Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 14

meaningless language, the official reports allow bureaucrats to speak for themselves.
The report of the Australian National Audit Office
into the Super Seasprite helicopter project offers a
prime example. The significance of this report lies in
the official trick language—the slippery, astute, and
downright devious words and phrases with which the
military bureaucracy is regrettably comfortable.20
Super Seasprite helicopters were acquired to
enhance the capability of the Royal Australian Navy’s
eight ANZAC class ships. The project was approved
in February 1996, with a budget of $746 million, and
provisionally accepted aircraft were operated by the
Navy between late 2003 and early 2006, when flying
was suspended. The project was canceled in 2008.
Overall, expenditure exceeded $1.4 billion.
The Seasprite report reveals a bureaucracy riddled
with habits of avoidance. Despite evident waste and
obvious failure—since no Seasprite helicopter capability exists, or ever existed—the Australian National
Audit Office report manages to avoid moral language
and ideas. The word “wrong,” for example, occurs three
times in the report. On pages 260 and 319, the word
12

The Royal Australian Navy’s Kaman SH-2G(A) Super Seasprite helicopter 19 March 2005 at the Avalon Airport in Avalon, Victoria,
Australia. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“wrong” appears in the phrase, “wrong side of the aircraft.” On page 334, we read of a “wrong impression.”
Despite the nonevent that was the Seasprite helicopter, no person is seen to have been wrong. No person is
seen to have made a mistake.
Yet, recalling Robert Kempner’s interrogation of
the truculent Wannsee participants after the Second
War, there were people who “knew the things you
had to know,” and who made the decisions significant
people make.21 Such people accept large salaries from
the public purse to remunerate the heavy burdens of
responsibility. Incredibly, no person was considered
responsible. No person was wrong. No person was
found to bear any blame.
The word “blame” appears once in the report, on
page 333, where we read that the Australian National
Audit Office Report “summarise(s) the apportionment
of blame against the audit objective to identify those
January-February 2017  MILITARY REVIEW