Page 24 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

Designing the Integrated Force: How to Define and Meet the Challenge?

Once an aircraft is functional you need to get in the hand of the operators, pilots, crews and maintainers. They
will determine what they think the real priorities for the evolution of the aircraft, rather than a test engineer or
pilot.

And you get the benefit of a superior platform from day one.

When I became Deputy Chief of Air Force, the Wedgetail was being slowed down by the Kabuki effort to
arrange specification lines for the aircraft. There was much hand wringing amongst the program staff as to how it
didn’t meet the specifications that we had put out.

I said, “Let’s just give it to the operators.”

And the advantage of basically giving the aircraft to the operators was what the test community and the
engineers thought were real limitations the operators did not. Sometimes it took the operators two days to figure
a work around.

And the real advantage of the development was that they would prioritize what was really needed to be fixed
from the operational point of view, not the testing point of view.

In other words, you can spend a lot of time trying to get back to the original specifications.

But when you actually give it to the operators they actually figure out what’s important or what isn’t important
and then use the aircraft in real world operations.

And what this has meant is a new working relationship between operators and industry to deliver ongoing
modernization of the platform.

This approach was highlighted during an interview with Group Captain Bellingham published last year.

Question: It is clearly a system in progress with the capability to evolve into what the US CNO calls a key
capability to operate in the electromagnetic battlespace, and to do so for the joint force.

Could you talk about the joint evolution?

Group Captain Bellingham: “Army and navy officers are part of the Wedgetail crew... We are not just extension
of what the air defense ground environment or the control reporting units do from the ground. We take our
platform airborne and we do air battle space management.
“Recently, in the Army led Hamel exercise, we pushed the link picture down to the ground force headquarters.
Their situational awareness became significant, compared to what they have had before.

“And since the Williams seminar on Air-Land integration, several senior Army officers have been to Williamtown
to take onboard what we can do and potential evolution of the systems onboard the aircraft.

“We are seeing similar developments on the Navy side. A key example is working with the LHD. My opinion is
that the Wedgetail will be critical to making all the bits of an amphibious task group come together. And not just
that but as the P-8 joins the force, we can broaden the support to Navy as well. And the new air warfare
destroyer will use its systems as well to pass the data around to everyone, and making sure everyone’s connected.

“The E-7 is a critical node in working force integration and making sure we’re all seeing the same thing at the
same time, and not running into each other, and getting each other space. We’re not on a ten second scan. We
are bringing the information to the war fighter or to whoever needs it right then.”

Second Line of Defense

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