Guy at Polemica comments on Beazley’s final speech to Parliament – a prolix, somewhat rambling, knowledgeable, and big-hearted political valediction entirely appropriate to the man.
There’s lots of history to chew on, from Whitlam’s trip to China to the economic record of the current government. But in amongst it all, there’s a disturbing anecdote from Beazley’s most successful political era – his time as Defence Minister, about the reliability of the USA as a defence supplier:
There were some problems with the submarine as you would expect—teething problems. This is a question of patriotism. When I became Defence minister I understood this and I learned it soon, and it was a temptation to belt the Liberal Party to blazes with it. The radar of our Hornet could not identify most of the aircraft in this region as hostile—in other words, our front-line fighter could not shoot down people who would be the enemies in this region. Wasn’t that a wonderful opportunity for the Labor Party to finally lay to rest the ghost of Liberal Party claims to be the people who are best at managing the affairs of the defence of this nation? I shut up; I said nothing.
I went to the United States and, for five years, it was up hill, down dale and one knock-down drag-out after another with Cap Weinberger, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. I tried to get the codes of that blasted radar out of them. In the end, we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves—and we got another radar that can actually identify them, otherwise I would not be talking about it now. We got a radar that was capable of doing the shoot-down and the rest of what we wanted. I see there is an agreement signed by the defence minister—mate, I will believe it when I see it! I will believe it when I see it from that particular agreement that you have signed with them. That is not to say that I do not love the Americans and think that they are our most important ally, but they are a bunch of people you have got to have a fight with every now and then to get what you need out of them.
That’s right. The US sold us, and the Fraser Liberal government bought, crippled fighter planes, and we had to hack into the damn things to get it to do what we paid billions for.
Anybody checked to make sure the Super Hornets we’re buying work as intended?
One of the problems I noticed as an engineer working on such projects is that the ADF will tell you what they want (as in what widgets they want), but they won’t tell you how they intend to use them. Operational secrecy and all that.
Also, if you’ve ever worked on a military project – even an acquisition one – you’d know there’s a cast of thousands involved. You’d think all those extra eyes would spot problems early on, but in my experience they don’t. I’ve seen hordes of people sign off on documents missing what they later saw as vital requirements. It’s a human problem not specific to the military. I’ve seen it in lots of civilian projects. Unknown knowns as someone said.
Which makes me tend to think the Americans didn’t deliver said feature, because they weren’t contracted to deliver it. They weren’t contracted to deliver it because we never realised we needed it until the planes were delivered.
So then we do our best to retro-contract the feature, but the Americans aren’t all that keen on opening up a chink in what they see as their own operational secrecy.
SNAFU.
I don’t understand why he didn’t speak up. But that seemed to be the hallmark of Beazley politics – keep a low profile, don’t speak up. I don’t believe it’s a security matter (it’s security by obscurity, and most likely teh Enemy already knew of the problem anyway; certainly good planning would dictate that they knew). So why not speak up about the incompetance of the government?
Like Craig Mc, I have seen my share of signing off on specifications and requirements that have not been read or understood. Such specifications are largely at fault for not setting out in clear terms the essential requirement.
But in a process concerning the defence of the country and the spending of this much money, surely the people responsible for causing the primary functionality of these weapons systems to be missing are culpable. It’s not just that some important secondary functionality went missing; it seems that the planes couldn’t actually do their jobs. The fact that the contract wasn’t written in terms that allow us to rectify faults in the primary functionality of the systems is also culpable. In my experience these things happen when the needs of the process (red tape) outweigh the needs of the project.
I meant to say, “certainly good security planning would dictate that we assume that” Teh Enemy know about the problems with the hornet.
Two reasons: if you read the whole thing, Beazley really thought Australia had to keep quiet about it until it was fixed. The idea that your security measures secret doesn’t actually help security is one that’s relatively new and still seemingly not that popular outside cryptography and information security more generally.
Secondly, Beazley thought, and still thinks, that defence should largely be above party politics.
I’m not sure that this is a good idea; furthermore, his opponents clearly weren’t playing by the same rules.
