1.1 Defence: Edifice of Hypocrisy

Defence has five values – Service, Courage, Respect, Integrity, Excellence But Defence is a morally bankrupt organisation – it does not operate nor adhere to any ethical framework. Its organisational constitution is bureaucratic and legal. It has built itself into a monolith of contradiction. It is the desperate construction of ignoble and fallacious leadership who understand only their autocratic power, with no regard for common decency or humanity, serving a largely ambivalent government; as the government does not concern itself with Defence, only in that, it exists and serves petty political ends.

But, the hypocrisy is a cancer, and it has metastasized. There is no saving the organisation now. Make no mistake, Defence has many wonderful human beings amongst its ranks – but it is not enough. I understand that you do not believe me – let us begin.

On 19 November 2020, Defence announced the release of the Inspector-General of the ADF Afghanistan Inquiry – led by a man of questionable integrity, Major General Paul Brereton. This was the day Government and Military leadership cemented their hypocrisy and certified it beyond doubt.

When you commence a career in Defence, particularly an officer career, you are taught many things about leadership – one of the crucial aspects of command taught is that a commander has authority, and responsibility. You are taught that authority can be delegated, but never responsibility. This inalienable aspect of integrity is necessary to provide leaders the privilege of command, to facilitate their authority to kill, and send others to their death. Without integrity, the military does not and cannot function. You do not need to take my word for it, this has long been baked into Defence’s own leadership philosophy and doctrine.

The Afghanistan Inquiry formally broke this. It permanently suspended the notion that leadership was responsible. It propped up the case that somehow, in the far-away Middle East, all of the things leaders are, were, should be, responsible for, did not apply. This is not to excuse the obvious wrongdoings of the soldiers – but anyone who understands this, knows that the leadership created, systematically, and intentionally, an environment where such events were guaranteed to occur if alone by circumstance, and more likely, by covert license. Leadership failed the soldiers in how it managed deployments, in how it managed people, in how it managed missions, in how it supported operations, in how it enabled people, and in how it willingly turned a blind eye to many, many things. Defence leaders today, and for some time, have been sophisticated bureaucrats – they know what to know, what to admit, what to put in writing – they know which discussions need to be had in private – and what needs to follow in the email afterwards, the politically correct stuff that may one day be found by FOI request.

The Afghanistan Inquiry is only one of many reviews Defence has been subject to – in the past two decades or so, they also underwent the Grey Review and the Broderick review – and yet , ADFA undergraduates just can’t stop committing crimes against women. The basic issue of facilitating even the most essential level of protection for women is so severe, and so incapable of being managed, that Defence is subject to a class-action lawsuit by thousands current and former serving women. Defence is not a safe place for women, because it is not a safe place for people. What many will not understand is that senior Defence leadership tends to despise its own people, and more importantly, they are feckless cowards who will do anything to preserve their own careers and hurriedly iron-out problems. This does not mean they act to resolve issues correctly, but merely to extricate problems as cleanly as possible to create the facade of a flawless complexion; regardless of whether anything has been achieved at all.

Defence consistently markets itself as an exciting and interesting place to work, that people are its focus, its highest priority, and its most cherished capability. One must wonder why then, a Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide is required to get leadership to treat people with a shred of dignity. There is no need to excuse or reform the policy however – the policy itself is there, it is robust – the issue is, that the people in command simply do not care. Defence has all the tools – it would just rather that you killed yourself^. If you do manage to escape, or survive, Defence will do anything for its Veterans, as long as its within budget.

