Page 69 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

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

But we cannot forget our core mission which is ASW or as you have described it Maritime Domain Awareness
strike capabilities.

We’re the only capability that does independent long-range maritime strike.

That’s the thing we need to work hard to maintain.

We need to make sure that we meet our preparedness requirements to provide long range ASW, and ASUW
and those missions are key to the way we train, and do business.

CONCLUSION: SHAPING A WAY AHEAD

The Williams Foundation has provided a crucial venue for thinking through the challenges of building a
st
flexible, agile 21 century combat force grounded in a capability to fight and win in a high intensity combat
setting. The background is a real world effort by the Australian government to recapitalize their defenses
forces via the acquisition of new platforms, leveraging legacy ones and shaping an integrated force going
forward.

Integration is crucial not simply because Australian forces are relatively modest; but with new equipment
coming on line, capabilities such as software upgradeability in key platforms and the digital revolution
provide a unique opportunity to rethink integration. Rather than pursuing after market integration or simply
connecting stove piped service platforms after the fact with a bolt on network, how might integration be built
from the ground up?
The approach being taken is not theological or an application of set of propositions or laws written down in a
guidebook. The approach is to work greater integrative processes within and among the services, and to
highlight the need to pose hypotheses along the way concerning how greater integration is achievable where
appropriate and ways to achieve more effective outcomes for the development of the force.
It is a quest, which is being shaped by realigning organizations, and trying to build from the ground up
among the junior officers a willingness to shape interconnectivity from the ground up. It is about building a
st
21 century network of operators who are empowered to find force integration solutions, again where
appropriate or service specific outcomes appropriate to the different warfighting domains.
Shaping a way to conduct the quest is very difficult; but the ADF is clearly been empowered to do so by
Government. Such a quest inevitably will fail and succeed along the way; but without setting this objective
from the ground up, it will be difficult to change the operating concepts and the then the concepts of
operations, which can drive the transformation of the force.
The United States may have Joint Forces Quarterly; the ADF has a transformation process underway. And for
the United States, even when the Aussies are adopting out own platforms, they are doing so in a very
different context in which force integration is set as a strategic goal, rather than the pursuit of service
modernization. In effect, the Aussies are providing the experimental model, which can be quite relevant to
others, including the United States.

In the mid 1990s when I worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses, one of the tasks on which I worked was
for the Roles and Missions Commission. One of the key tasks, which the Congress had tasked the Commission
to pursue, was to determine what the United States might learn from allies. We worked hard on our white
paper but when delivered to the Commission we were told by a very senior member of the Commission:
“Good work; but why did you really examine the question? We are so much bigger than any of our allies,
there is very little we could learn from them or apply to our own practices!”

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