Stellantis names US and quality boss as its new CEO
Stellantis, the parent company of 14 brands including Jeep, Ram, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel/Vauxhall, Fiat, Maserati and Alfa Romeo, has appointed Antonio Filosa, currently the chief operating officer of Stellantis North America and the automaker's global chief quality officer, as its new CEO.
Mr Filosa (below) will start in his role as Stellantis CEO on June 23. He will name his executive team closer to that date.
"His track record of successful leadership during his many years with our Company speaks for itself and this, together with his deep knowledge of our business and of the complex dynamics facing our industry, make him the natural choice to become Stellantis' next CEO," Robert Peugeot, the automaker's vice chairman, said in a prepared statement.
Hundreds of new car deals are available through CarExpert right now. Get the experts on your side and score a great deal. Browse now.
Born in Naples in 1973, Mr Filosa started his career in 1999 as a trainee at Fiat. After roles in Europe and the US, he landed in Brazil in 2005, where worked his way up through program management, plant management and head of purchasing to become the head of Fiat Chrysler Latin America in 2018.
During his time in South America he launched the Jeep brand there, took Fiat to a "market leading position", and "significantly grew" the Peugeot, Citroen, Ram and Jeep brands.
In October 2024 he was appointed as the company's North American chief operating operating officer, and added the global role of chief quality officer in February 2025.
When he starts in June, Mr Filosa will have long list of items to deal with. Last year profits at Stellantis dropped 70 per cent on the back of falling sales and a glut of unsold vehicles in the US.
There are also persistent quality issues. In mid-2024, then-CEO Carlos Tavares publicly criticised the Sterling Heights plant for building too many Ram 1500 pickup trucks that needed be pulled off the assembly line to be repaired before they could leave the factory.
Another priority for the French-Italian-American automotive conglomerate, the world's fifth-largest automaker, is sorting out what to do with its collection of 14 brands, which under the previous CEO were all given 10 years to prove themselves.
Those most at risk include Chrysler, which sells just the Pacifica people mover; Lancia, another one-model brand whose reborn Ypsilon is struggling to gain traction; and DS, the luxury brand spun off from Citroen which continues to struggle to establish itself against incumbent marques.
The Chrysler, DS and Citroen brands were retired in Australia in recent years, while Lancia was axed here in 1985.
A recent report indicates Stellantis is preparing to sell Maserati, which posted a €260 million loss last year and cancelled its MC20 Folgore electric supercar.
Stellantis has been without a CEO since Carlos Tavares quit with immediate effect at the beginning of December 2024, reportedly after a disagreement with the board over the company's EV strategy.
In 2014 Mr Tavares (above) jumped ship from Renault to become CEO of the PSA Group, the parent company of Peugeot, Citroen and DS, after the French government and Chinese automaker Dongfeng bailed the company out. He helped to turn the company around with a sharp focus on costs and platform sharing.
In 2017 he engineered the buy out of Opel and Vauxhall from General Motors. Within a year the beleaguered brands were back in the black after decades of red ink.
With his star ascendent his next move proved to be a bridge too far: the 2021 mega-merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis.
Since the departure of Mr Tavares the company, especially in the US, has been trying to mend relationships with its suppliers and dealers. There are also rumours the company may return the Hemi V8 to the Ram 1500 range – an engine Mr Tavares effectively killed off.
MORE: Everything Stellantis
Content originally sourced from: CarExpert.com.au
Stellantis, the parent company of 14 brands including Jeep, Ram, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel/Vauxhall, Fiat, Maserati and Alfa Romeo, has appointed Antonio Filosa, currently the chief operating officer of Stellantis North America and the automaker's global chief quality officer, as its new CEO.
Mr Filosa (below) will start in his role as Stellantis CEO on June 23. He will name his executive team closer to that date.
"His track record of successful leadership during his many years with our Company speaks for itself and this, together with his deep knowledge of our business and of the complex dynamics facing our industry, make him the natural choice to become Stellantis' next CEO," Robert Peugeot, the automaker's vice chairman, said in a prepared statement.
Hundreds of new car deals are available through CarExpert right now. Get the experts on your side and score a great deal. Browse now.
Born in Naples in 1973, Mr Filosa started his career in 1999 as a trainee at Fiat. After roles in Europe and the US, he landed in Brazil in 2005, where worked his way up through program management, plant management and head of purchasing to become the head of Fiat Chrysler Latin America in 2018.
During his time in South America he launched the Jeep brand there, took Fiat to a "market leading position", and "significantly grew" the Peugeot, Citroen, Ram and Jeep brands.