^ “The risks were obvious and known to Defence through existing policies and guidelines. These policies can only ever mitigate risk if they are applied and followed in practice, and if they are supported by training those responsible for implementing them”

Defence commentary is always propaganda, with major work being invested in creating the social license for immense amounts of government expenditure in a “dangerous and uncertain world”. If things are so dangerous right now, why are nuclear submarines in the 2030s and 2040s the solution for today? If things are so complex, why has Defence so constantly thinned out and reduced training to its people. Every part of Defence has seen a hollowing out of its training, with examples abundant: most Western Fighter pilots are flying well below hours-flown relative to Chinese Fighter Pilots – and capability sustainment and readiness rates are struggling everywhere from Collins-class submarines to the persistently dysfunctional LHDs (with a healthy dose of corruption). The entire Defence portfolio has been heaving for many years now in ineffectual agony; the antithesis of everything it is supposed to be on the label. Defence is not training its people to succeed; not investing in getting the right amount of training; and critically, unable to actually spend money in any manner that generates tangible results, or cost-effective outcomes, in essentially any domain. It is obvious that any reduction in training is counterintuitive in an environment of increasing complexity and uncertainty. Such a plain contradiction, of word relative to action, is one of the most observable examples of the consistent dishonesty in which Defence leadership engages the public and the extent to which Government, constantly misrepresents the readiness and capacity of the nation’s military.

Such issues can never be addressed whilst the hypocrisy lives in every action and every deed. Defence consistently sells itself as a fair and equitable organisation. But elitism is baked into its payscales – fighter pilots are paid the highest tier within the Officer Aviation Payscale, separate from the ordinary payscale most plebs and regular officers find themselves on. We are all in it together, but some people are more equal than others. You would not think this possible in an organisation of “service” and “sacrifice” but these intangible things apparently do not hold up in reality against competitive remuneration in the real world. If these competitive pay-incentives were sufficient, why is it always in, or on the buffet of, a retention and recruitment crisis? Defence has constantly hollowed out pay and benefits for its people – Defence Housing benefits have tended to fall well below inflationary requirements, and superannuation has been consistently downgraded (the legacy pension scheme, to MSBS, to now just ordinary public-service superannuation).

It is partly that Defence is never satisfied in the way it mistreats some, and gilds others – fighter pilots are already the best paid personnel in the ADF, and certainly have the best conditions overall. You would think flying the most magnificent machines man has ever built would be enough, but, fighter pilots are just ordinary and sometimes greedy people. Defence is happy to self-inflict its retention woes, for one need only look at the F-35 Simulator Contracts in Williamtown to understand the very peculiar manner in which full-time (SERCAT7) instructor pilots were allowed to reduce their working rate to part-time (SERCAT5) so they could pick up instructor roles, contracting, doing the exact same work they would have already been doing (or could have been doing in uniform, full-time) whilst also staying flying. Such a crossover is effectively non-existent in any military because of the obvious conflicts of interest; particularly given the financial incentives of contracting whilst engaged in enduring participation in classified programs; and the underlying loss-of-control the organisation has on someone once they leave the uniform (even partly). No doubt senior leadership in Air Combat Group sold this as an efficiency; but it is just double-dipping at the expense of the taxpayer.

It should be clear by now that Defence leadership is a perpetual paradox – the MRH-90 Taipan incident has been an apt, and horrifying look, into the culture in Defence for many outside the veil. One important thing to understand is that the risks associated with aviation, with any part of Defence business, are “held”, that is, signed off for operational approval by senior leadership. Many senior commanders talk about the “risk they hold”. Indeed, hold quite loosely – since none have even been held to account when risks are realised. There are some important lessons to be learned about systemic factors and human factors – but the buck must stop somewhere; someone signed off on something that sent those men to their death. What’s the value of the signature if there is no consequence; we could just replace all these people and their signatures with rubber stamps and save quite a bit on senior leadership salary, no doubt. Here is Dan Davies Fundamental Law of Accountability from his book The Unaccountability Machine

The extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.

The Taipan crash and the lack of accountability makes me furious, so let me enlighten you further. Talisman Sabre is a huge exercise; flying during this exercise is often one of the most exhausting experiences an aviator can have because of the intensity over several weeks. The entire Aviation Safety Framework in Defence, and honestly, globally, is built on a human factors model – machines are well understood, and redundant – and assuming companies like Boeing don’t design machines to fail – the machines should fail and degrade gracefully; and only in the most truly impossible circumstances will things occasionally go wrong in a way that is or was beyond feasible human management. Almost all aviation incidents today are human factors related – the squishy, fleshy, perfectly fallible operator, maintainer or engineer. Defence builds its entire safety model on the precept that their “humans perform at the required standard and therefore nothing will go wrong” – and this applies equally to those operating the platforms as it does to those who maintain them. Well.

