Page 160 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2021

158 FROM THE SOURCE MAJOR GENERAL SIMON STUART
JUNE 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 106
tions of the US Army, the US Special Operations Command and the US Marine Corps. Obviously we don’t do everything they do and certainly not at the same scale but that’s the challenge going in. So the notion that the US is moving away from tank I think is to misread what’s occurred.
The US Marine Corps as part of the US Navy has opted not to do so to optimise their force. I think if you read any of their current commentary on warfare today and in the future, I don’t believe, from anything I’ve read, there’s any discussion that a credible and relevant combined arms fighting system is not an essential part of conflict today or in the future.
Very simply why does Australia need tanks? Because they are a relevant part of a combined arms fighting sys- tem. Just as everybody understands a warship as a system, and a system of systems. It has a combat system, a com- munication system, sensor systems etc, but it’s all assem- bled in a single hull. Army capability is the same, except it’s not concentrated physically in a hull. It is distributed, but it’s still a system of systems.
When you design, acquire, deploy, sustain a system of systems in the land environment, you do so in the same way as you would do in any of the other environments that are
more platform orientated. In other words, they need to be fit for purpose and all the sub-systems need to be working. The tank is an integral part of the combined arms fighting system. Tank ensures a better chance of mission success by reducing risk to force and therefore risk to mission.
ADM: If that’s the case, why don’t we take them any- where?
STUART: That’s a decision for Government in terms of the kind of posture that we project overseas. But if you look at our history, from the 1940s in Papua New Guinea and Malaya, the 1960s in South Vietnam. More recently, Australia has deployed with tanks as part of our combined arms teams in the wars in Iraq and Af- ghanistan, while they weren’t our tanks, we certainly operated as part of a coalition and have operated with other nations’ tanks. They are an essential component of land operations and will continue to be in the future. There are, I think, conservatively about 2,000 tanks in our region. Singapore, for example, has roughly twice as many tanks as we do, and others continue to invest. Having tanks as part of a credible combined arms fight- ing system means that we are relevant. Relevancy is a key component when it comes to generating strategic effects – shape, deter and respond.
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