AFTER the flood, I bought some metal shelving that, when assembled, was too big for the storeroom door.

Blokes who prowl the aisles of Bunnings like starstruck kids on Hollywood Boulevard do that sort of thing and wear the scorn of their partners and children.

However, when it comes to real incompetence, I dips me lid to the geniuses who bought for the army $40 million worth of landing craft that didn't fit the navy's amphibious ships.

This is your taxes at work.

At 25.4m long, the boats were not exactly runabouts and they weren't battleships, but you might have thought somebody would have run a tape measure over them before signing on the dotted line.

In the end, size didn't matter because they developed cracks during testing in 2007 and were quietly tied up and left to rot.

And, anyway, the amphibious ships for which they were ordered were rust buckets bought by some uniformed rube or Defence sucker and have been scrapped, which seems a neat way to rule off this page in the ledger of incompetence.

However, it is a thick ledger with entries going back so far it is impossible to quantify the total cost of this grotesque system of procurement.

It spans successive governments, suggesting that a solution is slipping beyond the reach of any political party or minister.

An electronic library search linking "Defence" with "incompetence" or "blunder" in the past 10 years reaps a rich harvest.

The latest Defence Minister to drink from the poisoned chalice is Stephen Smith, who had the job of officially deep-sixing the too-wide and overweight landing craft.

He reportedly also has his eye on the $3.8 billion order for 46 helicopters to replace the army's Black Hawk and the navy's Sea King fleets.

To put it in perspective, this is about double the sum to be raised by the Federal Government's flood levy, which is causing so much angst among political opportunists and tightwads.

Other troubled programs include the Collins class submarine sustainment project, ongoing glitches with the RAAF's Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft and its multi-role tanker transport.

Of 18 Defence "projects of concern" listed since 2008, seven have been removed "due to remediation" and two have been cancelled.

This is a record of fiscal and managerial idiocy that makes Building the Education Revolution clangers seem like masterpieces of planning and execution. You have to wonder whether Defence exists in our world or in some parallel universe of bottomless budgets and limitless stupidity.

Given the Federal Government last year rejected a Finance Department suggestion that we abandon a commitment to 3 per cent a year growth in the Defence budget for the next 20 years, it is reasonable to wonder if we are throwing good money after bad.

What other department would expect to have serial incompetence rewarded with endless generosity?

Little wonder Smith and Defence Materiel Minister Jason Clare coyly referred to "serious institutional problems" within Defence.

That's a bit like saying there are serious noise problems at the State of Origin.

"A key priority for Defence," said Smith, "will be to put in place a better accountability mechanism, better fiscal discipline internally within Defence.

"In the past there has been too much of an attitude or a culture that, irrespective of the cost, irrespective of the outcome, a Defence project was somehow immune from rigour."

It's a familiar tune that has been whistled by successive defence ministers as they have stumbled through the cloying fog of bureaucratic flim-flam.

The problem is we are suffering from incompetence fatigue. About the only thing that would surprise us would be if a Defence project came in on time, on cost and did the job.

We are so bedazzled by the figures involved that they take on an air of unreality.

And when it comes to assessing if weapons, machinery and assets do the job, we have nothing but the word of Defence or the top brass.

Those in the field often have a very different definition of success. (Heat-of-the-moment opinions about the suitability and reliability of army pumps during the flood crisis might surprise those who ordered them.)

Some bungles come to light only in the most spectacularly simple circumstances, such as when boats don't fit or helicopters don't fly.

Tragically, other failures might be revealed in blood.

Smith and Clare have declared a touching faith in Defence and the people who run it. You might wonder why, given that it is their political necks on the chopping block.

When it comes to the ongoing joke about Defence incompetence, it's time to remember the immortal line: "Stop laughing, this is serious."

sweetwords@ozemail.com.au

Originally published as Defence blunders beyond a joke