The September 26, 2024 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar: An Initial Take

The most recent seminar of The Sir Richard Williams Foundation was entitled: “Enhancing and Accelerating the Integrated Force: An Operational Perspective.” This seminar focused on how the force in being or the ready force was focused on improving its capability, its survivability and lethality for the fight tonight. For such a focus, one needs a sense of urgency for how to improve the force in the short to mid-term, rather than over emphasizing the long term future and future force structure planning.

This seminar begins the third phase of The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminars since I have been writing the seminar reports. When I first came in 2014, the seminar focused on “Air Combat Operations: 2025 and Beyond.” Well, 2025 is almost here. And 2014 was as well the first year that the Marines began their six month deployments to Australia or MRF-D showed up.

This first phase focused on modernization of the RAAF, in terms of a crafting a fifth-generation air force and the impact and intersection of this effort with the overall modernization of the joint force or a fifth-generation force. This focus continued until the pandemic hit in 2020. The work conducted in the seminars is summarized in detail in my book published in December 2020 entitled Joint By Design: The Evolution of Australian Defence Strategy.

The second phase has focused upon the strategic redesigns envisaged for the ADF first by the Liberal government and then by the current Labour government. Here the focus was upon discussing and analyzing the way ahead for long-range force planning and strategic redesign of the force.

We focused on these topics in the seminars which began after the pandemic lifted and through the first seminar of this year. I have summarized the work of this phase in two books, Australian Defence and Deterrence: A 2023 Update published last year and Australian Defence and Deterrence: A 2024 Update published recently.

Now we are launching a third phase focused on how the ADF is enhancing the force in being from an operational perspective.

In future articles and the final report, I will summarize the presentations and comments of speakers and participants in the seminars, which together provide a solid launch point for analyzing and discussing the challenges of the way ahead.

A rule of thumb is that a military has 80% of the force it will have in a decade, so the challenge is always adapting the force in being while new platforms and systems are added 10 to 20 years into the future.

There were several themes discussed during the seminar.

The seminar began with a presentation by Peter Jennings who focused on the political dynamics within the three AUKUS countries and how those dynamics might affect budgets, operational demands and force structure choices in the five year period ahead. Quite obviously the fight tonite force is clearly affected by operational demands and the ability and willingness of governments to provide sufficient funds for near term operational demands as well as funds for longer term force modernization.

A key challenge as well is the need to broaden the consideration of how defense notably in a multi-polar authoritarian world challenging the rules-based order has become a much broader consideration for the Australian nation than simply what the ADF can deliver. Notably, the information society is a bedrock for modern Australia, and enabling the information tools of a modern society is a whole of Australia problem, not just an ADF issue.

Three speakers especially noted this aspect of the way head. Chris McInnes, Executive Director of the Airpower Institute, underscored that the central role of aviation within Australian society requires rethinking the whole of aviation enablement challenge, rather than simply focusing on military airpower. There is a much broader eco-system.

Space systems clearly fall into the same class of challenges, whereby space for Australia is a whole of nation domain, not just a warfighting domain that requires only ADF-competence. Nick Leake, Head of Satellite and Space Systems, has made this point repeatedly in his past presentations, and did so as a member of the panel of industrial representatives.

Dr. Malcolm Davis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has underscored in his extensive work on space and in his presentation, the need to ramp up the investment and work of the Australian government more generally on the space domain because of its basic significance for the viability of the information society and economy of Australia even beyond defence considerations.

Throughout the day, there were discussions on the need to modernize continuously the enablers for joint operations, C2, ISR, Counter-ISR, or what my colleague Ed Timperlake calls the essentials of prevailing in Tron Warfare. The Chief of Joint Capabilities, LTGEN Susan Coyle argued that this area is indeed the high ground of military capability. And I would add the further challenge is that this is a software dependent world which is evolving rapidly and capabilities needed are ongoing and simply are not long range force structure platform planning targets.

The Deputy Director General-Signals Intelligence and Effects from the Australian Signals Directorate certainly reinforced Coyle’s emphasis on the role of Tron Warfare and intelligence as an enabler for the joint force and in this way it becomes a force which can operate as an integrated one.

The most targeted discussion of the force in building and the approach to change from an urgent shorter-term perspective was provided by a core panel. This panel was headed by AIRMSHL (Retd.) Darren Goldie and the two members of the panel were the Air Commander Australia, AVM Glen Braz, and the Commander of the Australian Fleet, RADM Christopher Smith.

No short summary of their comments is adequate so I leave for a later article a fuller discussion. But both focused on priority modernization efforts to work force distribution for the air and naval forces to be more lethal and survivable.

We benefited as well from a video presentation from General Kevin Schneider, Commander Pacific Air Force, and in person presentation by AVM Mark Flewin, Air Officer Commanding 1 Group Royal Air Force. The first discussed the challenge of modernizing the force in being from an American point of view and the second from a British point of view. And with the AUKUS emphasis, there is growing convergence on force integration issues with Australia.

There were several other presentations which provided insights into near term challenges which I will simply mention here and will provide future articles which discuss their presentations in more detail.

Jen Parker of the National Security College discussed the evolving maritime environment and its challenges, notably the changing littoral operational environment and the appearance of new technologies. The Chief of Air Force, AIRMRSHL Chappell, discussed the importance for the RAAF to be able to operate its force in depth, in terms of space, time and posture.

Throughout the day the growing significance of autonomous air and maritime systems was mentioned as a key element of the way ahead for near term modernization of the force, and this along with the Tron Warfare evolving capabilities were obviously key building blocks for the future. These systems are also part of the Tron Warfare effort and their approach to modernization will parallel the software world more than the legacy platform build world.

And this ultimately is the challenge: How does enabling the force in being, the fight tonite force, in the near to midterm mate with long term visions?

This is a major challenge for industry supporting defense whether those are defense companies or commercial companies. How does industry make the investments in defence modernization which upgrades the force in being to fight tonite?

A key issue involved in all of this is how to enable the acquisition process to fill the gaps which the current force must meet to become more survivable and lethal for the fight tonite rather than prioritizing 10 year to come platforms?

The industrial panel provided insights with regard to this challenge which I will deal with in a later article.

We have much to discuss in future seminars in our new phase of analysis and discussion.

The featured photo: Air Commander Australia, AVM Glen Braz, on the right, and the Commander of the Australian Fleet, RADM Christopher Smith, on the left, participating in the seminar.