I heard about this from Beazley’s speech. I was amazed that it was not an absolute sensation at the time! Basically Beazley admitted that we had undertaken espionage operations against our primary ally in order to access information from them that was supposedly Top Secret!
Also, implicitly, our primary ally knowingly sold us a pup and wasn’t interested in rectifying it!!Surely this should have been trawled over by any competent journalist, and its implications for the current and futureconduct of the alliance, and the defence of the people of Australia analysed for all to see?
I am not criticising Beazley here – I think he did the right thing. But how many more of these contracts have we got with flawed equipment or which don’t place appropriate requirements on our so-called ally?
I wonder if the Abrahms tanks actually fire?
Yes, looks to me they do. Watch the first ten seconds, skip the rest.
…and again. Jump forward to about 45″ in this one.
Kevin Brady “Also, implicitly, our primary ally knowingly sold us a pup and wasn’t interested in rectifying it!”
Why is this a surprise? The USA looks after Number 1. Allies are only trusted in so far as it is convenient for them to be so. They may become enemies down the track.
Most other countries are the same. We should take the hint, rather than assuming that because we speak English and have a treaty, we are permanent and intimate members of the family.
The US always attempts to hold technology that it views as being absolutely cutting edge close to its’ chest. The same behaviour applied to night vision and data encryption technology and they don’t just do it with us – the Europeans copped the same treatment and still do. The US are understandably hesitant to handover technology to us when we do not fund our internal security as well as the Yanks. Basically they didn’t think we could protect their interests by protecting the technology from espionage. While they do play hard ball (and I would expect nothing less) in negotiating the contracts – once it is done we have generally been very well served by it. That said, we always have been aware of the shortcomings of the equipment we have purchased and had a strongly held belief that if the balloon went up, we could rely on the US to come to the party with the technology in a timely manner.
But Razor, Beazley says we did not know the shortcomings of the equipment when we purchased it. I mean you don’t knowingly buy a weapons system that you can’t fire. Unless you’re incompetent.
As for the “strongly held” belief that we could rely on the US, I thought that at least some of the point of these aircraft were to stop the enemy trying in the first place. If they do try, then we would certainly need capacity to defend ourselves while we wait for the US to deploy. I mean, by the time the terr’ists have dropped the nukes from their Cessna 152s, it’s too late to call for help.
markie mark, we’ve been buying major equipments fitted “for but not with” for decades based on the “she’ll be right” principle – it has been the policy of both sides of politics for decades in order to reduce costs. The public generally don’t give a fat rat’s clacker about it until everything goes to poo. I find it laughable that a lefty site like LP gives a toss about this type of issue now, given it’s general anti-military and anti-american biases. Oh, and the access to source codes from the Yanks has been in the public domain for ages, too.
Razor: “That said, we always have been aware of the shortcomings of the equipment we have purchased and had a strongly held belief that if the balloon went up, we could rely on the US to come to the party with the technology in a timely manner”
What if we were at war with another so-called ‘ally’ of the United States? Which side would get the codes then? This seems to me to highlight the point that we are negotiating flawed contracts – possibly because we have this belief that we could ‘rely’ on the US. A more independent stance would see us co-produce technology and be more sophisticated in our contractual negotiations.
Kev – that is a big “what if.” Given that the US has never been to war with another country with a MacDonalds franchise, and the fact that Australia and the US’s national interest are vastly more often than not aligned, your scenario is similar to wondering if we would ever invade NZ.
Surely people are missing the point here? It’s not just that the Liberals maybe contracted for the wrong stuff, or that the US maybe gave us dodgy gear, whether by accident of not. Surely the main point here is that THEY WOULDN’T HELP US OUT when the problem became evident.
The same thing has happened recently with the Joint Force Striker aircraft (is that the name?) which was supposedly a multi-billion dollar joint program between the US and its allies. When it became clear that the USA wasn’t going to let anybody else see the code, even Britain had to threaten to withdraw before they could get a concession. Australia has also been given some vague promises, but again I’ll believe it when I see it.
