Gotta hand it to you Lookleft, an astute post. I hadn't really thought about the "Skidmore vs Fawcett knowledge and experience"side of things
This could indeed be a stroke of genius by MrDak. Very interesting potential twist, having a new DAS that could use that experience and knowledge to challenge the Senators.
No contest.
Like McCormick, Skidmore's stuffed. Wouldn't have a clue how to fix regulatory reform, and will be smart enough to pretend it's on track for completion 'soon'.
A lucrative public sector job prior to moving on, and that's it.
Speculation is a wonderful, fascinating past time but the proof (& truth) is always in the pudding..
Time will tell if indeed (reserve active) AVM Skidmore is an M&M plant to foil LC (retired) Senator Fawcett but it is interesting that they both come from a similar pedigree.
However perhaps we should look at this apparent connection (both former ADF & test pilots) from a different perspective and also consider where both these gents went after leaving the ADF..
Mark Skidmore -
Director Flight Operations
Raytheon Australia
December 2012 – November 2013 (1 year)Canberra, Australia
Casual position providing specialist aerospace advice in support of flight operations for Raytheon Australia.
{Interesting interview when MS 1st took up the position at Raytheon: Interview with Mark Skidmore - Raytheon Australia's Director of Flight Operations}
Director
Swift Aerospace Consulting
February 2013 – Present (1 year 9 months)Canberra
Swift Aerospace is a small consulting company that provides consulting services to the defence and civil aerospace community. These consulting services are based on the knowledge and experience of the Director who has 33 years service in the Royal Australian Air Force as a pilot and commander of aerospace units and several years in Defence Industry providing airworthiness and flight safety leadership. The primary market foci for Swift Aerospace are the defence aerospace industries that support the ADF and are in need of the skill sets provided by a retired senior member of the RAAF. However, given the scope and experience of the director, his airworthiness and flight safety knowledge is also applicable across the civil aerospace community.
So not much experience in the private sector but at least he wasn't lured to any major airlines and given his lengthy career (33 years) to a high rank in the RAAF he certainly would have had extensive dealings with the PS Mandarins.
Senator Fawcett -
Career
David served in the Australian Defence Force for over 22 years. An Army pilot, he flew helicopters and fixed wing aircraft and was the Senior Flying Instructor at the School of Army Aviation in Queensland. Graduating as an experimental test pilot from the Empire Test Pilots’ School (UK),
he finished his full time career in Defence as the Commanding Officer of the RAAF Aircraft Research and Development Unit. Elected to the House of Representatives as the Member for Wakefield (SA) in 2004, he served in the Parliament until 2007. David continued to fly as a test pilot and ran a small business working in the Defence and Aviation sectors prior to being elected to the Senate.
Read David’s full biography here.
The part in bold is interesting and there is a further reference from the Phelan - Fawcett Profile :
He then attended Navy Command and Staff College before returning to serve as ARDU‘s first (and only) Army Commanding Officer from 2001 to 2003. Fawcett reports that RAAF responded well to him occupying a post that had been more traditionally considered an RAAF appointment:
“As I used to point out to people, it’s really just sort of taking things back to the way they used to be. I think back to my great-uncle Bob Fawcett, who flew with No 1 Squadron of the Australian Flying Corps in 1918, when the Army had all the aircraft, before the Air Force even came into existence.”
If we then go to the same point in time on the MS CV: So it would seem that for at least a year LC (retired) Fawcett was in fact AVM Skidmore's commanding officer - do you think these two gents would never have rubbed shoulders in the occasional operational staff meeting or two??
Finally the following article from the Strategist (which I'm reliably informed is avidly read by most former/current high ranking officers of the ADF) was written by Senator Fawcett back in 2012:
Minister, mandarins and the military
Who is really in charge of the Defence Department? Many would guess the military chiefs, which is logical enough. Some would even say the Minister—civil control and all that. Or perhaps, given the recent discussion about the influence of Ministerial advisers over the public service, others would suggest we should be looking to the Secretary—Sir Humprey always did seem to get his way.
Another way to ask the question would be to consider who got the blame when reviews such as Rizzo, Black and Coles highlighted a lack of accountability, confused responsibilities and dysfunctional linkages between levels of authority across the Department? No clear answers there.
There is something even more telling, however, than the inability to identify who is really in charge of Defence. How is it that so many commentators can describe what has gone wrong, but so few ask why, or attempt to suggest a better way? It’s said that a fish rots from the head. If we accept that organisational dysfunction stems from problems at the head of Defence, perhaps that’s where we need to start—at the top. But just what is the relationship between executive Government and the Department?
