Page 75 - Australian Defence Magazine Nov 2020

NOVEMBER 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
BUDGET OVERVIEW 75
ABOVE: Defence spending is being used as an economic vaccine in the COVID age.
CAPITAL ACQUISITION AND SUSTAINMENT PROGRAMS
Between the two streams of funding, Defence is looking at $23.2 billion leaving the building to support capabilities old and new over the coming year. See Figures 2 and 3 for the Top 30 programs in each stream.
Meanwhile, 2020 is not all doom and gloom for Defence programs with a number of major programs reaching some key milestones this calendar year. These include:
• Decision to sole source to Hanwha Defense Australia for
self-propelled guns in Geelong
• Beginning of the Land 400 Phase 3 risk mitigation activ-
ity (RMA) with both contenders now having at least one
of their three test vehicles now in country
• Land 400 Phase 2 Boxers beginning to arrive in Australia
from Germany
• Delivery of the last Hobart class DDG to Navy
• Arrival of the first Supply class oiler in WA
• OPVs have hit major milestones with the move of production
from SA to WA with the third keel now laid at Henderson
• Both Attack and Hunter class programs have reached de-
sign milestones this year
• Retiring of the PC9 fleet and the completion of the PC21
fleet for flight training
• Delivery of the 30th JSF to RAAF
ADM also approached Defence to get an update on the First and Second pass approvals work done by government. This information used to be included in past PBS docu- ments but has disappeared unfortunately.
“The Department of Defence does not publish a compre- hensive list of capability decisions in order to protect the Commonwealth’s commercial, security and strategic lever- age,” a Defence spokesperson said. “The announcement of capability investment decisions are a matter for Government.
The 15 projects approved and announced by Government from 1 January 2020 to 7 October 2020 are seen in Figure 2 on the next page.
WORKFORCE
The average full-time workforce is forecast to be 77,139 in 2020-21, comprising 60,826 permanent ADF (79 per cent) and 16,313 APS employees (21 per cent); a scant one per cent increase from the previous year. Given the sheer amount of work that is needed to be done to deliver the program of work from government, it remains to be seen if the organisation will be able to get the work out the door fast enough.
The service breakdown of the ADF Permanent Force is seen in figure 3. The forecast for service categories 3, 4 and 5 in 2020-21 is 1,133,037 days of service performed by an esti- mated 21,061 members of the Reserve Forces. As part of the COVID-19 Response Package, Defence has expanded the em- ployment opportunities for ADF Reservists who may have lost civilian income with an allocation of up to an extra 210,000 days, accessible over two financial years, and also targeted re- cruitment of up to an additional 500 ADF Reservists.
Under the 2016 Defence White Paper and 2020 Force Structure Plan, the permanent ADF workforce will grow to
GETTY IMAGES