All at sea: The Defence Materiel Organisation seems to be repeating many of the mistakes made during the Collins-class submarine project in the 1980s. Photo: Damian Pawlenko

Eighteen people have been defence minister since Malcolm Fraser resigned the job 44 years ago. Of those, only one – Kim Beazley – has ever gone on to take another cabinet position. For all the others, defence was the end of their ministerial career.

There is a reason for this. When was the last time a defence minister really looked like he was in control of his department and knew what he was doing?  For a long time now, being defence minister has meant failure, frustration and embarrassment.  

Our present Defence Minister, David Johnston, is no worse than most of his predecessors. But no one will be surprised if he is moved on over the summer, as Prime Minister Tony Abbott looks for ways to mark a clean break from a bad year and a fresh start for the new one. In some ways, this would be unfair, as it is not clear Johnston has performed any worse than many of his ministerial colleagues.  

Nonetheless, it would hardly be a big blow to Australia's defence. Although Johnston is a pleasant person with a boyish enthusiasm for arcane technical details, he has no serious grasp of the two sets of big issues that are, above all, the Defence Minister's job to manage. 

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First, he shows no sign of serious engagement with the big strategic questions about Australia's defence needs in the fast-changing Asia of the 21st century. The assumptions that have underpinned our defence posture since the end of the Vietnam War are being overturned, as wealth and power shift to Asia's great powers, and strategic rivalry in the region escalates.  

Two defence white papers in the past five years have tried and failed to come up with a credible answer to what this means for the way our forces should develop in future. Johnston has commissioned a third attempt, due for release next year, but he has provided no effective leadership for the process, and no one involved in it expects the new white paper will do any better than its predecessors.

Meanwhile, our defence policy drifts, and some truly absurd and hugely expensive ideas – such as turning the navy's new amphibious ships into aircraft carriers by buying fighters to operate off them – look like being locked into the investment program on what seems to be no more than prime ministerial whim and without any serious strategic rationale at all. Second, Johnston shows no sign of serious engagement with the immense and urgent task of reforming the defence organisation. Indeed, he does not seem even to understand the size of the problem. Certainly, like everyone else, he can see that something is wrong on Russell Hill.  But he seems to think defence is a machine that works inefficiently, rather than a machine that does not work at all. If he did realise the full scale of the problems, he would be doing a lot more than the modest efficiency review he now has under way.

Johnston could get a better sense of what is wrong, and what needs to be done about it, by reflecting on the problem that has engulfed him recently. People have been a bit hard on him for saying he would not trust the government-owned shipbuilder, ASC, to build a canoe after its work on the dismal Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) project.

It was a silly thing to say in a momentary flash of temper, but hardly a hanging offence.  And, indeed, his frustration was understandable to anyone who has wrestled with a multibillion-dollar defence project going bad. But he was wrong to finger ASC. It carries its share of the blame for the problems with the AWDproject.  The real fault, however, lies with the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO), which was responsible for designing the acquisition process for the AWDs in the first place.

Instead of choosing a prime contractor by competitive tender, and making it responsible for delivering the completed ships, the DMO set up a convoluted process in which designers, builders and combat system suppliers would all be chosen and contracted separately, and then find a way to work together under a committee chaired by the DMO itself.  As a result, no one is in charge, and no one is responsible for the outcome, with entirely predictable results.  

And yet, the people responsible for this debacle are now the ones advising the government on how best to build our submarines. Tellingly, in the AWD project, DMO has repeated some of the key mistakes made back in the 1980s in the Collins submarine project.  Like the Bourbons, they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

So, if Johnston is anxious about building our new submarines in Australia, he should not be looking at ASC, but at his own department, and he should not be looking at improving its efficiency – he should be looking at rebuilding it from the ground up. The plain fact is that the defence organisation we have today will not be able to deliver and sustain the military capabilities Australia will need if it wants to remain a middle power in the Asian century.  

Abbott should understand he will not fix Australia's defence problems by replacing Johnston with another inadequate minister.  If he takes defence as seriously as he says he does, he needs to find a replacement who can really take on the immense strategic and administrative challenges posed by the portfolio today. He needs to appoint someone who can lead defence through the biggest transformation in Australia's strategic circumstances since Malcolm Fraser was defence minister more than 40 years ago.

Hugh White is a Fairfax columnist and professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.