Opinion: We don’t need a fourth Triton

 Increasing the fleet size of the upcoming aircraft is a bad investment amid our budget constraints

The Department of Defence has convinced Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and the PM-chaired National Security Committee of Cabinet to proceed with buying a fourth Triton, likely adding some $350 million to some $1 billion spent so far out of a total project budget of $2.777 billion. This is an extraordinary decision in at least five ways, but it’s most disturbing because it shows Defence is proceeding as if nothing has changed since the Defence Strategic Review (DSR).

With no new money coming into the Defence organisation for at least the next four years under the Albanese government, you would think Defence would be ruthlessly prioritising what it is spending its cash on. Instead, it looks very much like it’s on autopilot with this project being delivered by a big US prime – which joins a list of other recent decisions to buy from US defence conglomerates’ catalogues.