News Review: Minister releases 10-year DCP | ADM Feb 2011
Gregor Ferguson | Sydney
Shortly before Christmas, minister for defence Stephen Smith released the second update to the 2009 Defence Capability Plan (DCP).
As promised, this is a 10-year DCP and contains 140 projects or project phases worth over $150 billion at today’s prices.
This update was shaped, he said, by an independent review of the DCP commissioned by the Government from the ASPI in 2009 on ways to make the DCP a more useful and more transparent document.
“Defence will conduct various forums to enable industry to suggest further improvements to the information provided,” Smith added.
“After the release of the next hard-copy Public DCP in mid 2011, Defence will update the on-line version more frequently as changes are approved by Government.”
The updated DCP contains 140 capability projects or phases, of which 41 were not in the February 2010 DCP update, while four projects or phases have been deleted – three of them because they had undergone 2ndPass approval and the fourth because it had been subsumed into another capital equipment project.
Importantly, the DCP also includes more helpful budget estimates for each phase.
The individual project entries include assessments of the complexity of different elements of the project, such as project management, technical and commercial (and an explanation of how these assessments are made); and broad estimates (across two financial years) for key milestones: 1st pass approval, market solicitation, year of decision (2nd pass approval), initial materiel release (IMR) and initial operational capability (IOC).
This update also provides better guidance to industry on how critical defence considers certain industry activities to be. Instead of simply identifying potential industry opportunities the individual project entries qualify them: Preferred; Desired; and Optional. They also highlight Priority Industry Capabilities (PICs) and Australian Industry Capability (AIC) obligations.
The new additions to the DCP include a batch of critical naval projects: the replacement for HMAS Success (Sea 1654 Ph.3), and the Next Generation Combatant, its weapons and its strike capability (Sea 5000 Ph.1, 2 and 3, respectively); there is also a new Phase to Sea 4000 – Air Warfare Destroyer strike capability.
Project Sea 1000 – Future Submarine takes on more definition with separate sub-phases for design (Ph.1), acquisition (ph.2), weapons (ph.3) and maritime based strategic strike (ph.4).
Key Land projects which are new to the DCP include Land 400 Phases 2a and 2b – cavalry combat system and land combat vehicle systems, respectively, and an upgrade to the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. Also in the new DCP is Land 159 Ph.1 – ADF small arms replacement.
Interestingly, the lack of a maritime strike weapon for the RAAF’s F-35A Lightning IIs is addressed through Joint Project 3023 Ph.1, rather than a new sub-phase of Air 6000.
Otherwise, the extended 10-year horizon of this DCP update reintroduces Air 7000 Ph.1B – multi-mission unmanned aircraft system.
This isn’t due to enter service now until 2022-23 at the earliest and raises the question of how the RAAF will manage the transition from its current fleet of 18 AP-3C Orions; Ph.2b will see the P-8A Poseidon enter service from 2017 and the delay in Ph.1b could require the RAAF to extend the lives of some of its AP-3Cs.
As befits an increasingly “joint” and networked defence force, Joint Projects are now the most numerous in the DCP covering the full panoply of networking, security, logistics, ISR, communications, command and control and intelligence.
Smith stated some 16 DCP projects worth nearly $2 billion have undergone 1st or 2nd Pass approval since February 2010; he also warned there was some over-programming built into the December 2010 update “to provide flexibility and to ensure that best use is made of available funding in the development of individual projects. Over-programming means that project timing may change.”