Page 68 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

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

I think we’ve got the ability to influence the USN, and the USN has had the ability to influence us in many of
the ways that we do things.

We will be doing things differently going forward.

It is an interactive learning process that we are setting up and it is foundational in character.

Let’s look at what we’re actually generating at the moment.

We’re generating generation’s worth of relationship building, and networking between the communities.

We are doing that over an extended period of time.

For about three years we have been embedding people within the USN’s organization.
There are friendships that are being forged, and those relationships are going to take that growth path for
collaboration forward for generations to come.

When you can ring up the bloke that you did such and such with, have a conversation, and take the effort
forward because of that connection.

That is a not well recognized but significant benefit through the collaborative program that we’re working at
the moment.

We are shaping integration from the ground up.

And we are doing so with the Australian Defence Force overall.

A number of exercises and training opportunities are designed to have all the three services integrated and
working in the same complex battle space.
We’re reworking the way we do business internally, let alone as a collective, or collaborative process.

It’s a great opportunity with the new capabilities we’ve got to actually empower our forces for integration at
all levels.

Question: With the focus for the past decade upon land wars, ASW skill sets have clearly atrophied for
the key allied navies.
How have you dealt with this?

Answer: It is a challenge.

We’ve had to work hard to make sure that our skills did not atrophy to the point where we didn’t have that
capability.

And we’ve done that.

And we’ve done it on the AP-3C in time to move to the P-8 and take on all these new ways of doing business.
So I think we arrested that just in time, but it was a real risk that we faced as well.

Some can look at the new P-8/Triton dyad as delivering significant ISR and C2 capabilities into the
battlespace and it will.

Second Line of Defense

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