Page 23 - Williams Foundaiton Air-Land Integration April 15

New Approaches to Air-Land Integration

“The tactical elements now have better situational awareness, but their command and control network needs to
be able to support the decision speed that those linkages now enable.
We now need to make sure that the ground commander can make his decisions in a quicker manner to allow
the enhanced situational awareness (SA) to be beneficial.”
They pointed out that in the second phase of the exercise that the exercise director actually had to slow down
the exercise because “the call to fires done via the link systems so reduced the time it took to deliver the
effect that it was becoming to fast for the VIP observers to be able to see clearly.”
This is probably a good metaphor for what the future holds for the old C2 structure!
But to be clear, the Jericho co-leads emphasized that working through new C2 concepts of operations within
the overall transformation of the RAAF was a central lynchpin for change.
“The C2 system itself will need to be as flexible and agile and adaptive as the forces that we put out to
deliver the localized tactical effects.
And this is especially true in a contested environment because when the forces lose a particular node, cannot
sit around waiting for it return.
They will need to be reactive and adaptive.
We are talking about decentralized C2 as a centerpiece of the evolving force structure.
We need to start focusing on our tactical C2 layer this year and think about how that will interact with our
strategic C2 layer.
We'll be doing a lot of work on this challenge, which is a central one to the way ahead.”
As Group Captain Campbell added: ”The C2 system is the potential handbrake in a modern networked force.
Some would argue that C2 has always been the handbrake to ops.
However, in modern warfare, fast and effective C2 will be the difference between winning and losing.”

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