Contracting is Not the Enemy: The Readiness Impact of Policy, Money and Commercial Model

Abstract

The modern Australian Defence Force (ADF) is leaner and more lethal than ever, but it encounters more complexity per person and per item than ever before. From catering support to forces deployed to East Timor and Chinooks deployed to Afghanistan through to domestic transportation of ammunition, Defence has seen variability in the level of responsiveness available to government based on the effectiveness (or not) of contracting methods. The best examples show an integrated ADF/contracted workforce developed for and capable of the strategic tasks required of it. In the worst case, we see recognised deficits in capability, such as the insufficiency of transport to resupply artillery for national defence. This article presents three themes critical to the strategic enabling or impairing of contracted capability. It seeks to show that reliance on contractors need not erode Defence’s responsiveness to deal with unforeseen operations and recommends a more holistic and inclusive consideration of what Defence needs from its contracts.

Introduction

From the dawn of corporate enterprise in the British Empire to the drone- filled skies of Syria, whenever private capabilities have existed, governments and combatants have exploited them during conflicts. Reliance on contracting for logistics has been a staple of capability for hundreds of years, which is testimony to the fact that contracting need not cripple the ability to respond to unforeseen operations. Despite the history of contracting support to logistics force structures, there remains a persistent, if anecdotal, feeling of distrust of contractors and a sense that the very act of contracting undermines Army capability and readiness to respond to unforeseen operations. Indeed, through trade specialist forums and during the move to the Plan Beersheba configuration of Army, there has been a stated acknowledgement that Army’s readiness has been eroded.¹

The aim of this article is to argue that erosion in Army’s responsiveness to unforeseen operations, attributed broadly to contracting, is more accurately due to several factors to do with past contracting behaviour. These factors are bad policies, incorrect funding and poor contract formulation. This article will also address the counter-proposition that the contracting of elements of Army capability comes at an inherent cost to capability. Drawing on these interlinked themes, it will show that the counter-proposition is premised on less than ideal approaches to contracting and wrongly attributes current readiness issues to contracting in total, rather than to the policies and models of the current environment.

The scope of this article is limited and, while it is acknowledged there is much more depth behind the matter, the focus will be on three themes— policy, funding and competition, and contract formulation—using one or two examples for each. A counterargument to the thesis based on the current state of Army contracting and on a key risk drawn from contemporary conflicts that could undermine the thesis will also be discussed. It is the author’s intention to stimulate reflection by readers on how Defence conducts contracting, and to ask all logistics practitioners how to harness contracted capability most effectively as another tool to enable combat forces to achieve the mission.

For this article, the term ‘a reliance on contractors’ will be used to indicate an intentional or unintentional decision by the State to source some or all of its capability from private service/equipment providers. It does not include State ownership, so quasi-State-owned vendors will not be considered.² The terms ‘readiness’, ‘preparedness’ and ‘responsiveness’ will be used to mean ‘responsiveness to unforeseen operations’ at tactical, operational and strategic levels. The transition of existing military units through the Force Generation Cycle to ‘Ready’ is not considered within the scope of this article; however, where ‘Ready’ forces rely on a contracted support mechanism, that mechanism can be considered within the scope. 

The modern Defence Force is leaner and more lethal than ever, but encounters more complexity per person and per item than ever before.(Image courtesy Defence)

Policy

Government Policy

Governments are famously poor at contracting, so much so that there are movies³ made about it. Reports note that even highly commercially conscious countries such as the United States (US) lose vast sums of money in waste, internal competition and paying for unsustainable commitments. Equally, it is the government’s policy setting that directs the size of the uniformed military organisation and the government that commits forces to operations.⁴ As recognised by the 2011 American review of wartime contracting, the military’s core business and focus is on kinetic capability, leading to a deficit in logistics support that is risk managed with contractors.⁵ However, when a government commits forces to theatres of choice, deploying organic military logistics and supporting the remaining intra-Australian capabilities through contracted logistics capabilities, the inherent risk is that those organic⁶ capabilities are then no longer available to support unforeseen operations. If an additional operation is launched, either new capability at the National Support Base (NSB)⁷ must be generated or capability in another theatre must be stripped. The ‘coalition of the willing’ experienced this when the Second Gulf War was launched. Frank Ledwidge criticised the British Armed Forces’ state of strategic and logistics torpor, resulting from lack of funding, protection and government focus, when they deployed again into Helmand Province in Afghanistan.⁸