The people running the USA today are businessmen, and military-industrial products are their leading market. This is just business, like selling computers with little electrical components that are guaranteed to break after 500 hours of use. Keeps the customer coming back for more!
Maybe we should buy off the Chinese?
That’s only technically true, Razor. Under a NATO flag, United States aircraft bombed Belgrade, a home to the Golden Arches franchise since the early 80s.
I have a feeling there might have been Maccas in Panama too—but Google defies my research-fu, and anyway, it didn’t count as a proper country then.
Here we go. Thank the Serbs for their Roman alphabet:
http://www.mcdonalds.co.yu/informat/history/yu.htm
And furthermore, they are not even really US businessmen any more, they are globalised billionaires who fly private jets to Africa and Asuncion, cruise the Med and the Carribbean, stash money in Switzerland and Bermuda, dine in Paris and Moscow. They are taking the US taxpayers for a ride just as much as the Australians.
But of course, you all knew that.
Meanwhile, Downer has not quite ruled out supporting a US strike in Iran:
Remember, we weren’t PLANNING to go to war in Iraq, either. Right up till the last minute, we weren’t planning it.
the other Mark: “you don’t knowingly buy a weapons system that you can’t fire. Unless you’re incompetent.”
True. And admitting that you’d done it, without embarrassment constitutes…
Kevin Brady: “What if we were at war with another so-called ‘ally’ of the United States? Which side would get the codes then? “
Exactly. It is very easy to imagine precisely such a scenario arising, if the US found that another country was more strategically/tradewise useful than us, and we got into a disagreement with said country.
Folks like Razor should have a look at the constantly re-weaving web of alliances and enmities in Europe over the last three centuries, to see how these things can evolve. And being in the Anglosphere is no guarantee of Good Buddydom Forever. I’ve been close enough to the Irish troubles to have taken that one to heart. In any case: which nation was it, exactly, that burnt the White House down in 1815?
Gandhi,
Downer is, as usual, talking out of his backside again – he has four brass cheeks, and blows foul air out of both pairs! Of course the USA “rules in” military options – just look at what the Downing Street Memo said – that Bush was deliberately fixing the intelligence to get a pretext to go in.
Then again, this is no particular surprise from the idiot son of the aristocracy, Adelaide’s very own resident Peer of Australia, who wore fishnet stockings to childrens’ charity events, and couldn’t remember a thing about the AWB.
Didn’t the Americans like that the ADF had cracked it, and immediately asked for how so they could develop it further?
…I should probably have a link for this statement, but I don’t.
You guys are missing the point.
From the 50′s to the late 90′s the US didn’t trust our secret service to keep secrets safe from espionage.
Put simply, ASIO and ASIS leaked like a seive until around 2001 when we started taking it seriously. That’s also about the time when the US started trusting us with their secrets.
These revelations are not an indictment on the US as an arms supplier, as all the Lefty anti-Americans would like to see it, it is an indictment on our funding for our secret services.
In the 60′s, when we traded secrets freely with the UK, Russia didn’t bother trying to get highly sensitive things from London, instead they would have their spies and plants in Canberra request it from the UK, and get it from us instead, because it was so much easier.
I really don’t blame the US for not giving us the codes, we were not reliable, and if the Russians had stolen the codes from us, they would’ve had an insight into every radar in the USAF.
Stephen: if that’s true, it makes absolutely no sense at all.
Even if we personally handed Osama bin Laden the complete blueprints and source code to, say, the Joint Strike Fighter or the Air Warfare Destroyers, the only use they’d have for it is to trade it to an advanced nation-state for money or weapons.
The KGB, by contrast, actively sought such information and often put it to good use (though they spent more money reverse engineering the IBM 360 Series than IBM spent developing it…).
It is true. Australia was a leak link.
With respect to the F/A-18 combat systems, the missing data would make exported F/A-18s that much more dangerous if they were ever used against American forces. Iran, for example, flies top line American F-14 fighters that were provided to the previous regime.
So America, quite reasonably, tries to keep exported fighters and radars a little less capable than their own versions.
