• Peter Mares, Andrew Davies, Derek Woolner
• The National Interest, ABC Radio National

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02 August 2011Report after report into Australia's defence bureaucracy has revealed a culture which is dysfunctional and prone to making mistakes. Expensive mistakes: billions of dollars have been spent on military hardware which have been an ongoing headache for the country's top military brass and their political masters. It's no surprise, therefore, that Defence Minister Stephen Smith now appears set to wind back radical changes made by the previous government, which placed the part of the military which decides what equipment to buy - the Defence Materiel Organisation - at arm's length from the Department of Defence.

The logic for giving the DMO greater independence was clear: acquisitions needed to be made by people with backgrounds in business, and who weren't captive to the culture of the Department. But today, with the DMO and Defence become embroiled in a turf war, the structural reforms appear to have run out of steam. Yet by placing the DMO back under the control of Defence, could we be throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Should the DMO's problems had been resolved by giving it even more independence from Defence, rather than by clipping its wings?