Questions over army's Land 400 Phase 3 armoured fighting vehicles

Ever since his predecessor, Lieutenant General David Morrison, restructured the army after Afghanistan, our land forces have been built around a concept of three interchangeable brigades designed for mechanised warfare. If that's the battle you want to fight, it's obvious you need lots of (hugely expensive) tracked combat vehicles to do so.

But don't make the mistake of thinking the answer that suits the army is necessarily the right one for the country.

Organisations are built around founding myths; ideas that catalyse what they do into a core expression of belief. The army's mission is to take and hold ground and, if that's what you want to do, you need an armoured vehicle. Unfortunately, that's not all you need. Even more problematically, it might not be what the country needs.

Vehicles need fuel and, as the Russians are finding in Ukraine at the moment, AFVs are useless unless soft-skinned tankers can get close enough to resupply it. Drones ranging across the battlefield provide intelligence that's allowed artillery to disrupt mechanised assaults and armour is, quite literally, being stopped in its tracks. This war's exposed a new military reality: if you want to fight a modern war you need drones, missiles and communications. Mechanised vehicles are just one, very expensive, part of the spear. And all this is without even considering how we would get such heavy, 45 tonne behemoths to the jungle-clad areas where we're likely to want to deploy them.

This is exactly why former defence chief Angus Houston and former minister Stephen Smith have been asked by government to comb through the labyrinthine structure of the forces and ask a pretty basic question: "what is this for?". When you do this it's difficult to see how the costly investment in these vehicles could ever pay off.

Perhaps this explains exactly why the general's rushing to the media. Although he's a former infantryman, General Stuart knows that when the public thinks of the army, we think armour. If the commander's saying we need heavy tracked vehicles the obvious tendency is to assume he knows what he's talking about. He does. What this doesn't mean, however, is that the army's institutional desires are necessarily aligned with those of the taxpayer.

The general isn't working out how the country can get its best bang for its buck. His job is to advocate for the army: something very different.

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The airforce and navy are both getting new items of massively costly equipment; now the soldiers say it's their turn. Under the previous government, this wasn't a problem. When Land 400 Phase 3 (the innocuous name for this particular multi-billion dollar spending spree) was instituted, nobody had heard of COVID. Nor had the turning back of the Russian offensive in Ukraine revealed exactly how fragile mechanised thrusts can be. It was another world. The external environment has changed. Unfortunately for the army its structure, and what it's asking for, is set in concrete.

Nobody denies the two vehicles on offer for this contract are great. South Korea's Hanwha Redback, for example, is excellent. It's been hailed as the world's most advanced infantry fighting vehicle for the very good reason that's exactly what it is. It's capable of flying across broken ground at more than 65km/h, suppressing the enemy with its 30mm cannon and machine guns as it does so, and delivering an eight-person section, ready to fight, to the critical point. Exactly what you'd want if you were in Ukraine today or, perhaps, South Korea tomorrow.

If this vehicle is chosen it will also be built in the marginal electorate around Geelong, an area desperate for new industry. Rumours are that when the decision originally arrived at Cabinet's defence subcommittee, the previous government couldn't choose between the Redback and the German Rheinmetall. It has a factory in Queensland which is, completely coincidentally, right next to Peter Dutton's seat of Dickson. Perhaps it's not just the army that has parochial interests to protect.

The number of vehicles likely to be purchased has already been slashed from 450 to fewer than half that. This would expose the incoherence of the army's current, interchangeable brigade structure and force a more dramatic rethink of what its mission should be.

Let's be clear: the problem is not with the weapon system or our conception of modern war.

Redbacks are brilliant, optimally designed weapons system created to deliver soldiers capable of fighting across the final 300 metres of fire-swept ground and onto the objective. The question, rather, is it really necessary to design the entire army around a solution to a problem that may be irrelevant for Australia's situation?

Look at what's happening in Ukraine at the moment. Drones have been ranging behind the front-lines, destroying the fuel tankers that are vital to resupply the heavily armoured Russian tanks. Why bother attacking the hard front edge when these vehicles can be rendered immobile before being destroyed by cheap, easily delivered missiles?

Their height and weight mean they can't easily be transported to or driven around the islands where they may be used and, combat loaded, they are too heavy for most bridges and too sizeable to travel in villages with overhead wires.

There is no question that these are the vehicles the army wants but to determine where we should be directing the money we need to shift the question. Are they the right weapons for the country? How will we transport them to where they need to go and fuel them when deployed? Would we be better off with light battalions with specialist knowledge and resources?

Big questions with very different answers.