Defence analyst Michael Shoebridge has told an industry conference in the Hunter that Australia's new defence strategy is too slow and too focused on small numbers of nuclear submarines and expensive unmanned planes and vessels.
Mr Shoebridge, a former deputy at two Australian government intelligence agencies, told the Hunter Defence Conference that the nation's 2024 National Defence Strategy and investment blueprints were based on "two broken assumptions".
In a view shared by many observers in the defence strategy field, Mr Shoebridge said the NDS assumed Australia had decades to introduce major new weapons systems and that the nation could rely on US industry to re-supply its military in times of war.
He said the strategy was based largely on "decades-long projects eating almost all the budget delivering very small numbers of complex, expensive platforms of weapons" which could not be replaced easily if lost in combat.
"That is not a military that can sustain combat losses and remain capable, which means it's not a military which can fight a war, unless you want to lose it," Mr Shoebridge told a room full of Australian Defence Force leaders, executives from major defence contractors such as Boeing, BAE and Lockheed Martin and representatives of small and medium enterprises.
He said the strategy would shrink Australia's military capability over the next 10 to 15 years at a time when the ADF's budget was doubling to $764 billion across the next decade.
Mr Shoebridge said the spending strategy was a "brazen misuse of public money" and "irrational".
Defence leaders offered a different view of the strategy on the first day of the two-day conference in the vineyards organised by Hunter Defence Taskforce.
Department of Defence joint information capabilities assistant secretary Nelson Bates said the NDS and government investment strategies "provide a focus for the ADF to have an integrated and focused force".
"The NDS was a pivotal point to get us to know that the threat has changed and we've moving away from the 10-year period to the, 'We need to do things now'," he said.
Mr Bates said small and medium enterprises like those represented at the conference would play an important role in the nation's defence over the coming decades.
The Army's general platforms director, Brigadier Colin Bassett, said the nation's adversaries did not have the same budgetary oversight as Australia when it came to spending taxpayers' money.
"You can't just go throwing cash around to solve the problems that certainly do confront us," he said.
He said Australia soon would have the "best tank in the world" and the NDS would reposition the Army for the nation's Pacific island environment, including taking delivery of new landing craft from 2026.
"I think we've finally woken up that we that we live on an island, we're surrounded by islands, and we have this archipelago that sits to our north.
"We should be using it to our advantage, not ignoring it, and learn the lessons of the Second World War."
US ambassador Kevin Rudd said during a recorded video interview with former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon that both sides of American politics had committed to support the AUKUS defence pact in the lead-up to the general election in November.
"Whatever the political outcome, the AUKUS program is going to be in strong and solid shape," the former prime minister said.
He said US regulations building on AUKUS legislation passed through the US Senate and House of Representatives last year would come into effect in the next few months, opening an "increasingly seamless" strategy and technology relationship between Australia, the US and the UK.
"Now that AUKUS is under way, and particularly given the reforms made to the regulatory network making an increasing quantity of activity licence-free and regulation-free, enabling British and Australian and US firms to work seamlessly, that opens up the door in a big way to SMEs in Australia to get a slice of the action."
Mr Rudd said new defence technology across the three AUKUS nations took about 12 years to "get in the hands of a war fighter", as opposed to about two years in China, "to pick a country out of the air".
"We need to adjust to the strategic environment," he said.
"I think this will become a new and dynamic environment for Australian businesses to operate in."
