From the Source: RADM Rowan Moffitt, AM, RAN, Deputy Chief of Joint Operations | ADM Nov 06

1 November 2006

By Julian Kerr

Rear Admiral Rowan Moffitt was appointed Deputy Chief of Joint Operations at Headquarters Joint Operations Command in 2005. He spoke to ADM's Senior Correspondent, Julian Kerr, in Sydney.

PROFILE RADM Rowan Moffitt AM, RAN
1993 Commissioning CO, HMAS Newcastle
1995 Promoted to Captain, Chief Staff Officer Operations, Maritime HQ
1999 CO, HMAS BRISBANE
1999 Promoted to Commodore, DG Navy Capability Management
2001 Commandant, ADF Warfare Centre
2002 Promoted to Rear Admiral, Deputy Chief of Navy
2004 Maritime Commander Australia
2005 Deputy Chief of Joint Operations at HQ JOC

ADM: What are the outputs JOC has to deliver to Government?

Moffitt: The Defence Annual Report describes what the ADF does for the Government in terms of outputs and the first of those, Output No. 1, is command of operations in defence of Australia and its interests.

We in the Joint Operations Command (JOC) are the functionality which provides the mechanism through which command is exercised over ADF operations, as well as major exercise activities that the ADF runs, and some contributions to national support tasks like search and rescue, Defence's contribution to the civil surveillance program, and Defence's contribution to the civil community in a wide range of areas.

ADM: How do you establish benchmarks for these wide-ranging responsibilities?

Moffitt: There's an awful lot of precedent in our history on what constitutes good and bad in all of those areas.

Part of my organisation here in JOC runs the ADF's lessons-learned database which is a very comprehensive electronically-based compendium of things that we have learned along the way.

So we maintain that, everybody inputs to it, and we can go back and look at things that have been done in the past and see what were the good bits, what were the bad bits, and what we should avoid doing in the future.

So, in part we benchmark against ourselves.

When we get the opportunity, we will also benchmark against those people who are considered to be world's best practice in the sort of things in which we are engaged.

In large measure that's the US and the UK but even some of the small ones, who you might not necessarily go to first.

The Kiwis do teach us quite a bit.

They're agile and they're very like-minded.

We have looked at some aspects of their joint forces construct and there are lessons there for us, specifically in terms of organisation, even though they're much smaller than we are.

We've looked at the Brits, we've looked at the Canadians.

We're learning now from our current engagement with the Dutch in Afghanistan.

All of these are great learning opportunities for us.

Our approach is that we'll steal good ideas no matter who has thought of them.

ADM: On the way to your office I noticed a vision statement which said that "JOC will be the best place to work in Defence". Is that happening for you?

Moffitt: I've had very wide ranging jobs during my 32 years in the Navy, and several of the recent ones have been joint.

There are probably only two or three jobs in my experience which come close to this one in terms of enjoyment and professional reward.

This is a very hard worked place; there are not a lot of people in Joint Operations.

There are 85 at HQJOC, the ADF Warfare Centre at Williamtown is about the same number, the Joint Operations Intelligence Centre is slightly more, then there's the National Welfare Coordination Centre which is under my command, and crucially important to me is the Joint Movements Group.

So it's quite a diverse Command with a few hundred people in total, although the headquarters bit itself is less than 100.

Worked hard though they are, what they're doing is real, no day is like the one before, there is no end of professional challenge for everybody who is here, and while there's hardly a soul who wouldn't wish that the workload was less, they all do seem to enjoy being part of it.

It's really quite seductive, and I use that word very carefully.

ADM: What elements of Joint Operations still present challenges?

Moffitt: The whole joint business of defence is a journey.

We've taken some very key steps, none of which is individually removable from where we've got to today.

The fact that we established a joint defence academy was a clear enabler on our journey.

The fact that we established a joint command and staff course, a joint senior level strategic staff training process, an increasingly joint and integrated operational level headquarters in the immediate future, all of these things are key elements in the joint journey that we're on, which will continue well into the future.

The next key step that we're taking is to move to a fully integrated Joint Operations Command construct.

Now we're on the brink of stepping into a completely different joint staff construct at the operational level which will be the next major step we take in improving our ability in the arena of commanding joint operations.

