Katherine Ziesing | Canberra
Perhaps of all the services, Army is the least platform reliant; Air Force has planes and Navy has ships. But Army has their soldiers as their overwhelming platform of choice, as it were. Vehicles and helicopters are in the mix, but they rank a distant second to the potent platform that is the soldier.
Chief of Army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell made an interesting point at the ADM Congress last month when he questioned the conversation around the acquisition of platforms for Army.
“We speak of the best submarines for Navy and the best jets for Air Force. Where are the best vehicles for Army? Unfortunately, I don’t see an argument about which land system is best for Australia. Rather, the tone of media commentary seems to focus on what’s good enough.”
"Unfortunately, I don’t see an argument about which land system is best for Australia."
And he is right. The commentary around vehicles is far less technology and capability based than that of the other services. Recent vehicle programs have not covered themselves in glory when it comes to program management but they are on the road to recovery. Even new programs have a language and mentality that seems to accept the ‘90 per cent solution’ or ‘fitted for but not with’ and ‘close enough is good enough for now’. As past conflicts have shown, you can only fight the war in front of you with the force you have, not with the one you’re planning.
Abrams tanks alongside the new vehicles under the various phases of Land 121 and the future vehicles under Land 400 will form the centre of how Army moves, fires and fights in the digital battlespace.
“A Joint Fires Coordination Centre – usually misdescribed by its First World War codename – is the Tank,” LTGEN Campbell said at ADM2016. “A connected, lethal, deployable and sustainable armoured capability is at the core of the ADF’s joint land war fighting capability. The M1A1 Abrams main battle tank is an essential element of our close combat combined arms team.”
And that is the heart of the issue; it’s a team effort in a network-enabled environment. Army has been the last of the services to embrace the digitisation of the battlefield – and for good reasons I would argue, namely: the scale of the rollout of technology; a culture of making do and not wanting a soldier to become a Christmas tree – a mere carrier of batteries for an array of gadgets; and a history of programs that fail to meet the stated goals. Army can hardly be blamed for being cautious when upgrading to meet the new challenges of a digital world.
The questions need to change in this space. Why does Army need to evolve when it comes to vehicle protection levels? Why is ground based air defence important? Why is being on the technology edge for Army a bad thing? And I think most importantly, what does Army bring to the table in the joint battlespace with its sister services?
White Paper
Unless you’ve been living under a comfortable rock recently, you would have noticed the arrival of the new Defence White Paper, Defence Industry Policy Statement and Integrated Investment Plan (IIP) last month. A straight report on the highlights of these documents can be found on P.6 with much more analysis to follow in the April edition of ADM, once we’ve had time to digest and connect the dots. In the meantime, please check out the online coverage from the ADM team on this trifecta of important policy work.
At its heart, the government is looking to bring Defence expectations back into line with the past decade of DCPs that have been over-programmed and under-funded. There is a realisation that the key enablers to Defence, with ICT and infrastructure receiving pride of place, need urgent remediation. I hope that cultures and processes, particularly for ICT, are also addressed in order to fulfil the promises made in the White Paper and IIP.
As mentioned this month, the IIP is not the DCP of days gone by. It aims to produce a more integrated approach to how the ADF procures and sustains capability, as its name implies. An online companion to the printed version will be a living document, updated regularly as programs reach milestones, new and old programs are added and removed and timelines/budgets clarified. A worthy aspiration that has been voiced previously but not delivered. ADM will keep a watching brief going forward.