Major C Northcote Parkinson predicted in his 1958 book,
Parkinson's Law, that the Royal Navy would eventually have more admirals than ships. Which raises the question as to whether the RAAF will eventually on the current trend have more Air Vice-Marshalls than aircraft.
Parkinson's Law, as presented in his book, was that in a bureaucracy,
work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. This is clearly what has happened in the Australian Department of Defense, resulting in creation of thousands of additional civilian jobs.
While emphasising emphatically that I have no sympathy whatever for their objectives, I notice that the Afghan Taliban have no requirement for any sort of helicopters, nor F-whatever fighter aircraft nor Abrams A-something tanks nor aircraft large enough to hold a sitting of federal parliament inside to ferry the tanks around because they are too heavy to travel by rail or road anywhere in the region. Yet the Taliban seem to be holding their own perfectly well without any of these.
That seems also to be true of insurgents in East Timor, PNG, Bouganvillea, Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
I enormously admire the exploits of Australia's Special Forces in world trouble spots, sketchy as reports about them are. But I wonder whether, with all these bureaucrats and all this military hardware, none of which seems to work quite as it should, the defenders of our nation have somehow missed the point.
Defence Minister FitzGibbon announced on Wednesday the preparation of
a new White Paper, which will address Australia's expected security needs for the next 20 years. It will be interesting to see what conclusions it reaches. The last government defence White Paper was prepared in 2000. The world has changed since then.