David Cappy

And I think that is significantly more than we have been spending in recent decades.

And it's good that in some ways the conversation that's been forced by these new aspirational targets is at least making us think more seriously about the kind of investment we need.

I think that's a great question.

There are a whole lot of different dimensions to that.

First up, we have our Navy is almost all of the ships in the New Zealand Navy, bar one, will reach the end of their service life by the mid 2030s.

So that's a real challenge.

crash jam of obsolescence that's coming along the pipeline, partly because we haven't invested sustainably for a long time.

That raises real questions about how to replace those systems.

One of the questions that plays out is about the extent to which you should invest in big

platforms or ships or aircraft that require crews as opposed to some of the, you know, incredible advances that are happening at the moment around autonomous systems.

I'm a believer that you are going to need both crewed and uncrewed vessels for the foreseeable future.

And I think one of the things that the Defence Capability Plan talks about is beginning to invest in some of these autonomous systems.

systems that can go out and monitor our huge exclusive economic zone, for example, for months at a time.

It talks about putting more money into technology innovators.

Now, people will say, hey, we should be doing more of that and less of some of these old-fashioned platforms.

That's a debate worth having.

I think the other point you've talked about is people, and there you're right that for a long time some people in key roles have been paid under market rates, and that's been one of the reasons why the Defence Forces had problems with attrition.

And so you've had, for example, one of the reasons we haven't been able to put some of our ships to sea in recent years has not been a problem with the ships, but it's been a lack of senior maritime engineers, people who could leave ships

and go and work for a mining company or something and get a big signing on bonus.

Addressing those salary differences will be part of the way to help recruit and retain people.