It is not the reliance on contracting that has eroded responsiveness but, rather, the strategic risk analysis conducted by successive governments over what the military should look like and how much of it should be committed to wars of choice at any one time. This includes the proportion of uniformed logistics and support to combat forces, as well as the proportion of capability held in-house or contracted out—and what the government expects it to be able to achieve. In Australia, this expression of strategic requirement should be voiced, after advice to the Government from the strategic-level committees, in the Defence White Paper.⁹ It is critical for Defence, as the adviser, to accurately represent both the capability absorption that ongoing conflicts cause and what remains in a ready reserve to respond to unforeseen operations that may arise from the risk environment. Unlike a firm in the commercial world, the military does not define its limits by a cost of transaction versus income from production model as Coase’s ‘The Nature of the Firm’ defines limits.¹⁰ Military force is generated not only within allocated budgets in the short term but also to meet strategic requirements. Efficiency is still important but not as fundamental as generating, projecting and sustaining forces capable of achieving the mission and ensuring Australia’s interests. In a recent article, economist Nitin Gupta outlined the economic drivers for conflict,¹¹ but these factors of scarcity and uncertainty apply equally to the uniformed force structure desired and funded by government. Where strategic priorities and force alignment are considered side by side and contingencies or shortfalls in projection and sustainment capability are identified, opportunities for integrated contracted elements from industry will be visible. Capability and resource scarcity will be defined in the process of addressing strategic uncertainty, and governmental or departmental tolerance and limits can be drawn from this for contracted capability supporting the ADF. By ensuring that strategic requirements such as force projection and sustainment are considered, contracting can support force logistic structures without erosion of readiness.

Commercial and Corporate Environment

Just as the government’s policies shape and direct how Army logistics force structures look, corporate commercial policy and culture affect how contractors seek to market their support to Defence. Corporate commercial protection around intellectual property (IP) has resulted in a reluctance by some original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to allow Australian-based maintenance of key equipment. This can be seen with both the Harris Radio and the M1A1 Abrams tank (albeit US Government IP policy rather than commercial policy for the Abrams).¹² In circumstances like this, the erosion of readiness comes from a fundamental problem for modern complex technology and logistics: the risk acceptance of foreign manufacturers and the readiness variability¹³ of equipment that must travel internationally to be repaired. Even when vendor policy allows for the Army to address these risks and IP issues within Australia, the costs of doing so may well be prohibitive. Similarly, contracted capability can run into problems caused by lack of commercial/political insight. In December 2016, a contracted sea transport company caused diplomatic and military readiness challenges for Singapore by illegally docking in two Chinese ports, leading to nine Terrex APCs being held for two months.¹⁴ While insignificant in terms of the total force readiness of the Republic of Singapore Armed Forces (RSAF), the case demonstrates a clear issue with the corporate world’s understanding of the political environment. This issue is not a failure of contracting as a force projection option; it is a failure to communicate the requirement to behave differently from the way a commercial carrier would normally behave as part of the contract formulation.

These problematic corporate policies are not evidence that all contracting of logistics force structures is doomed to erode preparedness. As discussed further, the Royal Corps of Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME) is addressing the issue outlined above with better relationships with OEMs and service vendors and through better contract formulation and sustained through-life contract administration. Although it is not reported, it is likely that an event such as the one described above would trigger a performance management review of the contractor by the RSAF. This mechanism would leverage commercial competitive pressure and the risk of contract termination due to any demonstrable negligence by the contractor, to ensure that the contractor does not erode the RSAF’s readiness by such actions again. Australia has also employed performance-based contracting—a contract formulation step that also seeks to manage expectations of commercial providers and influence external policymakers.¹⁵ With mature contract management processes (like performance-based contracting) driving contractors to better corporate policy and performance, contracting elements of the logistics force structure need not erode readiness.

