Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, as well as their components and regions, are conducting their core missions. (U.S. Air Force Video by Tech. Sgt. Thomas Grimes).
04.29.2020
Video by Tech. Sgt. Tommy Grimes
U.S. Northern Command
Australia’s first digital shipbuilding course began a month ago, changing traditional shipbuilding education in this country.
The Diploma of Digital Technology is educating participants about digital technologies, connecting workers and information systems to ensure they learn and master the digital technology skills to work on the Government’s $35 billion Hunter-class frigate program.
The course is being run in partnership between ASC Shipbuilding – the prime contractor for the program – and Flinders University.
The world’s most advanced digital shipyards are being built in South Australia and the diploma will help foster a world-class Australian workforce which can leverage digital information and intelligence systems to facilitate greater innovation.
With the winding down of the Hobart-class Air Warfare Destroyer Program, the diploma is ensuring that shipbuilding capability is retained.
One of the 53 participants enrolled, Tony, said he could not have envisaged studying a new diploma 12 months ago.
“These first few weeks we have been adapting to new systems, new software and new environments,” Tony said.
“It has been exciting to dive into something new, yet familiar, looking for ways to apply new ideas against old processes and outcomes.
“Everybody has been making progress in directions previously not considered. I commend BAE Systems, ASC Shipbuilding and Flinders University for creating this diploma, allowing many of us to transition to the new shipyard, bringing further innovation along for the ride.”
With the challenges posed by COVID-19, students will be able to complete coursework online and, when permitted, will attend classes at Flinders University.
Australian Department of Defence, April 29, 2020.
By Australian Defence Business Review
The Commonwealth has announced it will acquire six more Cape class patrol boats from Austal for the RAN as it seeks to support Australian industry during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.
The six vessels will be built at Austal’s Henderson yard in Western Australia, and will add to the two Cape class vessels the RAN currently leases from Australian Border Force and eight Armidale class patrol boats. They will be joined in service by 10 larger Arafura class offshore patrol vessels from 2023.
“These vessels will not only enhance national security, but will provide important economic stimulus and employment continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Defence Minister Senator Linda Reynolds said in a May 1 statement. “The ability to build more of these vessels in Australia will deliver Australian Industry Content of more than 65 per cent, providing significant opportunities for Australian industry and Defence, as well as more than 1,200 workers in the broader Australian supply chain.”
Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price MP added, “This will help to ensure continued employment opportunities for 400 of Austal’s commercial shipbuilders in WA, with flow down benefits to Austal’s supply chain. Austal is an Australian industry success story with the company already building variants of the Cape Class Patrol Boat for international customers including the government of Trinidad and Tobago, …(and the) Guardian Class patrol boats in support of the…Pacific Patrol Boat program.”
The Armidale class has suffered in recent years with poor availability and greater maintenance requirements, reportedly due to overuse in the border security mission. While no timeframe for the Cape class to enter service was announced, its likely some of the Armidales will be decommissioned early as the Cape class vessels enter service.
This article was published by ADBR on May 1, 2020.
This article is published with permission of ADBR and all copyright remains with ADBR.
Featured Photo: Australian Defence Vessel Cape Fourcroy. (ADF)
We first published this article on January 8, 2012 and given the COVID-19 events, it seems prudent to republish the article, which focuses on the challenge of building resilient organizations.
The article as published in 2012 follows:
The Second Line of Defense team have been involved in crises management situations throughout their careers. And crises management is a key issue in which the team is both interested and has published several inputs.
During a trip to Europe in November 2011, SLD’s Robbin Laird sat down with Paul Theron of the Thales Group to discuss his work on the challenge of crafting resilient organizations. Theron is head of a working group within Thales, which addressed the key challenges surrounding collapse and response in crisis situations. The group has focused on the challenge, in general, and within telecommunications infrastructures in particular.
Black Swans and Gray Swans are a regular occurrence in the 21st century. Building organizations which can deal with their dynamics are crucial. At the heart of coping and recovering is the core capability of resilience.
The briefing, which anchored the conversation, can be seen below at the conclusion of the article.
