Australian Army Chief of Staff on Force Transition

During my September-October 2024 trip to Australia, I had a chance to sit down and talk with Lt General Stuart Simon, Chief of Staff of the Australian Army.

He discussed that under the force transition for the Australian Defence Force, the Army had to deal with three challenges simultaneously or what one might call the three R’s: Re-structuring or redesign, readiness and resilience.

Lt. General Stuart underscored:

We must do all three simultaneously. That means that we have to change the way we are set up and the way we work.

Previously, we did our force generation, force modernisation and readiness activities separately. They were three different parts of the force. We had a readiness model where we consumed readiness while we were deployed.

We cannot operate that way anymore, as we did in the so-called ‘wars of choice’.

We start with the consideration that time is the key resource. It is insufficient to invest our time in three different activities and then converge on an operation.

We assign land forces to the Chief of Joint Operations (CJOPS), and I give him a level of assurance that these forces are ready and at a clearly defined readiness level. CJOPS assigns the mission and tasks for the particular operation, activity or investment. Now – In a new way of working, I will also assign tasks in support of force generation and force modernization objectives.

When we deploy, whether onshore or offshore, bilaterally or multilaterally, we are going to make the best return on investment we possibly can.

For example, the forward deployed forces working in Indonesia as part of Exercise Super Garuda Shield, worked with a partner, had assigned tasks from CJOPS and me. The tasks from me may be individual and/or collective training objectives, or in support of force modernization. There might be an experiment. They may have new kit, and I might task them to figure out what tactics, techniques and procedures we must adopt to employ and integrate this new kit on operations.

In other words, we are flipping the model from one where we consume readiness when we’re deployed to one where we build readiness while we deployed.

If we are doing that consistently across all operations, activities and investments, and we are doing that at scale, then we start to build readiness across the force.

We cannot afford a model where we have one part of the force at a high state of readiness, and the rest of the force at low levels of readiness. It is very expensive and inefficient. We must be disciplined in understanding the difference between training levels and readiness levels.

I noted that the Army was a crucial force for working partnerships across the region, and frankly, I consider a major contribution of the ADF to enhance its operational  capabilities out to the Solomon Islands. The Army can provide the kind of local knowledge and local partnerships crucial for the defence of Australia and for the region.

Lt General Stuart certainly agreed.

Some of the value of land forces is in presence and persistence, and those relationships you need in terms of placement, access and understanding the situation, the micro terrain, understanding the littorals, understanding the ports and the airports, understanding the language, the local culture. What does normal look like? And how do you detect what’s different? How do you characterise threat?

We then return to a discussion of readiness built as well through a change in the training process.

Lt General Stuart underscored this approach as follows:

We have changed markedly since the so-called ‘wars of choice’. Back then a battle group would go the Combat Training Center and be trained for a specific mission and theater. The trainers provided a full mission profile environment for the specific theater of operation. Today the battle group comes to the training center and is provided with a full mission profile for various operational environments and the Commander trains their unit or formation. That is how we are building readiness now.

We then shifted to the discussion of force structure redesign.

Lt General Stuart emphasized the following:

In terms of force structure redesign, it is 18 months last week since the 2023 Defense Strategic Review. The Army has moved very quickly to execute on our mission and tasks, and our transformation.

In that time, we have rewritten the land domain concept, the land operating concept (which translates the joint or the integrated force concept into the land force component), and translated the Chief of Joint Operations plans into force structure and readiness requirements for the Army.

We have rewritten a number of the subordinate concepts, for example, the special operations concept. We have re-organized the Army. We have changed its disposition, and we are getting after the reorganization of units at brigade and at battlegroup level, changed the way we do operational command and control and the physical footprint and disposition of our formation level headquarters.

We have created a dispersed nodal structure. We understand the bandwidth requirements, the data exchange requirements, the data standards and the architecture needed in order to operate in this manner. How does the Army contribute to and draw upon the combined kill web?

We have been exercising and experimenting over the last four years across northern Australia with the first brigade which is our lead unit for littoral operations. We’ve been doing that across the North of Australia and projecting into the Northwest. We’ve been doing that with our teammates in the Marine Rotational Force-Darwin, and U.S. Army Pacific and specifically with their composite watercraft company.

We have leased civilian stern landing vessels to practice and to experiment and figure out how we’re going to incorporate new weapons, new watercraft, new digital systems in order to meet our operational mission.

It is experimentation with a focus on ‘learn by doing’ and builds readiness in the process.

We are redesigning the Army in a very practical way. And the way that our soldiers have embraced innovation from the ground up to solve operational problems is just phenomenal.

It’s a work in progress, but it’s moving quickly, and we are working with every partner, whether industry, allies or the other services to get after these problems. In that way, the redesign turns upside down the capability development and delivery process.

We used to start with the major system, let’s say watercraft. We then built some facilities, we trained some people, we did some Operational Test and Evaluation, and then we fielded the system. That process would traditionally take about a decade for a major system.

One of the requirements of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review is to change the way that the Government, Defence and the other agencies do acquisition. While we wait for those changes to occur, we’re doing what we can with what we have and taking that approach already.

For example, the very last thing to be delivered for the littoral maneuver capability will be the watercraft. We’ll have the doctrine, the concepts, the tactics, techniques and procedures already adopted.

We will already have adopted different structures, different ways of working, and different equipment sets to support how our formations fight.

The third piece, which you asked about, was resilience. We are not going to fight alone nor are we going to sustain ourselves on our own. We are working with small and medium enterprises, Australian enterprises notably, as well as the large primes we are associated with, to build the magazine depth and effectors we need for today and tomorrow’s fight, particularly when it comes to long-range strike.

The other aspect to resilience is what I call ‘adaptive reuse’. In other words, what do we have that can be reused in different ways – perhaps with a technical inject? Because you go with the kit you’ve got in a ‘fight tonight’ situation.

How can we use our extant kit in different ways through the application of technology or by integrating it into a human-machine team?

We are building an ecosystem that fosters innovation from the ground up, adding resources to it, and we’re getting some great results.

We have completely changed the mission of our 1st Armored Regiment which was previously a tank regiment, but it is now the lead trace for applied modernisation in our Army. It is the center of a network of industry, military and academia focused on solving today’s problems by putting new kit in the hands of our soldiers and enabling them to figure out how they are going to best use it operationally.

Featured photo: The Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart AO DSC at the 25th anniversary of Australian service in East Timor, held in Canberra, Australia. 20 September 2024. Credit: ADF