ADF Force Protection: Protect and survive - and fight on

Gregor Ferguson | Sydney

“Our opponents have studied warfare, they’ve read the history books,” says Major General Steve Day. “They adapt quickly. They are a very able enemy.”

MAJGEN Day is talking about the Taliban, who have taken a grim toll of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. At the time of writing the Army has lost 29 soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan since 2002, 8 this year alone, and a further 188 wounded. Last year 10 Australians were killed and 65 wounded, the majority by Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, which are the Taliban’s weapon of choice and have caused the majority of Coalition casualties.

However, a significant number of casualties have also resulted from small arms fire. Other incidents such as helicopter crashes aren’t necessarily caused by enemy action, but can injure or kill several personnel at once, causing ‘spikes’ in the figures. These can be attributed indirectly to the enemy as the threat environment dictates the tempo and type of Coalition flying operations – aircraft and crews explore the full operational envelope.

Faced with these grim statistics the Federal government and Department of Defence have made Force Protection a major priority. “There’s nothing more important than Force Protection – we have a moral obligation,” ADM was told by MGEN Day who, as the ADF’s Head of Joint Capability Coordination at HQ Joint Operations Command, is the man in charge.

In 2009, with casualties increasing after eight years of near-continuous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, then-defence minister John Faulkner ordered a Force Protection review. Early in 2010 he announced a $1.4 billion program to improve the protection afforded to ADF personnel in the Middle East, including improving body armour and night fighting equipment, enhancing vehicle armour, improved intelligence and surveillance capabilities and installing a Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar (or C-RAM) radar at the ADF base in Tarin Kowt to provide early warning of incoming Taliban rockets. Much of this money comes from a supplementation to the defence budget, reflecting the Government’s willingness to invest in this crucial capability area.

The Saab Giraffe C-RAM radar was rushed into service at the end of last year and has earned its keep, Day told ADM. It provides troops with 10 seconds warning to take cover, long enough to make the difference between life and death. Like the constant minor upgrades to protected accommodation and vehicles, this is just one part of an onion-like layered approach to Force Protection which tries to balance safety on the one hand with the need to get out and do a useful job, on the other.

The layered approach goes beyond trying to equip and protect individual soldiers – it is a holistic construct embracing intelligence, procedures, training and organisational factors as well as sensors, networks and armour and is based on a philosophy with six cardinal elements, says Day:

•           “Avoid encounters – don’t take unnecessary risks,” is the first, he told ADM. This doesn’t mean skulking in a protected fortress – it means not undertaking unnecessary activity which might expose soldiers (and civilians) to risk for no useful purpose. As discussed below, this element often requires some careful judgement by local commanders.

•           Avoid detection – this isn’t just a function of camouflage; it includes field-craft and careful management of troop movements by day and night to avoid detection, and includes situational awareness generated by whatever ISR means are appropriate and available.

•           Avoid acquisition by enemy weapons – camouflage, concealment and movement matter here, along with situational awareness, but this is also the layer at which Electronic Warfare (EW) plays an important role protecting against command-detonated IEDs

•           Avoid being hit – again a function of training, field craft, fire & movement, camouflage and concealment

•           Avoid being penetrated – contact with the enemy is inevitable, either during planned operations or enemy ambush. This is where vehicle and personal body armour is vital and where a considerable amount of investment has been made

•           Avoid being killed – making sure a casualty gets the right medical treatment within that ‘golden hour’ after being wounded. This requires an organisation-wide effort from the first care provider on the battlefield to availability of Medevac helicopters and rapid transit to an appropriate medical facility

These layers overlap and are mutually reinforcing. There is no simple ‘silver bullet’ solution to any of these layers and approaches have evolved with each turn of the operational cycle.

The ADF has been grappling with Force Protection since before deploying to East Timor in 1999, according to MGEN Day. Back then a decision was taken that troops should wear helmets and body armour. While this was a response to the perceived threat of militia snipers in East Timor, and considered by some to be an over-reaction, it was found to have a psychological ‘overmatching’ effect on the militias: they were genuinely intimidated by squads of heavily armed, business-like soldiers who presented hard targets.

