Page 49 - Williams Foundation Air-Sea Integration Seminar

Shaping an Integrated Force in the Extended Battlespace

clearly what is on offer is shaping an offensive-defensive enterprise that engages to kill adversary forces,
with whatever means are necessary.

In an interview conducted in Hawaii in 2014 with the then head of Army ADA, the point was underscored as
follows:

“The General discussed the role of ADA within Pacific defense as part of the support to airpower and to
strategic decision-making.

He emphasized that the capabilities of ADA helped provide time to determine how to both generate more air
power and how to use airpower and provided the national command authority time to determine how best to
respond to a crisis.

There are three ways to deal with an incoming missile defense.

There is passive defense, but there is only so much hardening and dispersal one can do without degrading
your combat capability, and their many soft targets, which cannot be hardened.

You can use air strikes to take out the adversary’s missile strike force, but you may not wish to do that right
away or have not fully mobilized your capability.

The role of having active defense or an interceptor force is to buy time for [Lieutenant] General [Jan-Marc]
Jouas (7th USAF Commander in the Pacific) or General [Hawk] Carlisle (the PACAF Commander) to more
effectively determine how to use their airpower.

It also allows the National Command Authority to determine the most effective way ahead with an adversary
willing to strike US or allied forces and territory with missiles.”

This is very close to the view articulated by the head of Australian Army Modernization, Major General
McLachlan, concerning how he saw the evolving role of the Aussie Army in the defense of Australia through
what the U.S. Army would call Air Defense Artillery (ADA) or shaping the lower tier to a missile defense
system engaged with the power projection forces.

From his perspective, the more effective the territory of Australia could be used to shape effective defenses,
the more the Air Force and Navy could focus on extended operations. He characterized this as shaping an
Australian anti-access and area denial force.

Clearly, integrated air and missile defense for Australia was really not that; they are too small a force to
execute the mission in these terms.

They need to shape a capable integrated force, which can execute seamlessly operations in an offensive-
defensive enterprise.

They will never have enough defensive capability to deter the most likely adversaries; but with potent
extended reach with some integrated defensive capabilities, they can provide for deterrence.

The way Air Commodore Heap put the goal: “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.”

What Australia does in the air and missile defense regime will flow from this strategic goal and not provide
for an independent capability. The American solution cannot be easily morphed to Australia.

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