There is scope to build the skills of Army logisticians and leaders in wielding industry integrated teams as deftly as conventional capabilities. (Image courtesy Defence)

Different Kinds of Reliance

What is seen in these examples of contracts undermining readiness is an example not of reliance on force support capability contracting as a general concept but, rather, of reliance on specific kinds of contracts, such as non- performance-based, non-integrated or poorly integrated. With local labour contracts in the Afghan theatre, the quality of work, reliability of staff and assurance about where the profits were being directed were arguably poor, so it is little wonder that American reliance on the initially poorly structured commercial/contract system led to significant waste, internal competition and financing the enemy.¹⁶ To use a ‘systems warfare’ analogy, reliance on local infantry in fighting a foreign insurgency has introduced threats from corruption, exploitation by the enemy and ‘green on blue’ hostile action at friction points within the coalition system. Contracting is a system similarly seeking to draw capability from a culture foreign to Defence, with its own stakeholders, motivations and competing objectives.¹⁷ Just as in the foreign counter-insurgency case, points of contact between the foreign cultures introduce friction and uncertainty to the system. Threading the needle to get the right requirements, the right management and the right contractor is financially and labour expensive. But, when it is done properly, Defence can rely upon these capabilities. An example can be seen in the Australian experience of deploying the CH-47 Rotary Wing Group to Afghanistan. This group integrated contractors closely, with OEMs and Australian contracted personnel physically present in Kandahar undertaking maintenance and deeper level supporting services. The mission parameters allowed for substantial deeper level maintenance periods (as helicopters cannot be operationally ready at all times). The ADF and contractor personnel were trained to work together and both understood the industry regulations. As a result, reliance was rewarded and the contracted logistics and enabling force structure functioned as a highly effective tool, ensuring that no erosion of responsiveness of the unit occurred.¹⁸ Australia deployed a uniformed quality assurance team to work with CHI Aviation contractors, linked in with the coalition’s contracted support. This allowed reliance on CHI to deliver the service effect, and reliable information about the unit’s operational readiness requirements. The coalition’s integrated logistics support enhanced CHI’s ability to support the Australian requirements. The coalition, through the US Forces Command, had negotiated a balance between¹⁹ uniformed and contracted aviation support staff that enhanced readiness of both aviation units (through pooled resourcing and integrated support across the fleet) and fighting elements (through provision of greater aviation support than would have been allowed within deployed troop caps set by government).

Another kind of reliance is the inter-reliance of integrated teams with a shared mandate and mission. The Chief of Army Commander’s Statement: Army in Motion and Futures Statement: Accelerated Warfare outline the complexity of the contemporary environment that the ADF faces.^20,21 In these statements, the Chief of Army speaks of the need to master the integration of industry and other supporting organisations into task forces. In its current state, the Army already has integrated joint and industry representatives within its exercise and training continuums. These include the joint support to the Exercise Hamel series, Army participation in ADF joint courses, and invitations to industry and coalition partners to support Army courses.²² However, there remains work to be done to meet the intent of the Army in Motion statement. There is scope to build the skills of Army logisticians and leaders in wielding industry-integrated teams as deftly as conventional capabilities. The all-corps training continuums for officers and non- commissioned officers currently develop tactical skills in an industry vacuum. Promisingly, the introduction of the Decisive Action Training Environment to the ADF provides an opportunity to train using mission-tailored, industry- integrated capabilities.²³

Funding and Competition

Funding

The ADF is a logistically lean organisation and, equally, has a lean funding line for supplementation of its organic logistic capabilities, compared with gargantuan organisations such as the US military.²⁴ Done poorly, contracting can be a black hole of value, as was seen by the US in the first decade of their deployment into Iraq and Afghanistan. While ADF logistics force structures do not face all the same problems as were reviewed in the 2011 US report to Congress on wartime contracting, we do see some related issues. These are our difficulty generating economies of scale; relatively poor buying power in the open market; and a small acquisition, contracting and management team that provides a limited contracting capability.²⁵

As Coase articulates,²⁶ outsourcing should be used for functions that are cheaper to transact for than to develop in-house; however, as he notes, those transactions are expensive. Contract creation and management are activities with distinct skill sets that come with costs to the organisation that increase with the complexity of the environment. Developing contracts that supplement the logistics force structure and can be relied upon to enhance Army’s readiness is a strategic activity. It is the responsibility of the Army’s leadership to impress upon the ministers for Defence and related portfolios how serious the consequences are of undercooking our fundamental logistics capability, particularly when contracted.

