Sick of academia? Try the military, says chief defence scientist

Mid-career academics fed up with insecure work should consider decamping to the military, according to an Australian physicist and former deputy vice-chancellor who made the same switch at the leadership level.

But chief defence scientist Tanya Monro said her organisation is not raiding universities for talent. And despite a ballooning skills gap in the military, she is untroubled when its brightest minds defect to academia.

“I don’t see us as competing,” Professor Monro told the Universities Australia conference. “And…I don’t worry about losing our good people. If our people go out into the [university] system, they’re advocates and they help guide change.”

Defence is in sore need of advocates who can sell its virtues as an employer. Professor Monro said its nominal workforce was already 3,000 people short and needed to expand by another 30 per cent by 2040 – a growth target likely to be boosted by the soon-to-be-released Defence Strategic Review.

Defence was “feeling the pain” in occupations with “small pipelines” of university graduates who were often snapped up by better-paying industries. They included psychologists, business analysts, enterprise architects, project managers, communication and cyber specialists and “engineers of pretty much every flavour”.

Professor Monro said the “quickly shifting sands of geopolitics” and the constant “grey zone conflict” of cyberwarfare required a new breed of defence workers: people who could devise disruptive technology and “really clever ways” of using it.

They needed to be able to act quickly, “and not get stuck in admiring the problem and developing perfect solutions – because there’s no point coming up with perfect solutions that may be delivered too late to be useful”.

Defence was also shifting its “mindset” from a focus on “capability gaps” to “intelligent choices” that could not easily be defeated by adversaries with more money, people and scale. An example was the “ghost shark” – a “truck-sized” prototype uncrewed submarine, currently being developed by more than 30 Australian companies in partnership with universities.

But academics should not limit their involvement to external partnerships, Professor Monro said. The “career path crisis” afflicting many researchers, including PhD contemporaries of hers who were still stuck on two-year contracts, was a far cry from the security of defence work.

She said most of the 50-odd doctoral students she had supervised had aspired to the top levels of academia. “We all know that only a really small proportion of PhDs go on to be tenured university professors. It’s really important that we give PhD students that broader sense of where they can contribute.”

A “mid-career grad programme” that she introduced last year, targeting seasoned researchers who were “attracted by the defence mission”, has drawn almost 900 applicants – many of them “vulnerable” postdocs weary of rolling contracts.

As well as rotating these outsiders through Defence divisions, the “Navigate” programme places Defence staff in universities and industry. Professor Monro said this helped generate an appreciation of academic work culture among people who had typically begun as cadets or graduates and “lived inside Defence ever since”.

This mutual understanding is vital, she said. “It all comes down to people. You can have the best strategic ideas in the world. But if our organisations are filled with people who are trying to sell each other things, but don’t understand how it is to work in each other’s organisations, I think we’re dead.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com