In October 2024 he was appointed as the company's North American chief operating operating officer, and added the global role of chief quality officer in February 2025.
When he starts in June, Mr Filosa will have long list of items to deal with. Last year profits at Stellantis dropped 70 per cent on the back of falling sales and a glut of unsold vehicles in the US.
There are also persistent quality issues. In mid-2024, then-CEO Carlos Tavares publicly criticised the Sterling Heights plant for building too many Ram 1500 pickup trucks that needed be pulled off the assembly line to be repaired before they could leave the factory.
Another priority for the French-Italian-American automotive conglomerate, the world's fifth-largest automaker, is sorting out what to do with its collection of 14 brands, which under the previous CEO were all given 10 years to prove themselves.
Those most at risk include Chrysler, which sells just the Pacifica people mover; Lancia, another one-model brand whose reborn Ypsilon is struggling to gain traction; and DS, the luxury brand spun off from Citroen which continues to struggle to establish itself against incumbent marques.
The Chrysler, DS and Citroen brands were retired in Australia in recent years, while Lancia was axed here in 1985.
A recent report indicates Stellantis is preparing to sell Maserati, which posted a €260 million loss last year and cancelled its MC20 Folgore electric supercar.
Stellantis has been without a CEO since Carlos Tavares quit with immediate effect at the beginning of December 2024, reportedly after a disagreement with the board over the company's EV strategy.
In 2014 Mr Tavares (above) jumped ship from Renault to become CEO of the PSA Group, the parent company of Peugeot, Citroen and DS, after the French government and Chinese automaker Dongfeng bailed the company out. He helped to turn the company around with a sharp focus on costs and platform sharing.
In 2017 he engineered the buy out of Opel and Vauxhall from General Motors. Within a year the beleaguered brands were back in the black after decades of red ink.
With his star ascendent his next move proved to be a bridge too far: the 2021 mega-merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis.
Since the departure of Mr Tavares the company, especially in the US, has been trying to mend relationships with its suppliers and dealers. There are also rumours the company may return the Hemi V8 to the Ram 1500 range – an engine Mr Tavares effectively killed off.
MORE: Everything Stellantis
Content originally sourced from: CarExpert.com.au
Stellantis, the parent company of 14 brands including Jeep, Ram, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel/Vauxhall, Fiat, Maserati and Alfa Romeo, has appointed Antonio Filosa, currently the chief operating officer of Stellantis North America and the automaker's global chief quality officer, as its new CEO.
Mr Filosa (below) will start in his role as Stellantis CEO on June 23. He will name his executive team closer to that date.
"His track record of successful leadership during his many years with our Company speaks for itself and this, together with his deep knowledge of our business and of the complex dynamics facing our industry, make him the natural choice to become Stellantis' next CEO," Robert Peugeot, the automaker's vice chairman, said in a prepared statement.
Hundreds of new car deals are available through CarExpert right now. Get the experts on your side and score a great deal. Browse now.
Born in Naples in 1973, Mr Filosa started his career in 1999 as a trainee at Fiat. After roles in Europe and the US, he landed in Brazil in 2005, where worked his way up through program management, plant management and head of purchasing to become the head of Fiat Chrysler Latin America in 2018.
During his time in South America he launched the Jeep brand there, took Fiat to a "market leading position", and "significantly grew" the Peugeot, Citroen, Ram and Jeep brands.
In October 2024 he was appointed as the company's North American chief operating operating officer, and added the global role of chief quality officer in February 2025.
When he starts in June, Mr Filosa will have long list of items to deal with. Last year profits at Stellantis dropped 70 per cent on the back of falling sales and a glut of unsold vehicles in the US.
There are also persistent quality issues. In mid-2024, then-CEO Carlos Tavares publicly criticised the Sterling Heights plant for building too many Ram 1500 pickup trucks that needed be pulled off the assembly line to be repaired before they could leave the factory.
Another priority for the French-Italian-American automotive conglomerate, the world's fifth-largest automaker, is sorting out what to do with its collection of 14 brands, which under the previous CEO were all given 10 years to prove themselves.
Those most at risk include Chrysler, which sells just the Pacifica people mover; Lancia, another one-model brand whose reborn Ypsilon is struggling to gain traction; and DS, the luxury brand spun off from Citroen which continues to struggle to establish itself against incumbent marques.
The Chrysler, DS and Citroen brands were retired in Australia in recent years, while Lancia was axed here in 1985.