This step presents the next key challenge for us in joint operations.

The ability of our forces to operate jointly is, I think, as good as anyone else in the world but new challenges constantly emerge.

We will get better thanks to some of the things that are in the Defence Capability Plan, things like the LHD, and these will present significant challenges.

As an aside, this project, I think, has the potential to shift the centre of gravity of the ADF quite significantly in a capability sense; it is as crucial to us in many respects, and as fundamentally joint in all respects, as things like JP2030 (ADF Joint Command Support Environment) and the new command and control, and communications systems.

ADM: Is the acceptance of Joint Operations being driven from the top down, or is it now more fully embedded in ADF culture?

Moffitt: The fact that we established a joint Defence Academy all those years ago has bred from the ground up a group of people who have a joint notion of life to begin with.

They start their service lives jointly.

People now start off in a joint environment, go off and do their single-service stuff, then come back at the crucial mid-level seniority to do the joint command and staff course where, having established a degree of credibility in their single-service professional specialist field, they can put it all together with other specialists in a joint environment.

We do that again at the senior Colonel (equivalent) level.

So we're very consciously building and embedding the joint culture in our officer corps, which is the joint 'engine room'.

It's mostly our officers who make the joint bits and pieces actually happen.

So, yes, I think the culture is emerging very strongly and while it has been driven from the top in years gone by, I think it has become self-sustaining.

And without all of those building blocks that I mentioned having been put in place, I think the next step we're about to take, to the new transitional JOC headquarters set up, would be much more difficult.

ADM: How does JOC deal with the implications for coalition interoperability of organisational and technical developments in the US and elsewhere?

Moffitt: We work very hard to continually develop our ability to be interoperable with the US, our key ally.

They're going through a similar sort of journey albeit a very different-looking one; the way in which they've approached it has been quite different from us and the results that they've achieved have been quite different from ours.

They've been forced into 'jointery' by legislation, and their hugeness makes it difficult for them to progress in the way that we do.

But they're doing some great stuff, into which we're very closely plugged.

We are able to access some terrific ideas which help to ensure we remain interoperable, by acquisition or by emulation.

The number of levels and ways in which we stay connected with what they're doing is just too complex to describe.

They give us extraordinary access to what they're up to, and are willing to share most of these sorts of systems.

Things like an ability to plug directly into their secret national network, sharing information on the systems that they're developing for the future, particularly through the US Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, these are all enormously valuable for us and help us to stay abreast of the latest and best developments.

ADM: How do you describe your role?

Moffitt: The Vice Chief of the Defence Force is the Chief of Joint Operations (CJOPS), the operational level commander in the ADF.

I'm his deputy, which is a relatively recent change, part of the evolution along the way.

In April last year the VCDF was designated as the CJOPS for the first time and the occupant of this office, who was the Commander Australian Theatre and the operational-level commander, relinquished command and became the deputy to CJOPS, who is Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie.

So in some respects, and especially if you look at it in the new HQJOC construct, I have two main functions.

I am the VCDF's deputy for command of operations and I run the JOC for him.

There are some administrative bits in VCDF's portfolio where I do not have the wherewithal to deputise for him but in the operations bits I clearly do.

The day-to-day, hour-to-hour type of stuff in all the operational and major exercise activities, the defence aid to the community, search and rescue, that sort of stuff, I manage on his behalf.

ADM: In October last year the number of staff that will man the new HQJOC was cut from 1,185 to 750. Why a cut of such magnitude? What will be the effects?

Moffitt: The original plan was simply to move all of the existing organisation, which is a small joint staff with geographically-scattered components, into one building.

There was a lot of duplication in that arrangement and given also the pressure on the specialist middle-level ranking officers who constitute the real engine room of an organisation like this, there was a need for us to do it smarter, and with less people.

The CDF's view was that we were ready to go beyond the organisation we've been working with for some years, the component based set up, into a fully-integrated organisation.

That's a bold step, but one of necessity because of the limited supply of the all-important specialist officers to staff JOC.

It demands of us in the C2 world the ingenuity that we see in our people every day.

No-one else in the developed world, as far as we know, is attempting to make a fully-integrated, operational-level headquarters work.

We're confident we can do it, because we've got good people who are already 'joint' to fill the organisational structure and because we've got the necessary experience, both from being engaged in operations and from commanding operations at the operational level.

