Page 164 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2021

162 FROM THE SOURCE MAJOR GENERAL SIMON STUART
JUNE 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
MAJOR GENERAL SIMON STUART
HEAD OF LAND CAPABILITY
Army has had a busy 12 months at home in response to climate change events, COVID taskforces and their usual training tasks. ADM’s Associate Editor Ewen Levick caught up with Head of Land Capability MAJGEN Stuart to look at how their major programs are progressing in light of everything Army is being asked to do from government.
ADM: ADM spoke to you only six months ago about Army capability. What’s changed in that period?
STUART: I’d say three things. Army in Motion and Ac- celerated Warfare which are a description of Army’s approach to and the environment in which we need to operate I think has been validated,
The kinds of discussions we’re having reflect government’s very clear policy on Australian industry, but I think its moved quickly and it’s quite a degree more sophisticated than I had expected it might be at this early stage. I think that’s a really good thing and I think it’s reflective of a
certainly in what was and will prob- ably be known as the COVID year. In other words, the challenges and the speed of change in the envi- ronment that we need to be able to operate among in in the future con- tinues in the same vein; it’s more challenging more quickly.
The second, in terms of our re-
sponse to that environment and the
tasks for which Army is responsible
say that our plan, for how we’re go-
ing to turn government’s invest-
ment as it’s articulated in the Force
Structure Plan (FSP) in to actual
capability, is on track. I qualify that
by saying that with each year there’s
more to do because there’s more in-
vestment, and more work that needs
to be done. We are keeping pace,
notwithstanding the fact that it is
a pretty difficult thing to do, par-
ticularly in some areas where you
need skilled workforce across indus-
try, academia and government; and
indeed, the ADF. There are some
skills where capacity is a real challenge for us. Working together across Industry, academia and Defence to work out how we can best leverage the skilled workforce we have is key to our future.
The third point, a personal observation, is that from an ‘Army for the Nation’ and ‘Army in the Community’ per- spective, our relationship and collaboration with industry has matured more quickly than I had initially expected.
genuine desire to collaborate and, frankly, a genuine understanding that business as usual with the cur- rent environment isn’t going to get us collectively where we need to be.
ADM: What can you tell us about Plan Corella for Army Aviation? STUART: Plan Corella is a neat way of addressing a range of current and emerging requirements. We need to maintain air crew competency in the first instance and, we don’t have the number of MRH aircraft available at 5 Aviation Regiment that we had anticipated. So, in the first instance, it’s a way of providing an aircraft to maintain air crew competency.
Secondly, we are, through our Fu- ture Ready Workforce’ efforts tak- ing a really close look at what we call the Total Workforce Model. That’s better use of the combination of full and part-time soldiers. We know that ex-Army aviators work in indus- try and generally fly certain types of civil helicopters. So, the question is
how can we make best use of that latent capacity to gener- ate more effort, particularly for domestic tasks. To have a similar or the same aircraft for those people to fly when they put their uniform on makes a lot of sense to generate additional capacity.
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PROFILE
2020 Head Land Capability 2017 Commander Multinational
Force and Observers
2015 Director General Land Mobility Systems Branch
2014 US Army War College
2012 Commander Combined Team
(Uruzgan)
2011 Director Coordination – Army
2010 Commander Joint Task Force 631, East Timor
2008 Commanding Officer,
the 8th/9th Battalion, RAR
2002 UK Joint Services Command and Staff College
2000 Company Commander, the 2nd Battalion, RAR
1990 Platoon Commander,
the 2nd/4th Battalion, RAR