A recent report indicates Stellantis is preparing to sell Maserati, which posted a €260 million loss last year and cancelled its MC20 Folgore electric supercar.
Stellantis has been without a CEO since Carlos Tavares quit with immediate effect at the beginning of December 2024, reportedly after a disagreement with the board over the company's EV strategy.
In 2014 Mr Tavares (above) jumped ship from Renault to become CEO of the PSA Group, the parent company of Peugeot, Citroen and DS, after the French government and Chinese automaker Dongfeng bailed the company out. He helped to turn the company around with a sharp focus on costs and platform sharing.
In 2017 he engineered the buy out of Opel and Vauxhall from General Motors. Within a year the beleaguered brands were back in the black after decades of red ink.
With his star ascendent his next move proved to be a bridge too far: the 2021 mega-merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis.
Since the departure of Mr Tavares the company, especially in the US, has been trying to mend relationships with its suppliers and dealers. There are also rumours the company may return the Hemi V8 to the Ram 1500 range – an engine Mr Tavares effectively killed off.
MORE: Everything Stellantis
Content originally sourced from: CarExpert.com.au
Stellantis, the parent company of 14 brands including Jeep, Ram, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel/Vauxhall, Fiat, Maserati and Alfa Romeo, has appointed Antonio Filosa, currently the chief operating officer of Stellantis North America and the automaker's global chief quality officer, as its new CEO.
Mr Filosa (below) will start in his role as Stellantis CEO on June 23. He will name his executive team closer to that date.
"His track record of successful leadership during his many years with our Company speaks for itself and this, together with his deep knowledge of our business and of the complex dynamics facing our industry, make him the natural choice to become Stellantis' next CEO," Robert Peugeot, the automaker's vice chairman, said in a prepared statement.
Hundreds of new car deals are available through CarExpert right now. Get the experts on your side and score a great deal. Browse now.
Born in Naples in 1973, Mr Filosa started his career in 1999 as a trainee at Fiat. After roles in Europe and the US, he landed in Brazil in 2005, where worked his way up through program management, plant management and head of purchasing to become the head of Fiat Chrysler Latin America in 2018.
During his time in South America he launched the Jeep brand there, took Fiat to a "market leading position", and "significantly grew" the Peugeot, Citroen, Ram and Jeep brands.
In October 2024 he was appointed as the company's North American chief operating operating officer, and added the global role of chief quality officer in February 2025.
When he starts in June, Mr Filosa will have long list of items to deal with. Last year profits at Stellantis dropped 70 per cent on the back of falling sales and a glut of unsold vehicles in the US.
There are also persistent quality issues. In mid-2024, then-CEO Carlos Tavares publicly criticised the Sterling Heights plant for building too many Ram 1500 pickup trucks that needed be pulled off the assembly line to be repaired before they could leave the factory.
Another priority for the French-Italian-American automotive conglomerate, the world's fifth-largest automaker, is sorting out what to do with its collection of 14 brands, which under the previous CEO were all given 10 years to prove themselves.
Those most at risk include Chrysler, which sells just the Pacifica people mover; Lancia, another one-model brand whose reborn Ypsilon is struggling to gain traction; and DS, the luxury brand spun off from Citroen which continues to struggle to establish itself against incumbent marques.
The Chrysler, DS and Citroen brands were retired in Australia in recent years, while Lancia was axed here in 1985.
A recent report indicates Stellantis is preparing to sell Maserati, which posted a €260 million loss last year and cancelled its MC20 Folgore electric supercar.
Stellantis has been without a CEO since Carlos Tavares quit with immediate effect at the beginning of December 2024, reportedly after a disagreement with the board over the company's EV strategy.
In 2014 Mr Tavares (above) jumped ship from Renault to become CEO of the PSA Group, the parent company of Peugeot, Citroen and DS, after the French government and Chinese automaker Dongfeng bailed the company out. He helped to turn the company around with a sharp focus on costs and platform sharing.
In 2017 he engineered the buy out of Opel and Vauxhall from General Motors. Within a year the beleaguered brands were back in the black after decades of red ink.
With his star ascendent his next move proved to be a bridge too far: the 2021 mega-merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis.
Since the departure of Mr Tavares the company, especially in the US, has been trying to mend relationships with its suppliers and dealers. There are also rumours the company may return the Hemi V8 to the Ram 1500 range – an engine Mr Tavares effectively killed off.
MORE: Everything Stellantis
Content originally sourced from: CarExpert.com.au
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The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate.
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