Australia’s problem arose because Indonesia at the time flew several American aircraft types, including F-16s, Skyhawks and Broncos, which were identified as friendly by Hornet radars. We wanted those types to be flagged as hostiles.
This complication would not have stopped F/A-18s firing at those aircraft. It just meant the pilots had to override some warnings. Also, in fast manouvering close combat, it would have deprived pilots of some of the value of automatic tracking of threats.
Nevertheless, it was poor purchasing not to check that the combat systems could be adjusted to our region, and it was excellent work by DSTO to determine the missing type signatures.
Having demonstrated to a stunned and admiring world intelligence community just how capable their own secret services were at keeping secrets.
Not.
Fair enough. Wonder what would have happened if we had have flown joint operations with the New Zealand Air Force (which, before it dumped any fixed-wing combat capability, flew Skyhawks?)
Doesn’t bear thinking about, really. Poor New Zealand.
“Doesn’t bear thinking about, really. Poor New Zealand.”
Shed no tears for the Southern Ocean Twin Islands Earmarked for Golf Courses and Private Estates (currently known to foreign ghosts as “New Zealand”). These islands have a splendid future to look forward to… unlike, one might say, the Southern Ocean Mining and Re-settlement Land-Mass.
Tony, thanks for that clear and precise explanation of what Beazley was referring to.
So it was some sort of ELINT technique then, and not really “spying” per se? Beasley was evidently being a bit melodramatic in his choice of words.
Stephen, you’re getting a touch carried away methinks. There have been public allegations about one ASIO officer being in the pay of the KGB (there was a 4 Corners episode on the subject, if I recall correctly). Nothing publicly about any ASIS officers being suborned.
Whatever the truth is, it’s irrelevant to the question here. Information is compartmentalised: unless there were some need for an ASIO or ASIS officer to have access to F-18 radar codes (and what on earth could that need be?), they wouldn’t have access.
As to Australia being a soft touch for Russian intelligence, there have been way more publicly exposed and convicted Russian spies in the US and Britain than in this country. I’d actually suggest we were more secure than the Yanks, not less.
Friend or foe aircraft are not flagged by radar signiture but by IFF.
No, Iran’s got fourth generation fighters rusting and rotting in bunkers for lack of spares and serious flight combat training time. No air force anywhere can possibly match the USAF anymore in a straight one on one air to air fight. The problem here is battles may be won in the air but wars are always won the ground. And since Viet Nam, the defination of victory for anything involving the US empire has become a completely moveable feast. On all sides.
Was about to make exactly the same point, ‘cept Paulus did it first sharper and clearer without any unnecessary snark about Stephen Lloyd talking through his arse.
And don’t forget the DSD. Bet they were feeding some juicy leaky yanky elint droppings and general comms stuff from Kangaroo Nine Inch Gold Blade 06′ or whatever to the DSTO too.
Anyway, the story of how we hacked the yanks here for F18 IFF and look down radar crypto should be at the very least a nice little 5000 insider blog post. If we had the antipodian equivalent of Defence Tech or Danger Room. Looking at you here Robert Merkel.
Oh yeah? The PLA would first have to get through several million orcs, Maori biker gangs, the NZ Armyâ??s elite Special Bungee Jumping Forces and 40 million kamikaze sheep.
Plus those 17 Skyhawks are still mothballed away somewhere. Only be a weekâ??s work for Shagger, Gazza and the rest of the mob at South Auckland Auto Repairs to have â??em up and flying again.
I meant “5000 word insider blog post”
For want of a noun the comment was lost, etc, etc.
“One thing the Chinese hadn’t counted on was Derek, and Dereks don’t run!”
Peter Jackson pretty much nailed it with his 1987 documentary on a top secret New Zealand special forces unit.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092610/
Yes Paulus indeed, and less distanced from the truth than you’d think.
Just spent just over a week, eating and drinking and yo hoo hooing through the North Island of NZ last month.
My observations are:
- Damn, there’s some great white wine action happening out of Hawkes Bay.
- NZ cop cars have the weirdest colour scheme.
- Everyone in NZ will be a Maori, either in bloodline and/or spirit, within the next 30 years.
