Australia’s army chief is to make a rare public intervention to warn that further budget cuts pose a risk to the effectiveness of the nation’s armed forces.
Lieutenant-General David Morrison, in a speech on Friday, will say he would hate to see the mistakes of the post-Vietnam War era repeated, either in the name of misconceived strategy or economic stringency.
‘We are approaching a point where doing more with less risks becoming a cavalier disregard for the ability of forces to survive against credible peer competition,’ he will tell Canberra University’s National Security Institute.
In details of his speech published in The Australian newspaper on Friday, General Morrison says defence can conduct its assigned operations ‘with decent prospects of success and commensurate acceptable levels of risk to our troops’.
But he adds: ‘The current straitened fiscal climate poses a very real risk to the army’s approved plan for development out to 2030’.
Government budget cuts are taking defence spending as a proportion of national growth to its lowest levels in more than 70 years.
At the same time, the strategic environment in our region is more ominous than it was in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, General Morrison will warn.
‘This is not the time to reduce our deployable military capability.