An open letter to Richard Marles, Australia's new Defence Minister

Dear Mr Marles,

Congratulations on your appointments. You must know that you have a huge job before you in taking responsibility for national security as the country faces a risk of war and as it enters what will probably be decades of worsening strategic threat from China.

This letter offers some uninvited suggestions for what you should do.

First, take control. By that I mean you must not merely have the title of minister for defence but, unlike your predecessors, you must seize power from the country's demonstrably incompetent defence-planning establishment: the officials of your department and senior officers of the armed forces.

More interested in pet projects and long-familiar force structures than in responding to the country's alarmingly worsening circumstances, these people have hoodwinked each of your predecessors into persisting with planning that looks more obsolete with every passing month.

In short, your direct source of advice is not fully focused on China and the technical revolution predicted before the war in Ukraine and now coming into view there. Rather, it continues to strive for nothing more than a better version of what our forces have always wanted to be.

The navy will always want about 12 destroyers and frigates, as it has had for 60 years. The army will always want powerful, traditional equipment for intense land warfare, in imitation of NATO armies. The air force is less of a problem than the other two but is too focused on exotic technology far in the future.

All three like the obsolete principle of balanced force (a bit of this, a bit of that), which gives them an excuse to buy what pleases them and keeps disputes between them to a minimum.

Your election promise of a prompt review of defence policy is an excellent first step.

But you must not let the department and services conduct the review. They would just find new excuses for buying equipment that they have always wanted to get.

Rather, you should staff a review board with outside experts. Look for those who have no close connection with the armed forces. So people from think tanks associated with the navy, army and air force will not be usable; they'd probably be back channels for advice from the services.

Australian universities and other think tanks are not your only source of independent advice. Australia has the remarkable advantage of having four intimate allies, our Five Eyes partners, that can supply experts whom we could trust with our secrets but who would not have an institutional commitment to our current planning.

So, bring in people from the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand - service officers and industry engineers who wouldn't care about stepping on Australian military toes. Direct them to have no contact with our services except through a formal process of submissions and discussions.

Tell the review board that you are worried about China, China and China and are inclined to think that forces shaped for that threat will be enough for almost everything else we really need to do militarily.

Tell them that the government has no interest in forces going back to the Middle East. If the US and Britain ask for help there, we can send what we happen to have.

You need to move fast. As the US reshapes its strategy and forces, China may see a window of opportunity for lunging at Taiwan in the next few years.

Though the government, rightly, will not say so, you know that we would have to stand by the US in such a war. We would fear that if the US lost and withdrew from the western Pacific, it would see little reason to help an unhelpful Australia in standing up to a rampant China.

So you should tell your review board to give you a quick interim report on what acquisitions can be made to strengthen this country in the next two to three years.

This will not just be shiny equipment, though there will be some of that. The board will urge you to get moving on lots of low-profile elements of national security, things that make the country and its forces more robust: spare parts, weapon stocks, tough bases, survivable fuel storage and so on.

MORE AGE OF THE DRAGON:

You can safely anticipate the review's recommendations by cancelling a great array of incredibly costly army programs that are plainly irrelevant to a Taiwanese war and are in any case threatened by new technologies.

Tanks, self-propelled artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and attack helicopters would have no role in an air and maritime campaign to prevent China from seizing the island.

Cancel the lot and instantly free up almost $40 billion for paying for what the review board does recommend.

You don't need to wait for its inevitable judgement that the army in its present form is almost irrelevant to national security - and that it still would be when its costly equipment dreams were fulfilled.

The independent experts will surely tell you that much of the army must become a force for wielding long-range missiles.

Finally, you must get the nuclear submarine program moving faster. Your immediate predecessor, Peter Dutton, said that these vessels, so critical for our long-term security, should begin arriving before 2035, rather than around 2040, as first expected.

You can do even better. Ditch the time-wasting, money-wasting plan to build them in Adelaide. Just ask the US to build Virginia-class submarines as soon as it can expand its facilities to do so.

I look forward to the long-overdue upheaval in our defence planning.