Page 55 - Williams Foundation Future of Electronic Warfare Seminar

A New Approach and Attitude to Electronic Warfare in Australia

"When we throw the F-35 at them, they're going to do all sorts of stuff with it that we will not have even
thought of.

"I look forward to letting our smart young man and women, who have grown up in a different environment to
those of us here in Canberra, get their hands on the F-35 and do some amazing things with it. I’m also quite
looking forward to getting back out there myself, and see this first hand.

"Our job is to set up the program and set in motion the framework for that kind of tactical innovation to
happen, to position them for success.

"We should not get in their way with excessive top down guidance and legacy thinking."

A Plan Jericho Perspective on Working the Integration Challenges

During my visit to Australia last Spring, I discussed the evolution of Plan Jericho with the do-leads of Plan
Jericho, Group Captains Campbell and Mitchell.

I had a chance at the end of the Williams Foundation seminar and the following week AFTER the Jericho Dawn
exercise to talk with them about the exercise and its place and significance within the Plan Jericho effort.

The exercise involved changing how the air and ground communicated with one another in the maneuver
space. As such, the exercise could seem to be a look at new technologies to connect the force.

But this would miss the real point of the effort, which is the reshaping the concept of operations and the co-
evolution of the ground and air forces.

And the reshaping effort requires an ongoing operational training regime to understand what further changes
are required to ensure that the air-ground maneuver forces work in an effective manner.

It is about technological enablement, but changing the culture and approach of the forces as they work the
new technology into new approaches.

http://www.sldinfo.com/an-update-on-plan-jericho-from-the-perspective-of-jericho-dawn-a-discussion-with-
group-captains-campbell-and-mitchell/

The focus of that interview was upon the challenges of working through C2 innovation to get better force
structure operational capabilities.
During my most recent visit, I had a chance to sit down at Russell with the new co-lead, Group Captain Carl
Newman and Group Captain Mitchell.

In various articles which we have recently published on Second Line of Defense, we have highlighted barriers
to getting the kind of 21st century combat force we need to deal with the threats which come at us in high
intensity warfare.
Not only have we launched a Forum to deal with the challenge of shifting from slo mo to high intensity
warfare, but we have been highlighting in some of our recent interviews some of those challenges.

One of those is clearly the fragmented and cumbersome security system which places layers of players in
place and ensures that we will not achieve the kind of C2 in a dynamic threat environment which our forces
will need.

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