Page 114 - Maritime Services and the Kill Web

The Maritime Services, the Allies and Shaping the Kill Web

How would you regard the shift on the demand side for the pilot?

Air Vice-Marshal Roberton: You go from having to manage a package to being a node, a sensor, and a
shooter in a network.

We are no longer operating as little bespoke package and building block of a force.

If you’re doing this properly to prepare for a fifth-generation fight, you start them in the middle of the web,
and our warfighters understand what they can contribute and where they can draw upon to be a sensor and
a shooter in that web.

And that’s not just airpower, that’s across the entire joint space.

This requires us to fundamentally change our exercise approach to train aviators in the kill web. It is a
fundamental in dealing with the kinds of adversaries we find in the real world.

We cannot take yesterday’s “block and tackle” combat aircraft approach to train to be the kind of
distributed mission commanders we need in the future air combat force.

We need to focus on the sensor-shooter relationship in which we can deliver distributed kinetic and non-kinetic
effects.

And this comes from within the kill web.

Put another way, you are training for autonomy in all of the weapon shooter nodes and crafting the overall
impact accordingly.

Our decisive advantage is going to be in our ability to operate in high-tempo ops, fully networked.

That’s what will make it a completely unfair fight.

It’s not going to be about mass and numbers; that will always have a part to play.

But our decisive advantage has to be our ability to just run our kill web at high speed.

We have parts of our organization that are now thinking at the tactical and operational level in fifth-
generation sense, but we are yet to exercise the enabling and support function in that same mindset.

That’s a challenge for us.

Question: One of your first tasks as Air Commander Australia was to participate in Talisman Sabre 2017.

What was your role and what did you find during the command post segment of the exercise?

Air Vice-Marshal Roberton: I was a month and half in the job when I had the chance in July to work as the
deputy CFACC to General O’Shaughnessy at PACAF for the exercise.
I was on the CPX side, and the scenario was good for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it commenced on day 42 of a war, assuming established air superiority.

Then the exercise transitioned where a near-peer country came into the war and we had to reestablish air
superiority.

It was challenging to deal with the problem.
Second Line of Defense

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