Page 159 - Australian Defence Magazine Sep-Oct 2022

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
and the decision to enter a war is made, all bets are off because the way that any war plays out is always subject to chance, fog and friction and a whole range of things that you may not have expected.
FROM THE SOURCE LTGEN SIMON STUART 159 petition by employing them poorly in a tactical sense, then
I think what we’re also seeing is the per- petual cycle between the rise of new ca- pabilities and ways of operating, and their counters. That continues and we’re watch- ing very closely.
At the operational level I think there will be plenty of lessons about the importance of lev- el planning and preparations, and about the importance of logistics as part of those plans. And, particularly relevant for us is national resilience and the integration of the national industrial base to support operations.
“WE HAVE A REALLY CHALLENGING
SET OF STRATEGIC CIRCUMSTANCES AND A REALLY CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENT IN THE INDO-PACIFIC”
you’re going to So overall, a
lose those tactical battles.
very broad set of considerations that I think are important. We continue to watch with interest. And, I think we need to understand that Russia wages war at the strategic level and it has very considerable depth and ca- pacity to endure.
ADM: With Ukraine in mind, how important are Active Protection Systems for the Land 400, Land 907, and Land 8116 vehicles? Is that going to be a matter of priority for Army? LTGEN STUART: Protection is a matter of pri- ority. It’s one of the four design principles for our modernisation program - connected, protected, lethal and enabled - and we look at protection as a system and that is indeli-
The other key operational level aspect
we’re really interested in is making sure we
have an effective mission command system that is resilient and well-rehearsed.
Then finally at the tactical level, certainly the lethality of the environment, complexity of the environment and the clutter in the environment have all played out. Very sim- ply, if you pit old equipment and vehicles against modern equipment and vehicles and you double down on that com-
bly linked to the idea of combined arms and the application of combined arms. So a system view of protection. I’m in- ferring from your question, what are the ways of defeating or protecting against things like drones? We would seek to have a layered protection system and at the defeat mecha- nism level there are a range of different ways through the electromagnetic spectrum, through directed energy weapons
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