Page 38 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

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

“In the past decades, we have in many ways predominately fought wars of choice. Arguably, this luxury of
choice will not necessarily continue. Increasingly, we see a higher probability of facing the possibility of wars
of necessity and National Interests at threat. Moreover, the force must be response to new challenges that
are not simple to define.”

“From the impact of exploding urbanization, severe demographic shifts, population growth and resource
scarcity; to the barely glimpsed consequences of hyper connectivity and climate change. The way warfare will
manifest in the future, the adversaries we may face and the means we will employ are impossible to fully
prepare for.”

“The land Force component will continue to play a vital role in response to these challenges. As such Australia
must continue to invest in a highly capable ground force integrated into the joint force. We need to get this
design right; as failure to adequately prepare the force is not an option.”

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“The fluid nature of the 21 century battlespace means as well that operations in one domain need to be
informed by and to inform the other warfighting domains. In effect, either you integrate or get in each other’s
ways with very negative perhaps even disastrous effects. In other words, joint warfighting is necessary not
just to enhance combat effectiveness but to avoid the kind of entropy which conflicting elements of a network
force could create by cross-cutting each other in quite a literal sense.”

He argued that with the new technologies, more combat power could be concentrated on smaller combat units.
And C2 combined with empowering the way we will fight needs to be pushed to those units enabling them to
be more lethal and survivable.

“There can be little doubt that technology is changing the character of the contemporary military problem,
suggesting not simply technological solutions but the need for innovative operational concepts across all the
domains – simultaneously. The force designers of today must navigate this complexity to provide tomorrow’s
policy makers and joint task force commander’s robust, capable and responsive options for a tomorrow of
contested domains, increased lethality and irreducible complexity.”

“And it is crucial as well to train for the future with significant uncertainty as a training framework. Training
with networks and without; training with GPS enabled systems and without; these are important training
venues to ensure the kind of combat flexibility and skill sets which the Australian Army would need to exercise
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in 21 combat situations.”
He had a healthy disregard for our capabilities to actually know in detail future war situations and conditions
and argued for shaping solders to fight with confidence in uncertain combat situations. In effect, he was
arguing that the design of the integrated force needed to built around training of the soldiers, sailors and air
men to be able to deal with disruptive change and combat learning on the fly in very dynamic combat
situations.

His core sense of joint force design from the Army’s perspective was to deliver a set of outcomes for the
ground maneuver forces. These key outcomes were summarized in the following slide:

Second Line of Defense

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