Hegseth’s Heroes lurch into action, but Australia’s capability gap isn’t weapons

Australia’s defence hawks have chosen to overlook US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sabre-rattling and inconvenient omission of AUKUS in his weekend speech in Singapore, instead focusing on his call for Australia to lift defence spending to 3.5% of GDP “as soon as possible“.

That would be $91 billion a year at the moment, compared to the $50-odd billion currently committed, which is expected to rise to $60 billion by the end of the decade.

It’s only a few weeks since incoming Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby said Australia should increase spending to 3% of GDP. But what’s half a percentage point of GDP between allies?

That’s the problem with the obsession with GDP-based ambit claims — it quickly devolves into an auction-like process in which 2.5 is higher than 2.33, and neither is as high as 3, and what about 3.5? Hey, 5% is really what’s needed.

Hegseth’s call unleashed the usual suspects. Greg Sheridan called it a “pivot point in Australian history”, a dramatic escalation of rhetoric from his passing nod to Colby’s call in March. And right on cue, Crikey favourite Peter “Iraq was a good idea, let’s go back” Jennings emerged to lament our low spending and blame Anthony Albanese for failing “to invest in the US relationship“.

We’re beginning to wonder whether Jennings exists anymore; he seems more like an AI model asked to spit out calls for higher defence spending and produce shopping lists by rote. His claim that the government hasn’t invested in the US relationship is downright bizarre, given AUKUS, the ever-growing integration of the Australian military into the US military machine and the handing over of Australian territory to the US Marines, Air Force and Navy, all of which have accelerated on Albanese’s watch. Perhaps the Jennings chatbot needs tweaking.

The response from the prime minister, however, is that it is already lifting defence spending, that Australia sets its defence policy, not anyone else, and that you can’t just issue demands for GDP-based defence spending levels without identifying what it would be spent on.

To which he might have added, “or say how it would be funded”. Not one of Hegseth’s Heroes explains how the extra tens of billions of dollars a year are to be funded — what taxes should be increased, or what other spending should be cut.

At least Peter Dutton, in his otherwise disastrous announcement of extra defence spending during the election campaign, said that his extra spending would be funded by not proceeding with Labor’s tax cuts from the 2025 budget. Hegseth’s Heroes don’t have the guts to do similar.

The other problem is this: all the focus is on what additional weaponry we need, with drones and missiles featuring prominently. And, yes, there’s a strong case for both. But the biggest gap in Australia’s defence capability isn’t in hardware but wetware: we don’t have enough people.

Jennings, at least, comes close to understanding this when he warns that “the Defence Department and ADF would need deep reform to change thinking and acquisition plans”. He proposes “to expand the military by about 25,000 personnel or more. That means fixing recruitment … I would boost reserves and cadets. People, not equipment, are the most pressing need.”

Recruitment is a huge problem for the Army and Navy, and Labor’s efforts to fix it have been unsuccessful, as I explained recently in The Mandarin. I’ve yet to see any of Hegseth’s Heroes, or any of the other advocates for more defence spending, offer a constructive suggestion as to how this might be fixed. And given defence recruitment across the Western world and even in China is a problem, we’re all ears for ideas from the Three Per Cent Club (Hegseth’s helpful answer is to kick trans people out of the US military).

And all this is before the fabled Virginia-class submarines, which will require three times the crew of our current subs, if they ever arrive.

Nor has anyone come up with a serious idea about how to fix the manifest incompetence and possible corruption that characterise the Defence Department and its handling of major procurement and contract management, and pretty much everything else.

My suggestion? We need a royal commission into defence’s mishandling of procurement and contract management, with the implementation of the ensuing recommendations to be overseen by a PM&C-led taskforce. Even then, we’d likely need an Andrew Hastie-style defence minister with the CV to stare down top brass and defence bureaucrats, who have a disturbing track record of misleading and hiding information from their ministers.

That, again, is a people problem: we need significantly better defence bureaucrats than we currently have.

Another people problem lies in the widespread calls for what Jennings refers to as a “need to turbocharge domestic industry for our, and allied, needs”. Everyone, Labor included, wants a much bigger local defence industry. But where are the workers coming from? Unemployment is 4%. Labor is already trying to expand domestic manufacturing in renewables, green tech and other protectionist boondoggles. And we’ve committed to a long-term development of a nuclear submarine servicing capability as well. Where, exactly, do the advocates for a supersized Aussie defence sector think they’ll be able to recruit workers from? Or what industries do they want to shut down to provide the workforce?

We need more soldiers and sailors, even without expanding the ADF. We need better bureaucrats, even without increasing defence spending. We need a lot more defence industry workers. And without those, any extra defence spending is likely to be wasted, or will sit in Defence’s bank accounts because it can’t spend it.

It’d be helpful if Hegseth’s Heroes grappled with that. But it’s much easier for the armchair admirals to attack the government and throw around GDP percentage figures. Maybe they think the numbers will do the fighting.