The chaos of post-liberation Iraq provided huge potential for smart adversaries to develop asymmetric tactics and weapons and the professional view is that Al-Quaeda and the other insurgents operating around Iraq developed their weapons, particularly IEDs, to a higher level of technical sophistication than the Coalition faces in Afghanistan today.

However, while lacking the industrial capabilities and technical smarts available readily to insurgents in Iraq (and even to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army, in their day) the Taliban is intelligent, adaptive and workmanlike. Furthermore, it has mastered modern media techniques very quickly, says MGEN Day and exploits the lethality of its armoury very effectively. One of its targets is the Coalition’s will to continue: it uses the ‘Propaganda of the Dead’ and the 24/7 ubiquity of the modern media to draw global (as well as tribal) attention to its struggle and try to undermine civilian morale and political resolve in the western coalition members.

Against this background Defence’s Force Protection imperative is transforming defence acquisition: even light utility vehicles need armour and mine-resistant undersides nowadays, with Project Land 121’s Phases 3 and 4 fundamentally shaped by the need to provide high levels of baseline and objective protection for occupants. The Army is into its third generation (and counting) of body armour and second generation of camouflage uniforms for individual soldiers (see p.44). It is also investing in surveillance assets such as UAVs to improve its situational awareness, and mine detection equipment based on new technologies.

Training and ISR are essential, according to MGEN Day: the tactics Army units have evolved for dismounted and vehicle movements in Afghanistan are unrecognisable from even five years ago, he told ADM. Furthermore, experience (sometimes painful) and advances in ISR have taught much about the Taliban’s tactics and have helped the ADF develop new tactics for mounted and dismounted operations and movement, for the employment of EW and the detection of, for example, in-ground IEDs.

Many of these lessons emerged in an ad hoc way and former defence minister John Faulkner’s Force Protection Review was a first-class opportunity to carry out a strategic overview and consolidate the ADF’s knowledge and expertise, he told ADM. The Review made 48 recommendations, of which some 41 are under way or already complete. Of the others, two have been dropped as being impractical using currently available technology, but they remain on the radar with DSTO playing a vital but under-reported role in developing the ways and means. The remainder are still being looked at ‘closely’, he said.

Importantly, the Army now has a tightly coupled feedback mechanism which identifies and absorbs lessons learned on a continuous basis and then feeds these back into the pre-deployment training and force preparation activities of units before they rotate into Afghanistan. Some of these are tactical and procedural, but the feedback also includes new technology and equipment, some of it developed or enhanced by DSTO.

While much of its work is highly classified, Day told ADM that DSTO conducts Operational Analysis; it conducts technology searches; undertakes its own R&D on specific problems; and carries out studies which inform Defence’s decision-making. DSTO pioneered the use of ‘flyaway teams’ of scientists and analysts dispatched to the operational area to tackle specific technology issues as they arise. DSTO is part of every single committee and team, says MGEN Day: “They make a difference every single day.”

However, Force Protection is a consideration, not the final, absolute determinant, in shaping the ADF’s capability and acquisition priorities and its operations. At the operational level decisions need to be made by those schooled in the ‘Art of War’.

If you accept that the Afghanistan campaign is a Counter-Insurgency struggle, then the point of leverage is the civilian population and this is where the effort needs to be made.

“The key to success is the population,” MGEN Day told ADM. “You won’t win if you stay inside your patrol bases, safe from the enemy but not connected to the people. To be connected to the people you’ve got to provide them with security, understand what their needs are and help them with the daily struggle of village life, all in the middle of a counter insurgency. And there are risks associated with that.” 

There’s a fine balance to be struck between being absolutely safe and being reasonably effective: to do their job in Afghanistan, as previously in Iraq, East Timor and Somalia, Australian soldiers can’t avoid taking measured risks. Balancing those risks demands constant judgement, by the troops on the ground as well as their masters back in Australia – that first onion-like layer of Force Protection, Avoiding Encounters, is a constant challenge.

When an Australian soldier dons his body armour and climbs into a Bushmaster to go out on a patrol in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province, he (and increasingly she) is part of a brutal struggle for hearts and minds as well as the safety of life and limb.

“There’s nothing more important than Force Protection.” Day told ADM. “The threat doesn’t sit still – it adapts and so our Force Protection continually changes. This is Darwinism at its primordial best, this is the struggle for survival.”  

Subject: Defence Industry