And that includes all the Chinese in Auckland.
- Those fluffy little lambs gambolling in a surrealistically perfect picture postcard landscape taste delicious.
- The Masonic Hotel in Napier has to be stayed in to be believed in. Think of an smaller but perfectly formed major art deco riff on “the Shining”‘s Overlook Hotel.
- The local talent is easy. Especially when you ask them to count up to “six/sex’ at a hot local venue billed as a Melbourne style bar.
- The country op-shops are even easier. A first hard back editon of ‘Biggles: Pioneer Airfighter” for only NZ$10. Tattered endpapers and rather foxed though.
- Did I mention the food and wine is excellent?
- Apparently the way to show yer really cool on K’road in Auckland is to mention some connection to Peter Jackson’s Weta Studios – in Wellington.
- Don’t bother getting hammered on NZ’s very interesting experiment in single malt whisky from Milford Sound and then charging into the Beehive, brandishing your MasterCard and demanding to buy a mothballed Douglas A3 Skyhawk. They just won’t sell you one. And that’s that.
- Not much wildlife in NZ. A week plus driving saw less roadkill than a dirty weekend in Tasmania or down the Great Ocean Road. A massive fuckpot of sheep though. Lotsa sheep. Really. Fuckin’ heaps of sheep.
Nabs, the issue wasn’t identifying whether contacts were friendly or hostile, which is what IFF does.
It was that the combat systems, based on the radars, would not correctly distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft, thus hindering the use of those systems to engage and attack hostile aircraft, if that was every necessary.
Yes, you’re right that F-14s are not leading edge these days, but they are still pretty fierce aircraft. My point was that export versions of American fighters can be turned against America, so it’s reasonable for America to de-tune them.
Paulus, yes, the process was electronic, not human intelligence. I forget whether Beazley’s words conveyed that meaning.
The sad story of New Zealand’s Skyhawks is that they spent the end of their years as targets anyway, because they were too slow for any serious role. They were used to give gunnery practice to Australian warships. Huge embarrassment for any fighter jock.
It’s hard for me to contradict you if you do it first.
Radar can tell you what is coming at you but it can’t tell you its motives. Hence the invention of IFF.
Hmm, Tony, having properly read your last comment after commenting on it, I’d say zeroing on the definition of “combat systems” is the crux here.
And perhaps also perhaps an awareness that modern IFF systems are slightly more situationally aware than just blipping a transponder smodged into a Cessna 162.
And now you’ve all touched down, lashed to the apron or been trundled into hangers. No one wants to play anymore?
And why isn’t Kim putting up hot pinups anymore?
Now I come to think of it, where is the wench these days?
Wot? That’s it? You’ve all collapsed for the night? Wimps.
Very well. I will now pace around in circles, swilling whisky and counting my feet while playing Magazine’s “A Song From Under The Floorboards” VERY LOUDLY!
Nabs, I’ve been off on Catallaxy reading about Round XVII of the epic bout between Helen Dale (aka Skepticlawyer) and Phillip Adams. Dale is winning on points.
Thinking about what Tony was saying, I’m surprised by one thing: he is implying that the F-18 radar (APG-65/73) could itself distinguish between different types of aircraft, and the combat system would accordingly characterise targets as friend or foe. Are fighter radars really good enough to do that? Buggered if I know – but it seems a little strange and I’d like to know more.
As to your New Zealand excursion – “The local talent is easy … A massive fuckpot of sheep!”. That says it all really. A line from Apocalypse Now comes to mind: “He’s out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.”
By the way, if I may be so bold, you a gamer by any chance? As in wargames. You have the classic combination of military history + black sense of humour + incipient alcoholism = wargamer.
If anybody knows any insiders, happy to be put in touch
My understanding is aircraft send out an encrypted signal and offensive units pick up the signal and decide whether it is friend or foe.
I remember American Patriot missiles in the Iraq war in 2003 shot down a few friendly cruise missiles, and (I think) a British Tornado fighter jet because the missiles incorrectly identified friendly missiles and that jet as being the enemy.
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