The Theron briefing provides an overview to the approach being developed at Thales. The brief provides seven findings on critical infrastructures resilience and we encourage our readers to go through the brief itself to get a sense of the core foundational work, which Theron and his team are doing with regard to this crucial challenge facing 21st century organizations and societies.
In this piece, we are going to provide an overview of some of the key dynamics of change associated with the need to provide flexible and agility capabilities to manage 21st century complexity. In other words, we are going to harvest some of the findings and points during the discussion and craft a narrative regarding the challenge of crafting a resilient organization.
The brief is based on several real world events from which some core propositions about resiliency were developed. Among these events are the impact and response to Katrina, the challenge of trauma faced by Paris firemen, and the Mann Gulch incident in Montana in August 1949.
At the heart of the challenge is recognizing that 21st century societies and organizations have an inherent complexity within which system or sub-system collapse can be expected. The need is to prepare for the unexpected because that is the expected.
A Theron noted: “we live in such complex world, that we cannot forecast what’s going to happen next.”
Crises are largely started by incidents but as an incident unfolds there are multiple dynamics in which simply responding to the initial incident will not be sufficient. Indeed, by focusing simply on a single incident and following the procedures for “normal” response to a single incident will lead to system or sub-system failure.
Theron underscored that “events which started in relatively limited way start impacting the whole world because the phenomenon propagates to other spheres which themselves are going to affect other spheres and from one sphere to the next, the phenomenon amplifies, becomes bigger, but in a way that you can hardly predict because in fact you’re going to have so many interactions between those spheres that the way each interaction will work is completely unpredictable.”
This means that as collapse is generated by events, the response team and its leaders needs to not only multi-task but also look for a core thread around which recovery can be built. To do so will require not simply mobilizing internal resources but seeking outside resources as well.
A key element is to NOT focus on the proximate cause of the collapse but to weave together a more comprehensive response and narrative which would allow recovery.
Theron cautioned that you can’t plan for everything for every single disaster and the more so as you move up to the stage where phenomenon are going to combine with each other into something completely new and so you have to have that capability to create solutions to react dynamically to whatever emerges in the time of crisis.
And that’s, that’s a big change that most companies think they are going to resolve all issues. But that way of thinking is wrong because we are not talking about a basic flood or a basic fire that ruins your computer department, we are talking about something that is going to be complex, which is going to mix, maybe a fire ruining your computer department combined with the financial crisis plus the arrest of your manager because he committed financial fraud and so on. And these incidents create an event of such a magnitude and complexity that your business continuity plans are useless. You have to re-think, re-position, and re-focus in shaping a recovery strategy.
Collapse is about system recovery and re-direction. The two elements are highly correlated. Indeed, Theron emphasized that crisis is an experience of collapse. To navigate through a collapse is the attribute of resilience. Resilience is the aptitude of a socio-technical system to surmount a crisis.
Resilience is demonstrated by several behavioral elements: getting by, resisting, resuming and rebounding from a crisis.A number of key elements can be highlighted about the nature of the challenge of dealing with crises and ways to shape resilient organizations.
According to Theron: Resilience is the aptitude to face a crisis and to surmount a crisis. To do that you need four aptitudes, three of which are drawn upon in the dynamics of dealing with collapse.
The first is the capability to get by. You have a core mission, e.g., it is to rescue people in buildings and fire if you are a fireman, if you are a telecommunication provider it’s to deliver a communication service, if you are an army in the battlefield, it is to fight according to the plans set for you and you are not supposed to give up your mission just because you are facing even death.
The second is resisting the destructive pressure of the circumstances. That means that you don’t allow yourself to be drawn down to the point you’re going to die.
Three, you have to find ways to resume your normal activity.
And four, you have to rebound. That means that once the crisis is over, when you are finally in the past crisis stage, you have to think about what happened, to draw the lessons from what happened.
You have to look at how at the world around you, maybe it has changed to a point significant enough to imply that you should adapt to that new world around you and get rid the old structures, the old plans, and the old ways of life.
