Is our broken defence force fit for purpose in the age of Trump?

Has Donald Trump turned the world upside down for Australia, which can no longer look to America for its security? Or is he simply a more transactional leader than we’re used to, and the US remains our friend, albeit a more demanding one?

Are the major parties engaged in “bipartisan gaslighting”, as Malcolm Turnbull calls it, of voters by insisting everything’s fine when it comes to Australia’s relationship with America? Or should cool heads prevail and we should avoid overreacting to Trump’s bluster and tariffs?

Let’s call them the minimalist and maximalist theses: either Australia can pursue business as usual in relation to its strategic security objectives, with just a few minor tweaks, or Australia faces a new world in the biggest challenge to its security environment since World War II. In such a world, not only do major projects like AUKUS need to be reviewed — and likely dumped — but our entire security framework needs a root-and-branch review.

The line from the government and the opposition is that the former is the case. America is still our friend, even if it doesn’t act like one, and is still reliable as a security partner. AUKUS is chugging along nicely and is safe under Trump.

In the latter camp is Malcolm Turnbull, who is so concerned that he’s holding a conference of security experts to engage in “a fundamental rethink across a broad range of policies, especially the AUKUS submarine project, trade, defence and regional diplomacy”. With him is former navy chief Chris Barrie, who says, “We’re in a whole new world, and we need to recalibrate Australia’s strategic priorities to reflect the fact that the US is no longer a reliable ally”.

But in truth, whether you’re Team Maximalist or Team Minimalist, there is no safe place for the Department of Defence in this debate: there’s no scenario in which defence does not face additional pressure and scrutiny.

That’s because even the minimalist position involves a significant lift in defence spending. In the 2024 budget, the government committed to increasing defence spending to 2.3% of GDP. The Coalition insists it will spend even more (it’s promised to waste $3 billion on a couple dozen more F-35s), but refuses to specify a figure — though it won’t be as high as 3% of GDP.

That’s the kind of spending the Trump administration has already flagged it wants to see from Australia. And while the prime minister said Australia, and not the Trump administration, would determine how much it would spend on defence, Richard Marles (like any defence minister with the prospect of more funding dangled in front of him) has said that he’s ready to talk to the US about spending more.

The maximalist position, inevitably, is that Australia needs to spend a lot more on defence because it now needs to stand on its own two feet and not assume the US will help. Indeed, given Trump’s treatment of Ukraine, in the event Australia is attacked, all we might get from America is abuse, demands for our mineral resources and the cessation of intelligence-sharing.

But there have been domestic calls — to the extent that ex-military chiefs lamenting the lack of defence spending isn’t a media staple in any decade outside actual wars — to lift defence spending from commentators for some time, usually in response to the horrific threat supposedly posed by China (a country that notably hasn’t declared that it wants to annex, say, Vietnam to become another province of China).

The rub is that even these advocates for more defence spending recognise it can’t happen without significant reform at the Department of Defence. One of the “3%” advocates, former defence secretary Dennis Richardson, is engaged in a review of the failings of the Australian Submarine Agency, which was only established in 2023 to run our end of AUKUS.

And Peter Jennings, the neocon from central casting and ex-head of ASPI — plus one of the few who still insist the Iraq disaster was a good idea — has also advocated for 3% with the Institute of Public Affairs (yes, the same IPA that used to support less government spending). But even Jennings admits that the Defence Department simply isn’t up to the job of spending more money.

There’s no point spending more on defence if it is not spent well. We won’t retrace the endless cycle of reviews and reports into defence’s record of underperformance, particularly in its delivery of capability. This vast literature includes independent reviews appointed by governments of both sides of politics, reports by parliamentary committees, invaluable investigations by the Australian National Audit Office and masses of analysis by think tanks and commentators. 

Jennings’ proposed solution — a panel of people like him to (secretly) hold the department’s feet to the fire on behalf of government — is laughable. But when even Jennings says “the system is broken”, it means no-one can credibly advocate for more defence spending without simultaneously discussing exactly how they would reform the department to purge — or at least minimise — the incompetence, or corruption, or both, that drives its serial underperformance.

That goes especially for politicians. As shown by the Coalition’s barmy idea of buying more of the wretched F-35s — at one time Australia’s worst defence procurement decision but now a mere footnote to AUKUS — politicians usually only exacerbate the bad decisions made at Russell Hill (unless, like former ministers Linda Reynolds and Melissa Price, the department actively misleads you on big decisions).

So the maximalist v minimalist debate partly proceeds from a false assumption — that Australia can increase its defence spending in a way that is actually going to achieve the kinds of strategic goals we want — whether we think the Americans will still come to our rescue and AUKUS will ever deliver a single boat, or whether we think we’re now in a Hobbesian world where we need to arm ourselves quickly.

And as always, the Defence Department sits silent in all this, magisterially non-transparent, refusing to respond to the most basic requests for information, gleefully delaying and blocking FOI requests and pushing back against auditor-general pressure to be publicly accountable for its major projects. Its position is very much business as usual.

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