If contracting could deliver better capability, align better to readiness requirements and broadly cost the Army less, how much more capable a force could Army be? Lieutenant Colonel Kane Wright recently wrote an article concerning the scale of financial liability that comes with the high- readiness, technologically sophisticated ‘Army in Motion’. He concluded that, in order for Army to sustain itself in a strategically viable way, hard decisions would have to be made on the procurement of equipment. These decisions include judiciously limiting the equipment delivery to areas of greatest effect and also identifying where a less complex and expensive type of equipment still meets our capability requirement and where Army’s priorities simply do not justify development of a new capability.²⁷ Contracting, despite being more complex than simply an extension of in-house Army logistics, could benefit from similar hard choices. To effectively make these choices, the Army will require a detailed understanding of where the contracted service or product sits in the Fundamental Inputs to Capability framework, as failures to correctly identify the requirements and supporting ‘architecture’ from the organisation will lead to wasted effort, sub-optimal service and wasted money.

The Competitive Environment

The Australian Army competes in both domestic and international markets for scarce resources. These resources are largely suitable personnel, supplies and equipment. In the context of developing a contracted component of a logistics force structure that supports preparedness, ‘competition’ means the forces and factors competing for the resources of the civilian industrial logistics sector. Army has a range of competitors in the Australian domestic and foreign procurement space. Competitors can be allied organisations such as the US Army, which can absorb the logistic capability of, for example, Javelin missile producers such that the Australian Army may not be able to replenish stock over a tactically viable period.²⁸ Army also competes with the civil sector, particularly the Australian mining sector and specialist industries such as the medical sector. Here the ADF struggles to convey how it represents a compelling return on investment. The civil sector competition within Australia means that the major logistics providers analyse contracts with the Army in the context of high-earning, shorter-term contracts in support of the major civilian players. The limited resources of each provider in the market may be allocated against a higher bidder at the expense of Army capability.

Insidiously, the presence of ‘bigger fish’ militaries and civilian outsourcing competition generates another element of competition for the Australian Army in the domain of intellectual capital in contract formation and negotiation. The Australian Army does not have a large pool of trained and experienced contract drafters and managers to turn to, this largely being limited to 17 Sustainment Brigade’s contract cell, uniformed staff with postings to a few relevant roles²⁹ and departmental staff such as Estate and Infrastructure Group base support management staff. The absence of a body of professional contracting staff limits the intellectual capital put towards the concepts of industry integration from the Army perspective. The resource-limited Army contracting staff turn to templates published by external organisations such as the Department of Finance. These templates—for example, the ‘Commonwealth Contracting Suite’—are based on imperfect matches to the preparedness requirements of the ADF. By the same token, the structure of logistics service providers (with the exception of specialist providers of services such as deployable medical care)³⁰ are geared towards a less preparedness-driven model of logistic support, as the domestic environment sees little deployable or conflict-ready contracting.

Defence must be cognisant of this environment in its contracting. The Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG) ASDEFCON templates and notes seek to take away much of the legwork required by publishing templates that address many of Defence’s contracting requirements.³¹ The push towards CASG ‘contracting centres of excellence’ in the Performance Based Contracting Team is a positive step that has the potential to ensure that contracting templates are suitable for Defence and cognisant of the need to support readiness in the force structure.³² Defence, and by extension the Army, are currently outcompeted for scarce resources in this environment, with long and costly tender processes and short contract periods.^33,34 If Army wants to represent its particular requirements and preserve readiness, it needs to both engage these broader Defence organisations and ensure that staff, from end user to contracting representative, understand how to articulate what is required. Although shaping the commercial environment’s domestic capability to support Army’s requirement for deployable support is both a big task and beyond the scope of this article, articulating that requirement to industry is surely the first step.

The Best We Can and the Recently Highlighted Risk

There is a salient counterargument to the thesis of this article, and there are clear examples of risks in seeking to build systems that outsource capability from logistics force structures. First, the counterargument is that the contracting teams within Defence have historically been composed of competent, pragmatic Defence members working with the best of the tools and money available, and that this represents Defence’s best efforts in this space. Any erosion to capability is a natural consequence of the limited contracting capability held in Defence. The move to contract fourth-line logistics demonstrates a positive political and budgetary outcome, albeit at the cost of capability. The decision to contract this capability was a policy made due to parliamentary and ministerial level decisions to downsize Army and outsource suitable functions.³⁵ Consequently the policy itself (an argument could be made) was good policy given the strategic direction from Parliament. 