And that’s rebounding. And if the first three help you through the collapse stage, the fourth one is going to make you more robust, but probably more resilient because you will have learned that in certain extreme situations, what matters is the way you manage to navigate through the circumstances at hand.
Resilience is generated in part by tactical and strategic agility. The ability to re-combine elements and to introduce new ones in shaping a post collapse system is central. As Theron put it: You have to have that capability to break boundaries, to go beyond your boundaries and think completely differently.
We ended the conversation with Theron emphasizing the centrality of understanding where your organization fit within its matrix of interdependencies.
And he highlighted the need to spend time understanding those interdependencies PRIOR to crises in order to understand how to shape an agile response once a crisis hit.
For example, telecommunication depends on energy, electricity, but any electricity depends on telecommunication and electricity serves also gas and water distribution and so and water helps the telecommunication sector because you have to cool down big computer centers and so on.
So if you really want to assure the resiliency of a sector like telecommunications, and only focus narrowly on your facility, you will miss the point. Because you are in that network of interdependencies and you can’t achieve resilience on your own.
Your sector is analogous to a social group, which depends on the social groups around it. And therefore that means that you have to can have resiliency not only at your own level, but at a higher level, at a coordinated, collaborative level that is going to help you discuss the problems and prepare upstream for possible unknown devastating events.
And if you don’t have this collaboration upstream, in times of crisis, you won’t even know who’s the guy at the electricity company whom you should know and who could solve your problem. You won’t have that possibility. You won’t have coordinated plans. You won’t have coordinated systems or alternative means to resolve situations.
By Paul Dibb
The coronavirus pandemic will affect the power of countries in different ways. The biggest impact will be reductions in the economic, and therefore military, strength and relative power of competing major states.
The American historian Walter Russell Mead says that ‘the balance of world power could change significantly as some nations recover with relative speed, while others face longer and deeper social and political crises’.
Henry Kissinger’s view is that ‘the world will never be the same after the coronavirus’. He stresses the need for the democracies to defend and sustain the liberal world order. A retreat from ‘balancing power with legitimacy’ will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. The challenge for world leaders is to manage this crisis while building the future, he says, and ‘failure to do so could set the world on fire’.
Most importantly, the pandemic has widened the confrontation between the US and China, with uncertain results for Australia.
China stands to be a loser, not because its economic power won’t bounce back, but because its ideology forced this pandemic on the rest of the world when it could have been contained at the very outset. By suppressing information about the outbreak in Wuhan, the authorities lost the world at least four to six vital weeks when Beijing could have contained what is now an unprecedented global disaster.
China had been warned about the origins of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which, like the coronavirus, started in a major Chinese city. In both instances, the virus appears to have been transmitted to humans from wild animals sold in China’s wet markets. The leaders from President Xi Jinping down will carry the legacy of their denial and repression as a millstone that will be long remembered outside China as causing large numbers of unnecessary deaths worldwide.
In one fell blow, China has fatally undermined the advantages of globalisation—not only in a health sense, but also in Western countries’ dependence on China for medical drugs and equipment. Countries such as the US will diversify away from such reliance on China, even if that increases costs.
America’s reputation has also been damaged, by its inability to provide leadership in arguably the worst crisis since the end of the World War II. Allan Gyngell, a former head of Australia’s Office of National Assessments, has said that the US ‘looks irrevocably weakened as a global leader’. While China is now belatedly ‘offering its resources and experience in handling the virus to build relationships with other countries’, including in Europe, he notes that the US is ‘absent from any international leadership’.
President Donald Trump has failed to provide consistent and credible responses as the crisis has unfolded.
Rather than prompting a multilateral response, the Covid-19 crisis has ramped up extreme nationalism and harsh border-protection measures as the virus spread rapidly from one country to another. Nations are becoming acutely introverted as they give absolute priority to staving off massive deaths and the threat of calamitous economic damage, and even collapse for some.
In the longer term, this pandemic will likely fade away and most, but not all, advanced economies will snap back into economic growth. But it will be the most damaging crisis by far that our populations have experienced. The remarkably sudden and abrupt onset of this calamity will lead to greater uncertainty, and even fear, about our futures.
