Dialogue: In defence we're selling our grandchildren short

Mr MALCOLM McPHEE*

A stable, civilised society is based not just on the assurance of internal law and order. It also depends on external security - a competent defence force and allies who trust you.

The Government - like the ones before - says it is committed to that and talks about new equipment. However, its Budget defence-spending figures, which have not received much attention, and defence policy framework statement send some puzzling signals.

The outlay on defence declines from the $1.24 billion for the year to last June 30 through $1.14 billion in the year to June 2001 to settle at $1.06 billion in 2004.

With spending on new equipment, the essay looks like one of slicing a shrinking loaf in a different way.

The projected defence spending is also in retreat as a percentage of forecast Government spending - from 3.41 per cent in the June 2000 year to 3 per cent this year and finishing at 2.54 per cent in 2004.

It is no better as a percentage share of expected gross domestic product - down from 1.18 per cent in the year to the end of last June to 1.03 per cent this year and falling remorselessly to 0.84 per cent in 2004.

Nor does our commitment to external security - defence - look too flash if the GDP measure is compared with numbers for other communities.

Last year New Zealand Defence posted these comparative figures (defence spending as a percentage of gross domestic product): Australia 2.2, South Korea 3.3, Malaysia 3.7, Singapore 4.3, China 5.7, India 2.2, Taiwan 4.7, Thailand 2.1, New Zealand 1.2 (stated as 1997 figure, including operating and capital costs) and Japan 1.

Recent Australian reports have put that country's defence spending as a share of GDP now at 1.8 per cent.

The commitment shrinkage has alarmed many Australians concerned about their vulnerable north, and thoughtful New Zealanders who have ventured to their neighbours' tropical seas and spent time at Darwin's war museum. That is our frontier, too.

Now, spurred by the troubles in Timor, the Solomons and Fiji, the Australian Government has become concerned enough to decide to boost defence spending 4 per cent in real terms immediately and 3 per cent a year over the next decade.

How do those figures compare with the defence commitment of others, many we of whom we like to call friends? The Economist tabulated these 1998 figures from the International Institute of Policy Studies (the Russian figure is an estimate) for defence spending as a percentage of GDP: United States 3.2, Russia 5.2, Germany 1.5, France 2.8, Italy 2, Poland 2.2, Britain 2.8, Spain 1.3, Czech Republic 2.1, Hungary 1.4.

Our Budget numbers can also be seen as a reduction in spending in real terms. Take the $1.24 billion as the base and adjust it for inflation as assumed by the Budget. If spending were maintained at the same rate, the defence budgets in nominal terms, or dollars of the day would need to be $1.27 billion instead of $1.14 billion and rise to $1.35 billion in 2004 instead of the projected $1.06 billion.

If projected defence spending was maintained at even the present lowly 1.18 per cent of GDP spending, it should be $1.31 billion this year instead of $1.14 billion and $1.49 billion instead of the Budget forecast of $1.06 billion.

Defence, of course, like most other things is not just about pure spending figures but also about how well the money allocated is spent.

Even so, not enough is not good enough either. I am old enough to remember the fit young men who went off to war in Greece, Crete and North Africa. They raced each other from dairy factory cheese presses to curing room carrying 80-pound (36kg) cheeses (on a couple of occasions with a loaf under each arm until the boss stopped them).

Those who made it home from war were prematurely aged and some barely fit or complete enough in body and limb for the jobs kept for them.

The stories they told had a common conclusion. Their equipment was primitive compared with that of their enemies. And they had no air cover. Never again, they kept saying, should New Zealand send its young people into conflict without modern equipment and air cover. Valour could not compensate for lack of technology, the lesson of war down the ages.

And who did those young men blame? The politicians who let New Zealand's equipment run down between the two world wars.

Have our postwar political colonels done any better? You have only to visit the Gallipoli museum, stand on the beach and the hills above and note other hill-less beaches not far away to understand what stupidity and ill-preparedness means.

Savagery and danger have not disappeared with the end of the Cold War any more than war did with "the war to end all wars" - the First World War. No political pronouncements to the contrary now will do that either. Recent events in the Pacific and its western fringes show troubles can still be close to home, and ignored in military hardware terms at our peril.

Much play is being made of the need to turn New Zealand into a skilled, technology-driven country. The armed services could be a collection of small national hotbeds for producing engineers, technicians and computer specialists, as well as pilots and infantrymen. Skills learned are not lost: there is life after the services. The national good could thus be doubly served.

Dare we let our children, grandchildren or some later generation say we sold them short like the men of the early 1940s and the wars before? The worst thing about war is that so much of it is so unpredictable - simply tragedy waiting to happen.

Defence is not just about what we can afford but also about what we cannot afford not to do.

With Australia's new moves in mind, a real defence budget reassessment is overdue. Few of the 2100 Kiwis in the Navy, 4400 in the Army, 3000 in the Air Force and 3800 reservists would disagree. The last Budget forecasts hardly do much for their morale either.

* Malcolm McPhee is a retired Herald journalist.