With mature contract management processes deployable support, such as to Timor-Leste, becomes second nature. (Image courtesy Defence)

This article proposes that Army should have its own awareness and ability to articulate its requirements, both in advising on policy and in contract formation. It is possible to judge whether the contract formation was good in this endeavour by the results that can be seen today.³⁶ RAEME Corps Conference 2018 Topic 3, RAEME Aviation’s Plan Pelican and RAEME’s Plan Centaur, all identify erosion in the readiness of our maintenance capabilities. This runs at the individual trade skills level and in engineering and trade knowledge within the corps and is attributed to the decision to remove fourth-line maintenance experience from Army’s uniformed members. Reinforcing the thesis of this article, trade skilling in deeper level maintenance as part of the contracted solution has been implemented for RAEME aviation trades, and the corps conference has raised the issue as articulated above.³⁷ To address the argument on the quality of the policy, we can look to recent history. The aims of Plan Beersheba provided a clear message that the Army left standing as a consequence of this reduction had clear issues of eroded readiness.³⁸ It was not the move towards generating contracted fourth-line logistics capability that was responsible for the erosion of readiness; rather, it was the policy directing the reduction and setting the scope, scale and timeline for this to occur.

The Risk and Answer

Another counterargument is the attitude that there will always be vulnerability inherent in contracting with the private sector. This vulnerability is the loss of sovereign control of the capability vendor and potential for foreign and potentially hostile influence. The implications for readiness should this occur do not need to be spelled out. An example of the loss of control of a supply chain occurred in recent history with the formerly allied states of Russia and Ukraine. It is speculated that security of the supply chain for Russian military vendors was a key cause of conflict once Russia lost faith in the reliability of their ally with the fall of the Russian-aligned Yanukovych government; and the conflict has seen still more supply chain problems.³⁹ Australia also has moments of concern over the strategic supply chain, as seen in 2018 during parliamentary and media focus on the robustness of Australia’s strategic fuel reserves, which are primarily sourced from beyond our sovereign territory.⁴⁰

The risk of an unexpected operation involving a state that is a chief ADF equipment provider is not contemplated often. Australia maintains very close strategic relationships with these countries.⁴¹ Additionally, a review of later articles from that area yields interesting results. Although military equipment, spare parts and ‘dual use’ equipment trading has been suspended, it is interesting to observe that trade between Russia and Ukraine has increased, including for food and power—commodities high on the agenda for any logistician.⁴² Although this risk could be catastrophic to the readiness of the ADF (and to the ADF), it is also highly unlikely based on the 2016 Defence White Paper and the depth of Australia’s alliance with its strategic partners.

How Contract Formulation Can Erode or Not Erode Readiness

The Commercial Model

Contract formulation, the third theme to be considered, relates to decisions on the scope and coverage of contracts and the effectiveness of the contract terms to meet Defence requirements. These decisions, and the model used, derive the terms that give the contract shape and affect its operation on the ground. Defence commonly uses models such as simple purchase arrangements for consumable supplies and agency arrangements for overseas translators.⁴³ The commercial model used in shifting uniformed personnel numbers from administrative and logistics roles so that Defence could afford a more capable fighting element resulted in whole levels of logistics activity being outsourced. The contracting of all deeper level maintenance functions mentioned above has seen maintenance of some materiel and higher level ‘rebuild’ tasks removed from RAEME, resulting in loss of technical proficiency and experience.⁴⁴ This detriment undermines Army’s readiness by reducing both the pool of qualified and experienced craftsmen available for Army to deploy and the pool of equipment available to deployed or readied forces when it must be dispatched for repair to a remote or overseas OEM.

Recognising this, RAEME Aviation, as part of Plan Pelican, and ground RAEME, as part of the corps conference, have identified how to retain ready forces while employing contracted capability.⁴⁵ This model is a more integrated design, achieving a skilled and experienced workforce of both contracted and uniformed staff by building terms into contracts and agreements with contracted service and equipment providers. This builds trust between agencies and provides experience opportunities and allows overseas maintenance through embedding craftsmen with contracted maintainers to share deeper level maintenance work and bringing contractors into integrated close maintenance teams. In this way, the Army gains the benefits of contracting elements of the logistics force structure while offsetting cost to readiness by having the workforce skills and experience maintained.