Australia will find itself weaker in the post-pandemic world. Serious economic damage may well have a long-term impact on cohesion and trust in our society. The reputation of our American ally has been badly damaged. And it remains to be seen whether we should allow our trade with China to resume its previous predominance.
A major lesson we should learn is to diversify our economic relationships and become more self-reliant, including in terms of our national security. This will involve a radical rethinking of the credible circumstances in which we will have to take the lead during security crises in our region without American involvement.
We will need to re-examine our vulnerabilities in such key areas as fuel supplies, critical infrastructure, and protective and offensive cyber resources. We should rapidly develop a new strategic posture, giving high priority to long-range missile attack capabilities to deter any power from threatening our strategic space.
A further serious geopolitical issue should not be underrated. It’s highly likely that neighbouring countries, critically important to us strategically, will suffer severe structural damage to their societies and economies. The health systems of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu may be overwhelmed, with very high death rates.
They will need our help to fight this virus and to restructure their economies. Australia and New Zealand should lead the way. If we don’t, China will probably step in and offer massive economic and medical assistance as it seeks to entrench a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, which will directly threaten our own security.
The future of the democracies in Australia’s primary area of strategic interest to our north and east must deeply concern Australian policy planners. We should ensure that our natural focus on our own serious problems doesn’t lead us into the trap of isolationism.
Indonesia, with over 270 million people, and Papua New Guinea, with nearly 8 million, must be priorities. If the coronavirus overwhelms their potentially fragile societies, we should be prepared to contribute generously to a prolonged and expensive effort to rebuild their health systems and economies. It’s not in Australia’s interests to see such strategically crucial neighbours collapse.
Australia’s former ambassador to Indonesia John McCarthy believes that the Covid-19 crisis could fuel support for extremist groups in Indonesia and place the nation’s stability at risk. We need to think carefully about the geopolitical impact of the virus on countries in our immediate region and give it our highest priority.
The nation-state has decisively reasserted itself as a prime actor in the global fight against Covid-19. There will be much greater calls for self-reliance, but as the international community becomes more fractious and the liberal order recedes, we must not lurch into a new bout of introversion.
Paul Dibb is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.
Featured Image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images.
This article was published by ASPI on April 21, 2020.
Operation Solania is the Australian Defence Force (ADF) contribution to regional security in partnership with the Pacific Island nations.
It also supports Operations Kuru Kuru, Island Chief, Tui Moana and Rai Balang, which are coordinated maritime surveillance and patrol operations run by the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), to detect and deter illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing activities.
The ADF’s contribution consists of Royal Australian Air Force B300 King Air and C-27J Spartan aircraft and the Royal Australian Navy ship HMAS Maryborough.
Australian Department of Defence
April 1, 2020
By Ms Samara Kitchener
Airborne search and rescue is an expensive and demanding task, but what if there was a better way?
AI-Search, Defence’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) prototype to transform airborne search and rescue, is now in its second phase of development.
The prototype is a collaboration between the Royal Australian Air Force’s Plan Jericho, Warfare Innovation Navy Branch and Air Mobility Group’s 35 Squadron. The system, which combines a sensor and processor, is highly portable and has the potential to enable any aircraft, including Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), vehicles or vessels to become an improvised search and rescue platform.
A recent C-27J Spartan sortie from RAAF Base Amberley off the coast of Stradbroke Island, with the assistance of the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard, helped evaluate the AI-Search algorithm to recognise a life raft and other waterborne vessels. This sortie was the second of several phases to develop and evaluate this proof of concept.
The AI-Search algorithms are being developed by budding machine learning expert, Lieutenant Harry Hubbert from the Warfare Innovation Navy Branch.
“During the sortie, we had a few GoPro sensors rigged up to detect a life raft and two algorithmic approaches working together to increase accuracy and the likelihood of a detection,” Lieutenant Hubbert said.
“This sortie was pretty challenging as the life raft was upside down, making it harder to see for both the human eye and the AI-Search sensors.
