Page 20 - Williams Foundation Future of Electronic Warfare Seminar

A New Approach and Attitude to Electronic Warfare in Australia

How do you view this shift?

Group Captain Braz: That is a good way to look at the process of change.
We are looking at ways to get the operators of specific platforms to cross-learn from each other, particularly
as we add Growler, evolve Wedgetail, add P-8 and add F-35.

We're also exporting our Growler experts into the wider joint environment, such as to our new Air Warfare
Centre.

We used to have a very fighter-centric fighter combat instructor course.
Now this is changing under the influence of standing up the Air Warfare Centre and the Air Warfare
Instructor Course.

Now we are focused on force integration.

We've integrated as best we could this year with the course that's running right now, including wherever
possible the Growler folks who have been in country on and off this year already.
Two EA-18G Growler aircraft arrive at Avalon for the 2017 Australian International Airshow. Credit:
Australian Ministry of Defence

We're tying in those other communities, the E-7, the ground-based air surveillance teams, the P-8 teams, the
air mobility and tankers, because we see opportunity to shape a broader set of perspectives.

We are aiming to get the right integration mindset amongst the communities, which would enable us to take
the team into new, and creative, innovative ways of operating.

We seek to bring technology more quickly on and off platforms. And we are doing so to find new ways to
interact and to share information, and to create the web of options that will give us redundancy and resilience
in our decision-making process.
Question: In effect, you are focusing on a 21st network of operators, rather than simply focusing on
optimizing information flows.

And in that regard getting a small operator community onboard the Growler and then proliferating them
in the crafting and evolution of a tron warfare community is what Growler for Australia is all about?

Group Captain Braz: That is a good way to look what we are about. We need to get the experience which
Growler can deliver and share the knowledge.

The difficult thing with Growler is that it delivers non-kinetic effects, and sometimes they're difficult to
measure. We're used to being able to deliver effects through other systems where the outcome is tangible
and measurable.
For a Growler, if you're attacking a threat system or the people operating that threat system, then often it's
difficult to truly assess how much you're affecting that system.

You can do trials and tests in certain scenarios, but it's never quite the same, and so you get a level of
confidence about what immediate effect you can achieve, but it's the secondary and tertiary effects that
we're often looking for that are sometimes harder to measure.

Second Line of Defense

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