas. By not buying huge quantities, there’s not the problem of much of
it becoming obsolete.
As well there’s the intangibles – the diggers were happier
and performed better, with the plus for senior commanders that their gripes
didn’t end up featuring in the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
It’s understandable how the procurement system evolved to be
the way it was. In World War Two, the emphasis was on outfitting a vast citizen
army as speedily as possible and the performance was impressive. Post-war,
unionised government-owned defence factories soaked up so much taxpayer funds
that a despairing Labor government opted for privatisation.
In this new and globalised world, one issue which incited
public debate related to a never exercised option for Bendigo-based Australian
Defence Apparel to source fabric for combat clothing from China.
That was of course billed in the tabloid media as diggers
going off to war in Chinese-made battledress as an inevitable consequence of
defence cost-cutting. The government wasn’t about to allow that to happen, with
five-year contracts awarded at the end of last year to two Aussie firms.
However, no such outrage greeted moves to source initial
buys of the new Multicam pattern combat uniforms, issued to units deploying to
Afghanistan and well-regarded by the troops, from the US. It’s now made in
Australia.
In their study, Cebon and Samson ponder whether the lesson
of Diggerworks can be applied to other areas of defence procurement. The answer
seems to be, with a few minor exceptions, probably not because of the
idiosyncracies of procuring soldier kit.
For one thing, soldiers come in all shapes and sizes and do
different jobs, requiring a diversity of items, none particularly expensive by
the standards of jet fighters and most with a relatively short life, allowing a
replacement cycle in years rather than decades.
With Australia now out of East Timor, mostly out of the
Solomons and well on the way to getting most troops out of Afghanistan, the
challenge for defence will be to absorb the hard-learned lessons that led to
Diggerworks so well that we don’t have to repeat all this in the next round of
conflict, perhaps a decade down the track.
Soldiers in Afghanistan have benefitted from Diggerworks effort.