Distant could be one way to describe the relationship. The Defence Minister sits on one side of Lake Burley Griffin and the Department on the other—literally and figuratively. Even those Ministers who choose to engage with Defence in a more proactive way don’t actually get much formal insight into ‘the process’ that leads to the briefs they receive. For example, how much ‘re-drafting’ by the many layers of review has the brief received in the time between leaving the subject matter expert and being delivered to the Minister? Does the brief still say the same thing, or have the priorities and agendas of other groups (or the central agencies) transformed the message? The Minister would seldom know, because Defence has a policy to ‘speak with one voice’, which limits the ability of the Minister to hear dissenting views where they exist.
On the other side of the equation, the brief the Minister takes to the National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSCC) may not actually reflect recommendations made by Defence. Think of the Super Hornet acquisition by Minister Nelson, a decision made without the recommendation of Defence. While the Minister was happy to own that particular decision, not all such Ministerial interventions are quite so transparent. The point is that accountability has to flow both ways in a functional relationship. Changes to submissions instigated by the Minister, or by Ministerial advisers, should always be formally captured in an auditable process. The Government also needs to be aware of the true opportunity cost of decisions it makes. Decisions to approve additional operational commitments or even to defer an acquisition have flow-on effects for planned training, maintenance activities, logistics contracts, personnel and defence industry.
Is there a better way? Certainly most successful public, not-for-profit, and even private companies seem to think so. Most of them adopt the construct of a governing board. This provides a proven framework for structured engagement between key elected stakeholders (directors) and the executives who have operational control. Through the board, the Chair is able to provide strategic guidance to the organisation, and hold executives to account for performance, and compliance with relevant regulations. The board doesn’t run the organisation on a day-to-day basis, but it has insight into the internal and external environments that shape the CEO’s challenges and decisions. Some private companies also choose to have a board of reference, which provides a structured means of retaining corporate memory, as well as obtaining a broader perspective on current issues and strategic direction.
The 2011 review by Lord Levene (PDF) for the UK Ministry of Defence confirmed that the model of a board can work for Defence. The Secretary of State (Minister) chairs the Board and is advised by the Chief of Defence Staff, the Permanent Secretary, the Procurement Executive, as well as non-executive directors who bring broader perspective and experience to the table.
In the Australian context, a Defence Board wouldn’t replace the role of the NSCC. The Board would provide a structured, regular forum for the Minister to engage with, and be informed by, a range of voices within Defence. It would enable him to be a more effective decision maker when dealing with the Department, and speak with more confidence and authority in NSCC when advocating for the Department.
For the Board concept to be effective in Australia, we’d need to redefine the roles of some senior appointments. This would include empowering the Service Chiefs to have command and control over all the resources they need to do their job—a pre-requisite for accountability to the Minister as Chair of the Board. A consequence of the increased control for the Service Chiefs would be a corresponding decrease in the number of groups within the Defence Organisation. This would be balanced by making the Secretary responsible for overseeing compliance both with strategic guidance and with policies relevant to achieving best-practice in non-operational matters across the three services. The Minister would then be in a position to make informed decisions on what should be done, to hold Service Chiefs accountable for subsequent outcomes, and to judge their efficacy in the task. Where exigencies require changes, trade-offs or exceptions to guidance, the Board provides a framework for these issues and the related flow-on effects to be assessed, debated and implementation coordinated.
The structured framework of the Board would also provide some degree of quality assurance for the taxpayer when the personalities, interests, or competence of the Chief of Defence Force (CDF), Secretary and Minister did not align as well as we might hope or expect. To return the rotting fish analogy, the Defence Board and the associated changes in senior roles would see the head of the organisation model the approach that must be adopted at all levels within Defence: informed decisions by accountable individuals.
The Defence Board in and of itself would not be a silver bullet to address the oft-lamented failures in the Defence Organisation. It is, however, the right place to start fixing the rot—at the heady interface of Minister, Mandarins and Military.
Senator David Fawcett is a Liberal Party representative for South Australia. He was a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade enquiry into Defence Acquisition. His additional comments to the report (PDF) argue that the changes to Governance discussed above are just one aspect of the suite of reforms to the Australian Defence Organisation required to achieve effective and sustainable change. Image courtesy of Department of Defence.
Then there was this article back in the July edition of AA magazine: A turning point-The Aviation Safety Regulatory Review 
Maybe the AVM (active reserve) Skidmore appointment is a master stroke by M&M, however I think he should be careful of the Boyd (Fawcett) 2 card play...
MTF...