Recommendations

There are three recommendations for improving the ADF’s relationship with contracting under these themes.

First, regarding policy, the success of ventures such as the integration of Boeing and other service providers on the Rotary Wing Group deployments to Kandahar, Afghanistan, demonstrates good alignment of Australian policy, commercial policy and contracting policy and should be identified as good case studies of capability-supportive contracting. The preparation, cultural factors and negotiation points that enabled these successes should be researched further and captured in Defence’s contracting training.

Second, regarding funding and competition, the ADF’s steps towards establishing joint ‘centre of excellence’ organisations to centralise costs and expertise is an excellent move to make the most of funding to professionalise contracting capability; however, it risks dislocating the capability from the requirements of the end users, such as the Army. It is recommended that Army mitigate this by taking steps such as routine liaison and training course and exercise integration to maintain the understanding between our strategic requirements through Forces Command and DGLAND and our capability generators in CASG and Joint Logistics Command.

Finally, regarding contract formulation, the success of performance-based contracts when adequately resourced provides an example of the way ahead. The Middle East Logistics and Base Services contract (MELABS) and many other contracts have since been created, and the performance- based contracting cell in CASG conduct some training within Defence.⁴⁶ However, this training is limited and not integrated with logistics training as recommended above. With better articulation and reward of contractor performance, perhaps the second-order costs to readiness will be foreseen and mitigated. The Army would avoid another situation like RAEME’s generational skills gap, which was caused by removing uniformed craftsmen from rebuild and other deeper level maintenance tasks, as some internal expertise must be maintained to hold the contractor accountable for their performance. It is recommended that Future Land Warfare Branch engage at capability, force generation and sustainment levels to integrate these lessons learned into Army’s strategic direction and future force concepts.

Conclusion

The Australian Army has undoubtedly experienced erosion in preparedness to address unforeseen operations over the last 30 years through the outsourcing of elements of the logistics force structures, as have other nations around the world. This experience should not be used to link correlation to causation. Contracting conducted by the Australian, Ukrainian, Singaporean and US militaries have shown the way to create strategic problems for preparedness and also how to do things differently in the pursuit of an effective integrated contracted logistics compatible with responsive national defence. It behoves all logisticians and warfighters alike to learn these lessons and steer both strategic decision-makers and procurement agencies towards smarter Defence contracts.

Endnotes

1. Department of Defence, 2015, PLAN Beersheba OPORD/SPTORD. Accessed via Defence Protected Network (DPN), not publicly accessible.
    
2. Department of Defence, 2018, Joint Doctrine Note 1-18, Annex 2B, para 6.
    
3. War Dogs, 2016, motion picture, Warner Brothers.
    
4. Department of Defence, 2016, 2016 Defence White Paper (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), 6.8.
    
5. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2011, Transforming Wartime Contracting, Final Report to Congress, August.
    
6. ‘Organic’ meaning held within the organisation.
    
7. ADF logisticians refer to Australia as the National Support Base to describe its role in operational logistics support as the source of personnel, supplies and equipment owned by the ADF.
    
8. F Ledwidge, 2011, Losing Small Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), Ch. 3.
    
9. Department of Defence, 2016 Defence White Paper, 1.11–1.28, 2.98–2.100.
    
10. Ronald H Coase, 1937, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica 4, no. 16, at: https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x 
     
11. N Gupta, 2018, ‘An Economic Imperative for Defence’, Land Power Forum, Australian Army Research Centre, at: www.army.gov.au/our-future/blog/emerging-threats-and- opportunities/an-economic-imperative-for-defence-dr-nitin-gupta 
     
12. M McKinnon, ‘Tank U-Turn as Parts Sent to US for Repairs’, The Australian, 1 January 2007; M1A1 ABRAMS Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Instructions.
     
13. ‘Readiness variability’ is the difference over time of equipment being available for deployment on operations against not being deployable due to being under repair.
     
14. B Jaipravas, ‘Hong Kong to Return Seized Armoured Vehicles to Singapore’, South China Morning Post, 24 January 2017.
     
15. Department of Defence, 2018, Joint Doctrine Note 1-18, para 2.7.
     
16. J Pan, 2011, ‘The Silent Kingmaker: The Need for a Unified Wartime Contracting Strategy’, Joint Forces Quarterly 60, no. 1: 40.
     
