Taipan scandal highlights Defence underperformance

This time they've been caught red-handed. But will the national disgrace of the Taipan helicopter scandal do anything to reform our underperforming defence organisation?

Risks to the country are rising. The defence budget must go up. And we have to put the money in the hands of an organisation that we have just seen trying to secretly bury evidence of its incapacity.

We have always known the Department of Defence and armed services are often incompetent in running major programs. You will not find one defence analyst who has high regard for their managerial ability.

But usually the evidence of mismanagement is vague, confused by complexity in any military acquisition program and by the defence establishment's ability to impose secrecy. Quite often, you see, it's not keeping official secrets; it's keeping officials' secrets.

But it's been caught red-handed with the Taipans, helicopters of the troublesome NH90 design our army, unlike most operators internationally, decided it could not use satisfactorily. Just about every voter who is paying attention can see the wrongfulness in this business.

If getting rid of those rather new aircraft really was necessary, our own national interest and indeed any sense of decency demanded offering them to Ukraine, even before that desperate country asked for them.

But the donation would have led to Ukraine fighting a war with aircraft the army and department had said were unsuitable for operation.

The defence establishment is usually incapable of doing anything quickly. It can take years to buy army trucks, more than a decade for fighters and a good chunk of a century for frigates.

So we marvel at the speed with which it determined the Taipans should be scrapped and - this is the really amazing bit - how fast it got the actual work of dismantling them under way.

That took only a few weeks from the September decision never to fly them again.

Anyone would think departmental officials and army officers wanted to eliminate the aircraft as soon as possible.

By the way, wouldn't it have been prudent to go a bit slowly on this matter, since only a few of the replacement Blackhawk helicopters had arrived? Shouldn't the Taipans have been stored for a while in case some national emergency demanded sudden restoration of the army's air-transportation capability?

Even a decision for storage instead of continuing operation would have assumed that July's fatal crash had left evidence of the NH90 type being unsafe. Yet we know the lost chopper operated perfectly up to the point it hit the water. The manufacturer has said so.

Journalists keep lacing reports about this issue with the phrase "safety concerns", which flows agreeably into a keyboard in relation to any kind of aircraft. But what safety concerns, exactly? Are they safety concerns 12 countries that continue to fly NH90s are willing to ignore?

The government says it acted on official advice in choosing to scrap the Taipans instead of offering them to Ukraine - and that goes to the nub of the problem.

When senior people in the defence establishment have some motive other than national security in recommending a decision, their advice must be viewed sceptically. But defence ministers cave into it almost every time.

In the case of the Taipan scrapping, the ulterior motive was obviously to get rid of evidence of institutional incapacity. More usually, it's an armed service's desire to obtain equipment mainly for reasons of military tradition or careers. Or the service may want to get what's good for itself even though the money could be better used elsewhere.

Our army will always call for big armoured vehicles, for example, even though we have an essentially air and maritime defence problem. The navy will always want surface ships, no matter how vulnerable to missile attack they look. And all the services will want to add extra bells and whistles that cause 80 per cent of development problems and vastly drive up costs.

In the Taipan scrapping we have a case of wrong advice that's as clear as day. But will the government do anything to guard against recurrence?

Maybe a little. It is most unlikely to overturn a decision it's been hoodwinked into and forced to defend, but Defence Minister Richard Marles, after copping political heat as a result of this bad advice, will surely be alive to the risk in future.

Stopping the department and services from offering bad advice would require effective accountability. But they do everything they can to avoid it.

For example, there was no reason to keep the scrapping of the Taipans secret - yet that's just what the defence establishment did. That alone was an outrage in public administration.

Consider again that's the organisation that must handle hundreds of billions of dollars of additional funding to keep us safe from China.

The Taipan scandal probably wouldn't have come to national attention without one eye-catching detail: the plan to bury the choppers after they were stripped of parts. People sensed intuitively that was no way to deal with costly public assets.

And most are also annoyed, even embarrassed, at our failure to send the helicopters to Ukraine, which wants them mainly for rushing wounded soldiers to hospitals.

Well, the cause for embarrassment just got worse.

After our failure to supply modern helicopters we didn't want, Germany this week scrounged up six ancient ones to give to Ukraine. They're Sea Kings, about 50 years old and designed in the 1950s.

Germany has been able to make those dregs available because it's taking delivery of replacements - NH90s.