Australia’s current industrial workforce planning remains largely neglected, threatening the delivery of major sovereign manufacturing ambitions such as the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise, finds a new brief from the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at the University of Sydney.
In The roadmap to sovereign capability: The industrial workforce and Australia’s missile manufacturing effort, USSC Non-Resident Fellow Alice Nason notes that while government funding has been dedicated to workforce development programs, failures in committing to key worksites and communicating decisions have limited the capacity of industry to undertake workforce preparations.
“The GWEO enterprise is one of our most significant industrial undertakings, yet we are hampered by a disconnect between our strategic ambitions and the reality of our workforce capacity,” says USSC Director of Foreign Policy and Defence Dr Lavina Lee. “To succeed, there must be moves beyond ad hoc coordination and clear, long-term demand signals necessary to attract and train the specialised talent required for this mission."
The brief finds that the Australian Government should address current trends of deferred responsibility, ambiguous demand signals and ad hoc, incremental coordination across industry, state governments and training providers to ensure the success of the GWEO enterprise. The brief also suggests that GWEO workforce preparations should be planned alongside and differentiated from other Australian defence projects to avoid duplication and promote targeted attention.
"This brief provides a starting point for the integrated workforce approach required to reconcile GWEO efforts with national priorities, underscoring that industrial readiness is not a secondary concern, but a fundamental pillar of Australia’s future defence capability,” concludes Dr Lee.
Key recommendations
- The Australian Government should specify workforce requirements and encourage private investment by clarifying the scale and geographic distribution of future GWEO work.
- GWEO workforce preparations should be purposefully planned alongside, and subsequently differentiated from, other Australian defence projects.
- National outreach should occur to increase state governments’ and training providers’ buy-in into an enterprise that has been industry-led to date.
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This brief is the last in a USSC series exploring how to operationalise the GWEO enterprise:
- US-Australia relations and the future of missilery: Long-range strike, missile defence and export controls authored by Center for Strategic and International Studies Director of the Missile Defense Project and Senior Fellow, Defense and Security Department Dr Tom Karako.
- Protecting the homeland: Accelerating ground-based air and missile defence for Australia authored by USSC Senior Adviser for Defence Strategy Professor Peter Dean.
- Partnering for forward deterrence in the Indo-Pacific: Overcoming barriers to US-Australia cooperation on Australia’s GWEO Enterprise authored by Center for Strategic and International Studies Director of Defense and Senior Fellow, Defense and Security Department Dr Cynthia Cook and USSC Research Associate Kester Abbott.
- Aiming higher: Accelerating US-Australia cooperation on precision-guided weapons authored by Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security Stacie Pettyjohn.
- Defence industry reactions to the GWEO Plan authored by Professor Peter Dean, Alice Nason and Kester Abbott.