Page 7 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

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

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Sixth, to get the kind of cross cutting modernization one needs with an evolving 21 century force, how can the
acquisition system be altered in order to provide for open-ended change? How to move from a platform
linear project approach to a broader program approach which allows trade offs to be made with regard to
platforms within a capability stream?

Seventh, the only way there will be the ongoing rapid transformation of the force will be shaping an effective
industrial-military partnership whereby there is shared understanding and shared risk to achieve outcomes
which are more targets than well defined platforms. How can this be achieved?

There are just some of the core questions, many of which were discussed during the seminar. But the core
point is that raising questions, which drive you towards where the force needs to go, is the challenge; it is not
about generating studies and briefing charts which provide visuals of what a connected force might look like.
It is about creating the institutional structure whereby trust among the services and between government and
industry is high enough that risks can be managed, but creative destruction of legacy approaches is open
ended as well.
It is about empowering a network of 21 century warriors and let the learning cycle being generated by this
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network drive acquisition, modernization and operational concepts. It is about innovations within concepts of
operations generated by the network to flow up into strategic change.

The danger to such an effort is the bureaucratic desire even necessity to constrain chaos and to constrain
change. The focus can become on processes to the detriment of outcomes; the focus can become on shaping
lightening bolts in charts showing how connected assets should be rather than allowing tasks forces and joint
force packages to creative find ways to generate combat synergy.

It is also the case that the general can defeat the particulars. What is needed is the generation of real world
case studies of generating joint effects from cross cutting modernizations and synergy, rather than mandating
a set of principles, which would appear on the wall of various defense organizations. Guidance needs to be
empowerment of the network; not providing detail lists of outcomes desired by the bureaucratic center.

The first principles review called for the creation of a strategic center; the danger is that it can become a
center for process generation, and not the fostering of the kind of innovation which is required for shaping the
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joint effects need to prevail in 21 century warfare.

The Perspective of VADM Ray Griggs
The first major presentation at the seminar was appropriately that by VADM Ray Griggs, Vice Chief of the
Defence Force. The VCDF Group was empowered by the defense reform process to spearhead the effort to
build out the joint force.
According to the Australian DoD webpage:

The VCDF Group enables Defence to meet its objectives through the provision of military strategic effects and
commitments advice and planning, joint military professional education and training, logistics support, health
support, ADF cadet and reserve policy, joint capability coordination, preparedness management, and joint and
combined ADF doctrine.

Vision: The VCDF Group Vision is to be the Defence leader in the design of the Australian Defence Force structure
and in the delivery of military enabling capabilities.

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