17. Department of Defence, 2016.
     
18. Teleconference between the author and Warrant Officer Class Two R Godfrey, Maintenance Manager on RWG QA Team, 6 September 2019. See also comments from before implementation of integrated contractors in Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, 2011, Defence Sub-Committee Visit to the Middle East Area of Operations: Report of the Delegation to the MEAO 14 to 18 May 2011, at: www.aph.gov. au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jfadt/ defencedelegation2011/full%20report.pdf 
     
19. Teleconference between the author and Brigadier J Shanahan, Director General and Acting Commander TAAC-South, 6 September 2019.
     
20. Chief of Army, 2018, Futures Statement: Accelerated Warfare, 2018 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia).
     
21. Chief of Army, 2018, Commander’s Statement: Army In Motion, 2018 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia).
     
22. Australian Army, 2017, What is Exercise Hamel?, at: www.army.gov.au/our-work/ operations-and-exercises/major-exercises/exercise-hamel-2016/what-is-exercise-hamel-0 
     
23. ‘Implementing the Decisive Action Training Environment’, The Cove, 28 February 2019.
     
24. Above 3, Ch. 8.
     
25. Department of Defence, 2015, 6.1–6.7.
     
26. Coase, 1937.
     
27. K Wright, 2019, ‘The Challenges of Sustaining an Army in Motion’, Australian Army Journal XV, no. 1: 53–66.
     
28. This example is for illustration purposes only; no real data has been examined regarding supply of Javelin missiles to the ADF during warlike periods.
     
29. Roles such as the Joint Logistics Command Supply Chain Branch; FORCOMD Contracting Cell; and training conducted only through the ADFWTC Operational Contract Management Course and outsourced ‘Contract Risk Management’ training.
     
30. Maria Hawthorne, 2016, ‘AMA Pressure on Government to Act’, Australian Medicine 28, no. 4: 33, at: https://ama.com.au/sites/default/files/ausmed/Australian_Medicine_16_ May_2016.pdf
     
31. ASDEFCON Shortform Services Contract Template.
     
32. Department of Defence, 2017, CASG, Performance Based Contracting.
     
33. The experience of other public logistics is instructive—for example, public transport.
     
34. I Wallis, D Bray and H Webster, 2010, ‘To Competitively Tender or to Negotiate—Weighing up the Choices in a Mature Market’, Research in Transportation Economics 29, no. 1: 89–98.
     
35. D Connory, 2014, Which Division? Australian Army History Unit Occasional Paper Series.
     
36. It has been beyond the time constraints of this article to find evidence about the capability of the team arranging the downsizing and the appropriateness of their funding, which, as outlined above, would have been compelling factors in the resourcing of this project and its capability to express Army’s requirements.
     
37. Department of Defence, Plan Pelican—Embedding of Aviation Technicians into OEM Workshops.
     
38. Department of Defence, 2015, PLAN Beersheba OPORD/SPTORD.
     
39. M Peck, ‘Russian Military Needs Ukrainian Spare Parts’, War is Boring, 4 May 2014; ‘Russia & Ukraine Military Industry’, Global Security.org, at: https://www.globalsecurity.org/ military/world/russia/industry-ua.htm 
     
40. E McCutchan, ‘Fact Check: Does Australia have 3 Weeks of Petrol in Reserve?’ ABC News, 12 July 2018, at: www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/fact-check-jim-molan-fuel-security/96876…;
     
41. Department of Defence, 2016 Defence White Paper, 68–76.
     
42. N Peterson, ‘A Step Backwards: As the War Worsens, Trade Between Russia and Ukraine Increases’, The Daily Signal, 22 January 2018.
     
43. See the Department of Defence office stationery contract and contract with World Wide Languages for provision of translator services for JTF633.
     
44. Department of Defence, RAEME Plan Pelican Problem Statement.
     
45. Department of Defence, 2018, ‘How Will Army Conduct Battle Damage Assessment with an Ever Increasing Use of Contractors and OEM for Maintenance?’, RAEME Corps Conference 2018: Topic Paper 3.
     
46. Department of Defence, CASG, 2019, Performance Based Contracting Fact Sheet, at: https://objective/id:AB33927872