摘要：The Australian Defence Force is held in high regard; the Department of Defence is not. Longstanding concerns about inefficiency, compounded by a succession of fiascos and bungles, have entrenched the perception that Defence is poorly managed. Earlier attempts at reform have yielded mixed, often disappointing, results (see Ergas and Thomson 2011), and the years since 2009 have seen a series of reviews aimed at improving performance, culminating in 22 defence-related reviews in 2011–12 alone.Eight recent reviews deal primarily with the fallout from the so-called Skype incident at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), in which an ADFA cadet allegedly broadcast images of himself and a female cadet engaged in sex. While those reviews are of considerable interest and potentially significant consequence, they will not be discussed here; rather, my focus is on the reviews which go directly to the efficiency with which 'Defence' uses resources.2The most far-ranging reviews are the Audit of the Defence Budget, undertaken by George Pappas with support from McKinsey and Company (Pappas 2009) and the Review of the Defence Accountability Framework, undertaken by Rufus Black (Black 2011). Others, such as the Collins Class Sustainment Review (Coles 2011) and the Plan to Reform Ship Repair and Management (Rizzo 2011), are more narrowly focused