It's certainly something that will be more cost-effective in terms of one of our most stretched resources, and we think that it will work better in many respects than the arrangements we have today.

ADM: Will these cuts affect manning levels in the Deployable Joint Force HQ or in the deployable secure intelligence facility?

Moffitt: There will be the core of a deployable joint headquarters as part of HQJOC when we get to the new HQ at Bungendore.

In the transitional arrangements from January 2007, that bit won't be there because we'll still have the Deployable Force HQ based on 1 Division.

But when we get to Bungendore there will a small core staff with a number of tasks, one of which will be to form the nucleus of a joint headquarters that we will be able to deploy quickly in the critical first few months of an operation.

This arrangement will lift that burden from the HQ 1st Division.

The new construct will be leaner and more focused, certainly more joint all the time than the current arrangement and probably more ready.

A similar approach will be taken with the secure intelligence facility.

ADM: What improvements do you expect when you move to the Bungendore facility at the end of 2008?

Moffitt: I've long felt that the next considerable improvement in our ability for joint operations will occur when we get the present geographically-disparate organisation all together in one place so that we can do better those many things that are best done face-to-face.

The transitional phase we're going into in January will make life harder for us in some ways because the organisation is designed around being in one place.

We will have the HQ split between Sydney and Canberra.

The Air Operations Centre at Glenbrook and the Plans Branch are moving to Canberra, the Operations branch and my current Chief of Staff (who becomes Director-General Operations) will largely move into the basement of Maritime Headquarters in Sydney, and the Support branch will be split between both cities.

The idea was to put in place the new organisation, kick it and punch it ferociously and make it work for two years before we move to Bungendore, so we know exactly what we need in the new building.

ADM: How do the network-centricity plans of the three services affect JOC, and vice-versa?

Moffitt: At the operational level, we're moving into a joint paradigm where the Services will be fully engaged with the global ADF network enabled operations framework.

In the new HQJOC there will be the ADF's single operations room at the operational level and the six or so ops rooms that the components run at the moment will cease to exist.

We have to have an architecture that provides for us to be completely interoperable with those bits at the tactical level.

These are the bits that the Services are desperately concerned about for their war fighting activities and over which they will still have a great degree of influence.

But it's not a case of one influencing the other so much; it's a case of an absolutely corporate, collegiate approach to the whole business of network-centric warfare in the total ADF construct.

ADM: How do you envisage the impact on joint operations of the new LHDs?

Moffitt: I have been concerned in the past at the view that these are just trucks to take the Army around, and indeed they are but that misses the real point.

They are a potentially enormous amount more than that.

They represent probably one of the most profoundly joint capabilities that we're bringing into service.

They have the ability, if we realise their full potential, to shift the centre of gravity of the ADF.

But I do believe that the Services and the Army in particular will need to think hard about the whole thing if the full extent of the very considerable capability these ships offer is to be exploited and a suitable level of preparedness is maintained.

There'll have to be permanently embarked aviation for the ship and the aircrew to be competent.

You can't do shipboard aviation unless you practise it all the time.

Likewise the watercraft that are part of it - you won't just put them there when you want to do a landing, you'll have them there all the time so that the watercraft crews and the ships' companies are competent and so that they can effectively integrate.

Also, these ships will need to have very extensive command and control capabilities, so that they can control their own air space and do flying operations safely, not with just one ship but two, which is a complex undertaking.

We'll need to practise that a great deal, and we will have to have aircraft on board to do that.

Three helo spots on an LPA can generate a complex flying operation environment and obviously, two ships with six spots each is much more so.

You also have to be able to harmonise the flying activity with the watercraft activity, and to be prepared to do this at even a rudimentary level, you need the tools on board and a lot of practise.

And if you're going to deploy to even relatively low threat types of activity, one of the key enablers of sound morale is making sure that the troops going in harm's way know that if they're wounded or injured, the right medical facilities are available close by.

So a Primary Casualty Reception Facility that is adequately staffed, trained and equipped is important.

The options that these two ships in combination will give the Australian government to deploy, employ and support Australian Defence Force elements in Australia's interest, in different ways from the way we can today, and a long way from home, will be significantly greater than it is today.