The Grumpy Strategists

Marcus and Michael broadcast this first video podcast from the Bunker, after taking measures to obscure the location (security, opacity and non-disclosure is baked in to the SAA culture, given we focus on Australia's Defence organisation...).
The first chunk of the episode gets into the important but superficial debate in Australia about OpenAI and Anthropic's push to operate in Australia only if the Albanese Government loosens data protection laws on copyright to allow the companies to do large scale, free, data harvesting.
Odd that the incredible power of AI can solve the world's impossible maths problems, break global cyber security & probably cure cancer - but the AI firms can't work out how to pay content creators for the work. The Grumpies explain what datasets are useful to AI for national security purposes and what are just commercially valuable to the AI firms.
Surprisingly, Powderfinger's back catalogue isn't much help with counter-terrorism or military targeting.
The episode also discusses the courageous UK Government decision to "cut steel" on the first SSN-AUKUS submarine in 2027, before a detailed design of the sub is finished. Cutting steel without a design is a lead indicator of a troubled program, so the UK move is all bad news for the AUKUS fraternity and UK and Australian submariners who want boats.
The episode ends with a celebration: 20 years of effort from the project team in Defence HQ acquiring the Triton long range surveillance drone has delivered - 29 hours of high quality surveillance in its first year. Australia is getting less surveillance hours out of its shiny P-8 aircraft and Triton fleets covering our huge EEZ than we did from the old turbo prop P-3 aircraft. Progress can be strange.

In Episode 82, Marcus scours the garbage bins around government offices in Canberra to feed the SAA bunker's furnaces and so avoid rising energy prices as the Houthis block Red Sea shipments. It's a nervous time, even deep in the Brindabella bunker. The Grumpies are almost as shocked as Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman to see Donald Trump can't or won't help the Saudis fight the Houthis to free oil coming through Red Sea, instead he's negotiating with them.
But the meat of the episode isn't the deepening global energy and economic crisis flowing out of the Middle East. The massive global news this week is that AUKUS has turned 5. Ahhh, they grow up so fast!!
To join the celebrations, the Grumpies conduct a rigorous "meta analysis" of the collected tomes and insights released on this incredible milestone for the trilateral initiative.
Most prominent here is the collected wisdom from the UK Council on Geostrategy. We're fortunate that these are not folk to be bogged down by any troubling perspectives: like this one: if the purpose of AUKUS is to deter Beijing, then the first 5 years has provided very bad news: China's production of nuclear subs is expanding rapidly and the quality of its nuclear subs is improving fast, on timelines that should embarrass all 3 AUKUS nations.
Meanwhile, AUKUS won't deliver a single extra sub into the Indo Pacific before the mid-2040s compared with the US, UK and Aust plans before AUKUS was born.....
Then there's the nasty issue that instead of working to integrate the UK and Australian defence industries into America's, the Trump Administration is pursuing its unilateral America First trade policy that is treating even its closest partners as competitors and adversaries....
Fortunately, the higher minds in the AUKUS grifter and booster crowds are not distracted by pesky problems around actual relative military power or real world outcomes.
They caution against the rookie error of seeing AUKUS as being about submarines at all. It's greatest achievements after 5 years and billions of dollars of mainly Australian money are:
1. that it's Not Yet Dead, and
2. that at the "conceptual level" it has reshaped the "geopolitical imaginary" and connected the Euro-Atlantic with the Indo Pacific ("scotching the narrative of British decline" along the way, apparently).
To quote one author channeling the novel Dune: "Our plans are measured in centuries".
Thank God for that. Take that Mr Xi Jinping.
The episode ends in a chicken coop, where new UK Chancellor Healey shows that you are where you stand. When he stood on the dung heap that was the UK's Ministry of defence (MoD) , he resigned on principle because the Starmer government wouldn't spend more on defence. Now that he's the Chancellor, responsible for where all the money goes, he's doing just what he condemned months ago - and not funding the UK military to meet its needs. The Chancellor's dung heap has a different view out over the chicken coop than the view he had from the MoD.

