Labor Tribune speaks with a defence insider: while it might seem like a boring bureaucratic restructure, Marcus Strom argues that the new military procurement body reveals much that is rotten with the defence establishment.
The Albanese government has announced that three Department of Defence major procurement groups – the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG), the Naval Shipbuilding and Sustainment Group, and the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Group – will be folded into a single entity: the Defence Delivery Agency (DDA).
On paper, it seems a major restructure. In reality, according to a well-informed former Defence source who spoke to Labor Tribune, it is simply the latest swing of a decades-long pendulum.
“It’ll do nothing,” the insider said. “Every decade they flip between forming a single procurement agency, deciding it’s a behemoth, then split it up before later deciding it’s disjointed – and then they re-amalgamate them.”
If all this sounds familiar, it is because it is. The same restructuring cycle surfaced in a 2010–11 parliamentary report and as far back as a 2010 news story announcing a new CEO for the then-procurement arm. The pattern has repeated under both Labor and Coalition governments.
A tradition dating back to Whitlam
The roots of the process can perhaps be traced back to the Gough Whitlam era. The then secretary of the department, Arthur Tange, overhauled the whole system, whereby cabinet was reported to equally by civilian and military leaders – a diarchic reporting structure. Apocryphally perhaps, Whitlam is said to have told Tange to “sort out the generals”.
“Ever since,” the source said, “Defence has tried to look like it is cleaning itself up by reorganising the furniture. But until you change the culture and financial oversight, nothing shifts.”
How we got here: 25 years of churn
The structure of defence procurement has been in constant flux:
- 2000 (Howard): Defence Acquisition Office merges with Support Command Australia to form the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO).
- 2005 (Howard): DMO becomes a standalone agency reporting directly to the minister.
- 2014 (Abbott/Andrews): First Principles Review recommends merging DMO and CDG. CASG is created.
- 2010s–2020s: CASG repeatedly split – naval shipbuilding and guided weapons spun out under Coalition governments, continued under Albanese.
- 2024–25 (Albanese): All merged again into the new Defence Delivery Agency.
This churn is not administrative efficiency, but about generals moving toy soldiers around on a bureaucratic map, spending billions of taxpayers’ money largely unaccountably.
Multibillion-dollar machine without adult supervision
The central problem, the insider insists, is the near-total absence of Department of Finance oversight.
“Any time Finance tries to get involved, they get snowballed with nonsense until they back off,” they said.
Since the Howard era, procurement projects have increasingly been run by the uniformed military without any serious civilian oversight.
“An officer’s job is to get as much money into their service as possible – jets for the RAAF, ships for the Navy. No one ever gets promoted for cancelling a project, only for growing one.”
The result? A structure prone to bloat, duplication and opacity – a vast multibillion-dollar slush fund, effectively accountable only to itself.
Revolving doors and future careers
The Defence portfolio is infamous for its revolving door into the arms industry. Former ministers and senior staff – from Kim Beazley and Mike Kelly to Brendan Nelson and Christopher Pyne – have slid seamlessly into military-industrial roles.
And with Defence Minister Richard Marles having no hope of becoming prime minister, his exhortations at the recent Indo-Pacific arms expo in Sydney that the weapons on display were “beautiful, menacing and extremely cool” were widely seen as a job application to the weapons manufacturers and merchants of death. Who knows if the current Minister for Defence Industry, Pat Conroy will follow?
AUKUS: billions for someone else’s strategy
Overarching all of this now is AUKUS – a program whose expenditures will dwarf even the largest previous Defence projects.
The public message is national security. But speaking to ALP members as part of the National Policy Forum ‘consultations’ on 2 December, Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong was strikingly clear: AUKUS is not primarily about defending Australian waters.
“The purpose of it is deterrence,” she said. “You want to put the question in the mind of any aggressor, a particular aggressor, whether the cost of conflict is worth it.”
This confirms that AUKUS is about projecting American power against China, not securing Australia’s territory.
Billions spent, little learned
The re-creation of a mega-agency in the form of the Defence Delivery Agency appears less a reform than a familiar reflex. Without cultural change, independent oversight and the political will to challenge Defence spending’s sacred-cow status, insiders say nothing will improve.
Ultimately, it also shows that a permanent standing army, unaccountable to parliament, is not only a democratic affront, but also a financial godsend to military snake oil salespeople.
Meanwhile, Australia enters the AUKUS era – committing hundreds of billions to submarines and weapons that may not arrive for decades, if at all – as Defence restructures, rebrands and merges itself for the umpteenth time.
As the war drums beat louder from Trump in the White House the public remains, as always, none the wiser.