Apparently, the US has told us that we need to massively lift our defence spending. I think that’s right, purely from a security perspective, but also because the US shows every sign of becoming/being unhinged.
Therefore, let’s increase defence spending, clearly move away from AUKUS – which was always a horrible, grossly expensive idea – in favour of much greater local procurement and particularly lower cost aerial/submarine drones and medium-range hyper ballistic missiles. Wherever possible, the US needs to be excluded from the procurement process, simply because they are now a defence liability.
Almost certainly the US has backdoors into most of the military equipment they have sold to Australia, including F35’s, which means that the equipment could be as useless as a “brick” in any conflict that the US did not support. This is not just a fanciful issue of sovereignty, it is a significant defence weakness.
Look at Canada’s situation, where reliance on F35’s has become a topical situation, and where it is clear that Lockheed would obviously need to comply with any presidential order with respect to the maintenance of the aircraft – and even in the absence of a “kill switch” you wonder how long the planes would be operational without ongoing software updates.
You can expect that Europe will begin to move to cancel hundreds of F35 orders in the coming months, in favour of local procurement that does not come from a country that publicly supports Russia. That local procurement may not provide aircraft of the same capability, but that may not be necessary given the likely adversaries.
We need to hasten slowly on this issue; allow the politicians to move the disengagement along slowly while working as hard as possible in practice with allies such as the UK, Europe, Japan and NZ to fill voids as quickly as possible.