Marcus and Michael broadcast this edition of the Grumpy Strategists from two secure locations: Marcus kicking back birdwatching from SAA's home bunker in the Brindabellas outside Canberra, and from an undisclosed site in Secret Harbor WA. They apply Hemingway's line about bankruptcy (how does it happen? Slowly, then quickly) to the changes unravelling the world of Australian cricket, the conduct of war, political parties across Australia and the climate (with graphic evidence from the recent Nepal glacier disaster).
It's not easy moving from cricketer Marnus Labuschagne to the performance of senior Commonwealth bureaucrats in parliamentary hearings. But the ambitious attempt by the leadership group of Public Servants running Australia's Federal departments and agencies to control what the public see of officials' performances and behaviour in open public hearings is an extraordinary example of overreach.
It shows that Australia's most senior bureaucrats have a highly developed - and wholly misjudged - sense for the level of deference they should receive, even from our elected representatives in Parliament. It also shows that our nation's most senior public officials have a tin ear for how their own and their colleagues' obstructive and unimpressive public performances appear to anyone not in the Senior Executive Service of a government department in Canberra.
This attempt at censorship of one of the few remaining key places where government policy and officials' expenditure of public money takes place - the Federal Parliament's open inquiries and hearings - builds on the last three decades of increasing government and official secrecy. It's a demonstration of why public distrust in our leaders and our institutions is falling, and why politics is now so volatile.
Government ministers and senior officials attempting to control "the narrative" and withhold information that might be controversial or embarrassing is the opposite to what Australians need right now. This type of linguistic misdirection ensures public distrust in the Government decisions and directions will grow. It's the opposite to the open government that makes democracies powerful and successful through time.
As an example, the gymnastic contortions Deputy Prime Minister (and still Defence Minister) Richard Marles has been exhibiting around his work to increase the US military's presence and operations out of Australia seems designed to maintain two fictions:
1. that Australian has sovereign control of these US activities and would exercise that control in a crisis, and
2. that the US presence, although permanent and getting larger, involves no basing of the American military in Australia.
It's likely only Mr Marles and his mirror are convinced by these language games. It's certain decision makers in Beijing are more interested in physical facts than in detailed language that pretends a duck is not a duck.

The Grumpies return to SAA's bunker deep in the Brindabella Hills. It's time to take stock of the $9 billion spent so far on 3 Hunter frigates for Australia's Navy, with $18 billion still to go. The right time to stop a bad project is now, before more years - and $18bn of scarce defence cash is wasted. The Hunters are meant to be the world's best anti-sub hunting ships - but they still rely on what many other cheaper ships have: a single sub-hunting helicopter with dipping sonar and torpedoes, and they have to move slowly to be quiet when sub hunting. The weapon system has a common and enormous weakness. Australians are meant to be believe two pieces of contradictory magical thinking at the same time: 1. these 3 (yes, 3) Hunter frigates are the answer to finding and sinking any sub on the planet and so will keep our sea lanes safe. and 2. Australia's future AUKUS subs are the oceans' 'apex predators' and can't be found by any adversary system on the planet - they can hunt surface ships at will and are invisible to anti-sub hunters (like, say the Hunter frigates).....How lucky is the Australian military to have found two true WonderWeapons?
The Grumpies also look at Australia's counter drone strategy and achievements from the only real performance metric we have: hobbyist drones (and anyone else's) that want to fly into and over Australia's most important airbases can do so freely at will, unhindered by defensive measures that aren't defence personnel closing the blinds.....

Michael calls in from Count Binface's campaign to beat Reform UK's Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election. The Grumpies ponder a Binface-type manifesto for Australia - "I will cut your taxes and raise everyone else's," along with "The hand-dryer in the gents' toilet at the Great Himalayas restaurant Southport to be moved to a more sensible position". Practical politics for real people.
Then Marcus unveils his path to make the AUKUS submarine program a truly national endeavour. It involves Strategic Analysis Australia being the centre of a new, mandatory, national contributions program centred on residents of the Australian Capital Territory. This leads naturally to Australia's developing contortions, somersaults & rotations around the fact that US submarines stationed in Australia will be carrying nuclear weapons, in breach of Australia's commitments to a nuclear free South Pacific under the Raratonga Treaty.
The episode covers the astounding new release of Australia's 2026 Defence Innovation and Science strategy just two years on from the last one. Defence Science head Prof Tanya Monro (AC) uses this to prove that innovation requires nothing new and nothing to be achieved besides a font change and a modest cover page redesign.
It ends with two philosophers: the new Chief of the Defence Force, Mark Hammond and his deputy Rob Chipman, and Grand Admiral Hammond's rousing commitment to an Australian military centred on Lethal Wellbeing.