Page 28 - Williams Foundation Air-Sea Integration Seminar

Shaping an Integrated Force in the Extended Battlespace

USN would do, but there clearly are currently USN leaders who are thinking along the lines of the RAAF
leadership, such as Air Commodore Heap articulated in the interview.

He clearly was looking forward to adding the Triton to the fleet whereby the Remotely Piloted Aircraft could
do wide area surveillance as an asset, which could allow for better use of manned assets, or to support the
initial assessment of HADR scenarios, or low intensity operations.

“What that means for our highly capable Naval surface forces is that before, where they could have an
effect based principally on their organic means, which was limited by the range of their sensors and weapon
systems, they now can have an effect at much greater distance, courtesy of support from a suite of state of
the art RAAF assets in terms of integrated ISR, strike and C2.

As the lead for the Jericho Maritime warfighting program, we will leverage off the key Jericho tenets of
maximizing combat effectiveness, facilitating innovation at the lowest level and speeding up and simplifying
acquisition.

And then the question will become where is the best place to do the operational C2 in the battlespace, which
will vary by mission to be on the ground, at sea or in the air, critically with full, degraded or denied enabling
space capabilities such as SATCOM and GPS.

That is where we want to go with the evolving SRG.”

Air Commodore Heap added: “My concept is to seek, acquire and potentially employ decisive, highly
protected asymmetric effects across the spectrum of warfare though our people’s, and industry’s great ideas.

We need to have open system architectures with the flexibility to spirally add capabilities at speed, not be
hamstrung by a 5-year acquisition cycle. If ISIS has an acquisition cycle, and I believe it does, it certainly isn’t
as limited as our previous processes.

Our new FPR capability acquisition processes and Defence structure is designed to correct this issue.

The new Joint Air Battle Management system announced in the recent Defence White Paper will be sourced
using this principle, so in 2025 when a developing technology becomes mature, it can swiftly be acquired
almost immediately fielded on operations if required.”

And shaping a more effective sovereign integrated force was important for Australia, for its own national
defense and to become a more capable ally for its partners.

“We are small but we want to be capable of being a little Tasmanian Devil that you don’t want to play with
because if you come at us, were going to give you a seriously hard time that will probably not be worth the
effort; deterrence in its purest form.”

THE SURVEILLANCE AND RESPONSE GROUP AND AIR-SEA INTEGRATION

At the recent Williams Foundation Air-Sea integration seminar, the sole Royal Australian Air Force
presentation was given by the Chief of Staff of the Surveillance and Response Group, Captain David
Hombsch.

The Commander of the SRG, Air Commodore Craig Heap was scheduled to speak so Group Captain Hombsch
had the twin challenge of presenting another person’s briefing and inserting his own operational experiences
throughout to explain how the SRG fit into the broader air-sea, or multi-domain integration effort.

Second Line of Defense

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