Given the serious issues with the Top Owl helmet – that instrumentation critical for attitude flying would spontaneously be in error during certain head movements – alone should have been enough to recognise it as not fit for purpose. Safety protocols, like memory-immediate action drills and recovery actions require instinctive recognition and reaction by the pilot to preserve the aircraft. So a heavily fatigured MRH-90 pilot is already under further stress owing to their duties; adding in the inherent complexities of formation flying, low flying and night flying – then human factors model is already at, if not beyond, its limit. When something inevitably goes wrong, a pilot reacts; but the Top Owl is permitted to give the pilot the wrong information. A pilot will either then be disorientated, delaying the correct response or inputting the incorrect response; or input the perceived correct response based on the incorrect, but instinctive, parsing of the data available. Layer on fatigue, layer on mission complexity, layer on degraded situational awareness; was such a flight ever within the risk tolerance? Was such an outcome really surprising? People are dead because of the apathy endemic to Defence leadership, that desperation in command to “perform” no matter the cost or consequences. Where is the person who signed off, who “held the risk”; it is easy to sign off on anything when you will never be held accountable – either in court, or by reality itself.

This is the tip, of the tip, of the iceberg. Defence never publicly acknowledged the Australia Day 2019 near-miss controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) of the C-130 in Sydney – and the fact the crew flew a second mission that day, even though it happened in plain sight during a display. The F/A-18F Super Hornet ejection in 2020 had over a year-long precursor of degradation in standards and performance, exacerbated seriously by demanding and unreasonable leadership – for which they were also, in-effect, exonerated of any contribution by the investigation. As is only natural of course. I do not think Defence has ever explained why the M1A1 tanks it sent to Ukraine, that it never used, needed to be replaced by M1A2 tanks, it also never intends to use. Who knows, Defence has no Plan B for submarines, but if you never intend to use them, I suppose contingencies are not required. Accountability is just word. Accounting is merely a financial process.

The Australian Government will never tell you so many things, so many public, obvious things. I do not decry the keeping of real state secrets – technical secrets, intelligence, espionage – the things it needs to keep secret. The Government wants no accountability and so it simply chooses not keep records (a different department, but it is official Defence policy to use Signal) – I suppose that makes it easier to reject FOI requests, if nothing exists. But that resistance to transparency and the cloak of secrecy espoused as necessary on the pretext of “National Defence and Security” is so broad and all-encompassing that, that I suspect soon, even the air you and I breath will be classified or redacted under such a premise – anything and everything is a threat to an institution that knows it is wrong. It is the pathway to dictatorships, of all kinds.

But the unassailable position of hypocrisy that Defence has built for itself, is its own doing and undoing. People sense it. People feel it. People know it. It is death by a thousand cuts. I fear the next phase though, partly because many more are likely do die in the interim unnecessarily and partly because it is hard to believe there is a peaceful or optimistic resolution to this. Defence will have to come clean sooner or later on many things – the impotence of the military, its lack of strategy, its subservience to American doctrine, technology and goals – its mountains and fields and continents of failure slowly cobbled together over decades of dishonesty and illusion. If it does not seek reform during a period of peace, it will be a horrifying revelation in a time of conflict. War is the most honest device; tragic, unnecessary, wholly undesirable; but it is so abrupt, frank and direct that it simply cannot be ignored, it bears no excuses and disregards all pleas. This is not a homage to war, but a recognition that it is an unstoppable force against anything with even a hint of fallibility.

There is no fixing nor reforming Defence, not from the inside. I strongly suggest, if you are considering a job in uniform, to reconsider. Do not join the ADF. Perhaps one day it will resonate with all the pretenses it currently claims, but that is a distant future. Joining the uniform is accepting the hypocrisy. Becoming a member of the ADF is take on the mantle of contradiction. Your talents are of value – and you are of value – so go make a real difference somewhere else.

Until then, let the hypocrisy fester. Every tumor eventually kills its host. We will know the day when Defence is ready for change.