Page 4 - Australian Defence Magazine February 2022

4 EDITORIAL
FEBRUARY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
IT’S ALL ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY
NIGEL PITTAWAY | MELBOURNE
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IN MARCH last year the government an- nounced the acceleration of a $1 billion Sovereign Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance enterprise which, according to Defence, is designed to ‘provide an en- abling ecosystem’ to support its inventory of guided weapons.
Sovereign capability is a catch-phrase used throughout Defence and industry at the present time, but what is a sovereign capability, who decides what the phrase actually means and why is it so important to have such a capability?
If you ask a hundred different stakehold- ers across Government, Defence, industry and even academia, you’ll get almost as many definitions in return, and it seems every announcement and press release has
decade, experts warned the cost to the na- tion of not having the industry was greater than the money being spent to keep it afloat. The importance of having an end-to-end capability – from design, through to devel- opment, production engineering and manu- facture – nurtured an ecosystem similar to the one aspired to at the beginning of this piece, and more. The so-called ‘spill-effect’ that nurtured many SMEs in the motor in- dustry – and, by the way, fostered innovation – could not be measured on a balance sheet.
This was all pointed out at the time, but the political imperative was to reduce taxpayer burden, and so the entire ecosys- tem was allowed to atrophy. Will the same thing happen again in the defence sector? While the national shipbuilding program guarantees a degree of sovereign capabil- ity for the foreseeable future, what will happen when the last Land 400 vehicle rolls off the assembly line? And, assuming it is successful, what comes after Loyal Wingman to retain skills built from almost nothing over the life of that program?
Sovereignty is not a catch-word to be bandied around when convenient. It is along-termcommitmenttothefuture growthofthenation.
Changing topics, it’s time for me to ad- mit I was overly optimistic when predict- ing light at the end of the COVID tunnel last month. The new challenges posed by the Omicron variant have meant we have taken the hard decisions to postpone the annual ADM Congress to June and to hold the already-delayed 2021 WIDA event on- line. You can read about the WIDA winners beginning on page 20 of this issue and I’d like to add my congratulations to all of the finalists and thank them for their patience.
Finally, you will notice a new column in the pages of this issue, which looks at what is happening in our region and written by Mike Yeo. As Australia becomes more fo- cussed on the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, we think it is important to place our own pro- grams into regional context and we hope this will become a regular feature in the future. As always, please let us know what you think. ■
“SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT
A CATCH-WORD TO BE BANDIED AROUND WHEN CONVENIENT. IT IS A LONG-TERM COMMITMENT TO THE FUTURE GROWTH OF THE NATION”
to include the words ‘sovereign capability’ somewhere.
In her From the Source interview in ADM’s December- January issue, Min- ister for Defence In- dustry Melissa Price defines ‘sovereign capability’ as, “The ability of Australian industry to directly contribute to the ac- quisition and sustain- ment of our current and future defence capabilities.”
But surely true sovereignty is more than contributing to
a capability – it is by definition, complete control over something, in this case an ac- quisition program or weapons system? So, what implications does this – should this – have for defence industry?
Furthermore, can Australia afford to have sovereign defence capabilities – or perhaps more to the point, can it afford not to have them?
When the car manufacturing industry was being shut down due to the cost of maintaining such a capability on-shore last