The government is set to squander millions on warships. Why? To buy votes.
There are many ways to waste money on defence equipment.
You can pay higher prices to build things here that could be bought more cheaply overseas. You can mismanage the project so that the costs blow out even further, and perhaps not deliver a workable system at all. Above all, you can commit tens of billions of dollars on capabilities we do not need because they will not be able to fight in the only circumstances in which they'd be needed.
The government's recently announced decisions on naval shipbuilding in South Australia put it on track to make all these mistakes at once. It has decided to build ships in Australia that we could buy much more cheaply overseas. It has decided to manage this in a way that almost guarantees the same screw-ups that have plagued the ill-fated Air Warfare Destroyer project. And most of the money will be spent on big and complex warships that are irrelevant to Australia's key operational priorities and would be fatally vulnerable in the kind of high-intensity conflict for which they are designed. 
It would not be hard for ministers to see these mistakes and avoid them, if they were really serious about making sure that Australia gets the most strategically cost-effective military capabilities as cheaply as possible. But there seems little doubt that such considerations hardly impinged on these decisions. Their aim was to announce big projects delivering lots of jobs and hence lots of votes in marginal seats in South Australia.
And no one seems to mind very much about that. There is something shocking about the casual cynicism with which the rest of us apparently accept that so many billions of dollars are being wasted, and Australia's future military capability compromised, to buy votes for the government. We ought to be asking some hard questions, even if ministers do not.
The first question is why do we need to build our warships here in Australia? After all, we are happy to buy our combat aircraft overseas, and there is no strategic or operational reason that ships are any different. Australia's requirements are not unique, and the argument that we need to build them here in order to maintain and operate them effectively is demonstratively false. We have operated foreign-built warships for generations. And the savings are potentially huge. We could have bought new air warfare destroyers from the United States for less than a third of the price we are likely to pay to have them built in South Australia.
The second question is why build them this way? If we are going to build warships here, it is essential to manage the projects in a way that minimises the all-too-familiar delays, technical problems and cost blowouts. This is not too hard, if you get the discipline of the market working in your favour. That means a fully competitive, highly detailed tender process to select a prime contractor to take complete responsibility for delivering the final product for a fixed price. That's how we built the very successful Anzac ships.
The government's plans for a continuous build program of new warships envisages just the opposite. It will establish a monopoly supplier that is guaranteed billions in government work indefinitely, and is therefore absolutely certain to be extremely inefficient. Designs will be selected on the basis of what the government calls a "competitive evaluation process", which means a decision based on preliminary sketch designs and with no firm prices. This is a certain recipe for technical problems and massive cost overruns.
And the third question is whether we need these ships anyway. This is the most important issue of all, though it gets the least attention. It is little comfort to build new ships efficiently if the ships themselves turn out to be useless. Of course Australia does need highly capable maritime forces, and that includes some surface warships. But the kind of ships we need depends crucially on the role they can play in maritime warfare today and in the future, and that raises some very big issues that our navy and our government are doing their best to ignore.
The problem is simply that vast improvements in surveillance and precision strike have made warships extremely vulnerable in any high-intensity conflict. These are not new trends, indeed some of them date back over a century. But they are now accelerating faster than ever, and this is driving a revolution in the way we have to think about naval warfare.
Sensors and weapons that were once best mounted on surface ships must now be carried in submarines, aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles, because the chances of a surface warship surviving in any waters contested by a highly capable adversary are disappearing fast. Even the US Navy now recognises that its big warships would be easy targets for China's anti-ship forces.
And yet the heart of the government's new shipbuilding policy is a project to build a big fleet of large warships - twice the size of the ships they are replacing - designed and equipped for the kind of high-intensity naval warfare in which they would have no serious chance of surviving. This is a truly momentous strategic error, like investing in cavalry in the 1930s.
But we can be pretty sure the ministers of the Abbott government didn't give any of this much thought when they set their policy on naval shipbuilding. They were not thinking about Australia's defence at all. And who can blame them? None of this will matter, because we will never find ourselves facing a high-intensity maritime conflict - unless our strategic circumstances deteriorate as tensions rise between Asia's major powers. And who could imagine that happening?