Page 17 - Williams Foundaiton Air-Land Integration April 15

New Approaches to Air-Land Integration

We are doing that from the headquarters down through the force elements groups. With the Air Warfare
Centre across the top, we are turning our Air Force into one that thinks integration from the start.

We need to understand our sister service capabilities from the start and will use the warfare instructors course
and the AWC to integrate that understanding across our future workforce.

Question: When we visited your KC-30A test team at Edwards, one of the key points driven home by the
team was how important the built-in situational awareness in the aircraft to reshaping their approach to
tanking in the area of interest.

How does this illustrate your evolving approach?

Answer: What we have given the tanker crew is what the fighter pilot experienced in the first decade of the
21st century.

We added Link 16 into the cockpit and suddenly they had situational awareness of the battlespace around
them and could now work within the battlespace, rather than simply going to a tanker track and acting as a
gas station in the sky waiting for the planes to come in to get gassed up.

This has meant changing the skill set for the tanker crew as well.

We need to have smart people with smart situational awareness combat skills rather than truck drivers. They
now position themselves where they’re next needed.

They’re maintaining their awareness and they’re moving into the battle space, and the jets are coming off
their targets and are surprised about how close the tanker is.

In fact, we’re starting to get the reverse complaint where pilots who are coming off targets don’t have time to
think and reconfigure their airplane before they’re on the wing of the tanker getting some more fuel.

Question: You are undergoing the culture change for a more integrated force BEFORE you get what is
called a joint strike fighter.

How does that preparation affect how the RAAF can introduce what the plane can do for the entire ADF,
and not just for traditional air combat?

Answer: We are reshaping our expeditionary air force capabilities, building new infrastructure, and
rethinking how to better mesh decision making at the point of attack with the enhanced situational awareness
which allows those at the point of attack to make good decisions.

The F-35 clearly is about decision-making and ISR but we are not waiting for the plane to show up before we
reshape our ability to use fused data and to push information to the right people at the right time in order to
make the right decisions.

I’m thinking about decision making in the cockpit back to the strategic level, but teaching the JSF pilot how to
operate in the decision space where he can be a decision-maker, that’s what we need to do as well to shape
an ability to get better decisions at the point of attack or defense.

And we are focused throughout the force on how to work the shift forward to the operational level most
capable of achieving the desired effect.

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