The road map that is the RAAF has been a tragedy for 20 years.
The 1990s was the decade where highly skilled technical experts in Defence were weeded out and replaced with unskilled generalist managers. What is a generalist manager?
Expert: "This product is too hot to use safely in the kitchen."
Industry representative: "This product met all of our specifications."
Generalist Manager: "The truth must be somewhere in between."
Joey burns his hand off.
This is normalization of deviance behavior. Which can occur when performance or specification goals are not properly tested.
This is also the same behavior that killed two space shuttle crews.
This behavior has been the norm in the entrenched defence bureaucracy for 20 years. It has caused fraud, waste and abuse to the tune of billions of dollars for a variety of poor weapon systems.
Let us review that which is a pure debacle: the replacement of our old fighter-bomber aircraft.
In 1991, the U.S.Navy A-12 program was cancelled. It was to be the ultimate strike aircraft off of aircraft carrier decks for the future. It would replace the A-6 bomber.
"The A-12 I did terminate. It was not an easy decision to make because it's an important requirement that we're trying to fulfill. But no one could tell me how much the program was going to cost, even just through the full scale development phase, or when it would be available. And data that had been presented at one point a few months ago turned out to be invalid and inaccurate."Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, 1991
Badly bruised and having to replace old aircraft on the carrier deck, the Navy dusted off a plan from McDonnell Douglas that they had previously rejected as an A-6 replacement, the F-18 Super Hornet. It was 25 percent bigger than an old F-18 Hornet, and kind of looked like one.
The U.S. Navy told the U.S. Congress that the F-18 Super Hornet was an upgrade of the old F-18 Hornet, in order to bypass testing phases for new weapons. The F-18 Super Hornet was no such thing, but the U.S. Congress fell for the subterfuge.
Later because the F-18 Super Hornet wasn't prototyped it developed a variety of problems and ended up with reduced performance that was already underwhelming.
In the mid 1990's, when McDonnell Douglass had its Joint Strike Fighter proposal shot down along with no credible airliner industry sales for the future, it sold out to Boeing, which inherited the now Boeing F-18 Super Hornet.
In the late 1990s, Boeing took over management of the RAAF F-111 fighter-bomber sustainment. They were also looking for their first foreign customer for the F-18 Super Hornet: knowing that Australia would have to replace its old F-18 Hornets and F-111s.
In 2000, by this time, short of skilled senior Defence engineer leadership, Australia was well into creating a plan to replace its aging fighter aircraft. Various U.S. and European aircraft makers were allowed to submit proposals in what was to be the most rigorous weapon acquisition and procurement process in Defence history known as Project Air 6000.
For those that wanted the F-111 gone, what to do?
2002 started with the announcement that, "two of the RAAF’s Force Element Groups - Strike Reconnaissance Group (F-111) and Tactical Fighter Group (F/A-18 Hornet, Hawk and PC-9/A) - have merged to form Air Combat Group."
Further:
"The evidence for this lies in the fact that there are no direct ‘one for one’ capability replacements for the current platforms."
This made it easier to 1.) admit that there was no replacement for the F-111 and get on with things; 2) rolling everything into one organisation made future planning easier; 3) including that the future would be one type of tactical strike fighter. Not two.
In 2002, under U.S. pressure, a gullible Prime Minister Howard shelved all contenders for the Project Air 6000. Australia would have the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. This was an unheard of action. The F-35 was a paper airplane that was years from flying. It could not be properly evaluated for capability.
As time went on the F-35 had technical project management problems far above what was acceptable for design and development of weapon systems. Including, like the F-18 Super Hornet, it was never prototyped. For the readers out there, an X-35 concept demonstrator is not a prototype.
Four years after the Howard decision, in late 2006, Parliament listened to uniformed defence officials stating that the F-35 development problems and lateness could be taken care of by extending the life of the old F-18 Hornets. Parliament was also told the F-111 could fly many years if needed.
Not long after, the then Defence Minster Nelson allowed an audience with Boeing to show their F-18 Super Hornet in a slick sales brief. "Avoid capability gap".
Afterward, Nelson informed Defence and Howard's cabinet that he was urging an emergency procurement of 24 F-18F (two-seat) F-18 Super Hornets.
Uniformed Defence officials had never been consulted. Or, even done proper evaluation of the aircraft's capability.
At the time this was billed as a $6.6B procurement over 10 years of capability. It would replace the F-111. This was yet another fraud upon the taxpayer.
Today we have a small number of Super Hornets.Yet in their current form, they offer much more valued capability to a joint operational commander (including close air support) than the F-35 will ever see.
The RAAF also has a batch of of G model F-18 Super Hornets that are a radar jamming variant. The radar jammer pods on this aircraft, ALQ-99s, were in 2004, declared by the U.S. Navy as obsolete to emerging threats with no growth room.
And of course we are damned with a growing, but small number of F-35s with significant development problems. (scroll down the page to submission 19 which links to a PDF) One of the many is the gun is unable to hit anything reliably.
All the old F-18s are leaving fast.
What should a fighter aircraft do? (PDF)
Is this all doom and gloom? Yes and no.
We will be losing significant gross national product this year due to the virus.
Defence had capable procurement and acquisition people many years ago: with strong, world class engineering leadership skills.
If we focus on bringing that back, instead of believing everything that is presented in a U.S. PowerPoint briefing, then, we should have a bright Defence future. That includes living within means and not buying gold-plated systems unworthy for war.
If not, with federal debt approaching one trillion dollars, the pubic will get fed up. And then, our Defence road-map will give us an ADF the size and strength of, New Zealand.
Where are they now? Many people that took part in this fraud are retired. Nelson, who is responsible for dumping the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet upon us, is now president of Boeing Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific.
Photo: Charles Ponzi.
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