Page 18 - Australian Defence Magazine Sep 2021

18 DEFENCE BUSINESS RETROSPECTIVE
SEPTEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
“THERE HAVE BEEN SO MANY INSTANCES DURING MY TIME WITH ADM WHERE I HAVE BEEN BLOWN AWAY BY THE GENEROSITY OF THOSE IN THE COMMUNITY”
While I am by no means an engineer, good engineering and even better opera- tors underpin everything the ADF and its support industry does. I cannot thank those who have taken the time to help myself and the ADM team understand the technology and business behind what we do as a Defence community.
When asked about what I do at ADM my elevator pitch has always been ‘I meet interesting and passionate people who explain their business and tech- nology to me, and travel the country
is huge but generally slow on most things with periods of intense activity. This pattern has not really changed over my time with ADM. There are of course exceptions along the way, but large complex programs take many years. I started writing about Land 121 in 2007 and wrote a piece on how the program is going as late as last year. Trucks and trailers are not rocket science but here we are.
Then-head of the AWD program Warren King at Pacific 2008 explained how the Hobart class Air Warfare Destroy- ers will sail around the heads at Sydney for the 2013 Fleet Review for Navy’s centenary, and how getting the program right was “essential if the Australian taxpayer was ever go- ing to trust us to build warships in our nation ever again.” Time has shown he was mostly right. Mostly.
That same year, I attended the Land Environment Work- ing Group (LEWG – the most recent LEWG saw me asked to leave after morning tea) where Steve Dunn admitted that the Land 400 programs were still not formally underway but thinking was progressing well, and the timeline for Land 19 Phase 7 was defined as 1st pass in 2012, 2nd pass in 2015, and IOC in 2018-2020.
2008 also saw DMO CEO Dr Steve Gumley say that 2008 was a year of reflection and 2009 would be a year of ‘doing it’. At that time, DMO was spending $2 billion a year with 600-700 SMEs in both sustainment and acquisition, with 50 per cent of contracts sole sourced. He emphasised that the DMO was trying to prioritise outcomes over pro- cess but ‘the desk officer level was not working as well as it could and the culture was slow to change’. He identified five bottlenecks to the organisation delivering capability: 1. Capability Development Group (CDG) did not have
enough people and DMO was loaning them teams to supplement their workforce.
ABOVE: Nothing says fun like PPE in a tank on a German test range.
and the world to do it. Then I write about it.’
Informed debate is based on informed media. We act as
a mirror to what is happening. That reflection is not always pretty but it is always in motion.
CLEAN OUT
In cleaning out my office, I have rediscovered every single note- book I have ever filled while reporting for ADM. I’m reminded about the various briefings, conferences and interviews over the years. Here are some of my reflections on those notes.
My very first Avalon Air Show in 2007 was epic at only six months into the job. I flew in a C-27J at sunset over the 12 Apostles (with the back cargo bay door open) that Boe- ing had brought out with Alenia; I was hooked. I remember then-Lockheed Martin JSF program head Tom Burbage ex- plaining that only partner nations in the JSF program would ever receive work packages and JASM was a good option.
The end of that year saw DMO CEO Stephen Gumley and Defence Minister Brendan Nelson go on a contract signing tour bonanza for Land 121 trucks and trailers, LHDs and AWDs. It was then that I had my first glimpse into the real scale and scope of Defence spending. In less than a two- week period, billions of taxpayer dollars had been commit- ted to capabilities outlined in 2000 White Paper. Defence