A former senior Royal Australia Navy officer has again hit out at the defence bureaucracy and its impact on maritime capabilities in particular, describing it at the Australian Naval Institute Goldrick Seminar as “that same leaden deadweight, inflicting a ruinous, gelatinous drag on the Navy,” Australian Defence Magazine reports.
Retired Rear Admiral Rowan Moffitt said some Navy capabilities were now on life support and others in palliative care.
Much of the shrinking surface combatant fleet was older than the ships of the World War 2 Scrap Iron Flotilla and relatively less capable, while submarines will cling on past retirement age, he said at the Goldrick Seminar.
Rowan Moffitt served 40 years in the Navy, retiring in 2013 at the rank of Rear Admiral. He’s long been critical of the defence bureaucracy.
He said by 2045 current plans will have grown the navy surface combatant fleet a bit and returned it overall to the firepower it had late last century.
Meanwhile, regional navies will have advanced in combat power to the middle of this one and grown considerably.
Furthermore, the Navy’s capacity, breadth, depth and resilience have all been systematically sliced away too.
“For a generation, the higher Defence bureaucracy has been that same leaden deadweight, inflicting a ruinous, gelatinous drag on the Navy,” he said.
“We contend that forty-year quest by governments for an efficient bureaucracy has lost sight of its purpose. The bureaucracy has become the purpose.”
Governments’ persistent unhappiness with Defence’s performance had led to a merry-go-round of constantly reviewing, reimagining, rethinking, reversing and renouncing the repeatedly proposed and infinitely pliable Defence reorganisations, he said.
“No review has addressed Australia’s dependence on the sea, and none has sought to secure the nation’s interests at sea. Australia’s diminished, disintegrated Navy today is the outcome,” he said.
“No review has done more than tinker at the edges with the problems that beset all but basic military hardware acquisitions. No review has been effective in solving elemental problems. No review has been the seed corn of effective change.”
Moffat said the Navy rigorously applied a foundational concept to its ships’ companies – that those who are qualified are allowed to perform tasks.
But that had been wilfully ignored for a generation in creating the higher Defence bureaucracy, where generalists dominate.
“The quest for efficiency, aimed primarily at creating a better bureaucracy, has lost sight of the need for specialists of many disciplines. It’s why we also grade the Department a ‘fail’ on meritocracy,” he said.
There was also a fail for chain of command – because of today’s impenetrable matrix structure where no-one was responsible or able to be held accountable for the most important things.
Moffat said the rising pyramid of bureaucracy, as expounded by British naval historian Cyrile Parkinson, was precisely what had happened unchecked in higher Defence this century.
“Since the turn of the century, the head count in each rank from Captain to Vice Admiral has tripled. Senior civilian numbers have ballooned similarly. Meanwhile, the higher bureaucracy seems to have become less adaptable, more prescriptive, less communicative, more secretive, less effective and more officious,” he said.
“Rather than the courageous independent exercise of authority and taking responsibility, which we would hope is the defining hallmark of a military culture, the higher Defence bureaucracy seems to have cultivated irresolution and excuse. People have been duped by a culture where good character equals being a team player. Consensus has become compulsory.”
