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This report sounds like one from whatever operational test and/or combat performance evaluation activity that Austrailia might have.

Each US service has an operational test organization, which is supposed to test equipment under as close to combat/war conditions as possible, before the stuff becomes general issue. By law that command is to be independent of the organization which purchases, or contracts for development of, all equipment. The Army's unit is the Operational Test Command, at Ft. Hood, which is a component of the Army Test and Evaluation Command, the other major componet of which conducts developmental tests. The Air Force has the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center which is a direct reporting unit (DRU) under Air Force Headquarters and is situated at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque NM.

The Navy and the Marines have similar organizations. There job is to help see that stuff that, while it meets it's formal specifications, is not yet ready for prime time, doesn't get to the field with such glaring problems. The problem is that many times the stuff is already ordered by the time the early examples are tested, and there is often not enough budget to conduct proper testing. A second mission is often to go to the field to investigate the performance of newly fielded systems. "The field" in this case meaning Iraq, Afghanistan, and various other places in the region.

This report sounds more like a report of one of those expeditions. If you don't know what's wrong, you can't fix it. The people who do this sort of thing are often quite frustrated with the appauling (to them) lack of suitability of the stuff that comes out of the developemental pipeline.

The Soviets used to be quite good about having real soldiers (airmen, sailors as appropriate) test the stuff during and after developement, before it went to the production organizations, and then again testing the production models, just to be sure that "producability" changes didn't mess up the functionality.

OF course the Soviet military didn't have the same sort of budget problems, until the very end at least. Their weakness was lack of quality control in the factories. So that even stuff that was well designed, came out as cr@p, after the drunken factory workers got done with it.