“The sensors are trained to detect an orange top, rather than a black top, but the AI-Search still had a 70 per cent detection rate, compared to the human detection rate of around 50 per cent.
“The 30 per cent AI-Search non-detections happened when there was low contrast between dark water and the black underside of the life raft, and the good news is that we had no false positives.”
Flying Officer Katherine Mitchell, piloting the aircraft as part of a search and rescue training exercise said that it was hard to see the upside-down life raft.
“We barely saw it 50 per cent of the time,” Flying Officer Mitchell said.
“AI-Search is already picking up more than what we are seeing, it’s incredible and it doesn’t get fatigued.”
Wing Commander Michael Gan, Plan Jericho’s AI lead said that they are now taking their learnings, finding the strengths and weaknesses, and iterating the next version.”
“The next phase will involve testing different sensor and processor combinations in a range of environmental conditions, with the potential of testing on a range of aircraft, including UAS,” Wing Commander Gan said.
This article was published by the Royal Australian Navy on April 21, 2020.
The USAF led a joint exercise in January 2020 focused on WestPac. The exercise had the stated purpose of distributing airpower throughout the operational area and working integratability to shape the desired combat effect.
But not overtly noted in the official statements was the growing concern and focus which the USAF, working with the US Navy and the USMC, and where relevant the US Army, on dealing with a major threat to its operational basing — the maritime strike threat from Russia and China in the Pacific.
When the B-21 comes to the force, it will have a significant role in the reworking of the kill web approach to dealing with the air as well as maritime strike threats to USAF operational basing.
Notably, when we visited MAWTS-1, USAF officers had become regular visitors to work with the Marine Corps Aviation on best ways to do expeditionary basing and operations.
With the US Navy highlighting a distributed maritime operations approach along with the USAF highlighting its ACE approach, a key question is how these will dovetail and shape an effective kill web capability in the Indo-Pacific region?
With the two services clearly focused on ensuring their capabilities to work integrated distributed operations, how do they view the strategic direction they would most like to see from the USMC? What kind of mobile basing and expeditionary operations will be best aligned with where the USAF and the US Navy are shaping their strategic trajectories in their warfighting approaches?
Because the Indo-Pacific is not primarily a land theater of operations for the United States, what roles for the US Army are most supportive of the evolving air-maritime kill web approach?
Given the defense modernization trajectories of U.S. allies in the region, notably our most important ones in the air-maritime domain, Japan and Australia, how best to ensure synergy among national approaches?
An 18th Wing Public Affairs release on January 10, 2020 highlighted the exercise as follows:
KADENA AIR BASE, Japan — More than 60 aircraft and 300 personnel from the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marine Corps participated in 18th Wing’s first WestPac Rumrunner exercise Jan. 10, 2020.
With the evolving security environment in the Indo-Pacific and to further support a safe and secure region, the 18th Wing spent months designing WestPac Rumrunner as an exercise to train counter air capabilities and strengthen joint interoperability. In addition to air tactics and joint interoperability, Airmen were charged with ensuring continuous airpower by using tactics derived from Pacific Air Force’s agile combat employment concept of operations, or ACE.
“As we executed this first iteration of Rumrunner, the exercise development team monitored how well our distributed joint forces came together and applied elements of ACE to disperse, recover, and rapidly resume operations,” said Capt. Brian Davis, 67th Fighter Squadron F-15C evaluator pilot and exercise director for WestPac Rumrunner. “The Rumrunner team looks forward to how we will continue to evolve and hone our procedures in the future.”
As the largest combat wing in the U.S. Air Force, Kadena Air Base was able to deploy a wide array of aircraft to simulate a realistic training scenario along with support from joint forces. The adversary air force primarily consisted of the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and Air Force’s F-15C Eagles, but the home team brought overwhelming joint capabilities to deny the adversarial advance.
F-15Cs defended the airspace and the KC-135 Stratotanker provided aerial refueling, while the 353rd Special Operations Group’s MC-130 Commando II dramatically extended the range and combat capabilities within the battlespace.
But, most unique to this exercise was the air-to-air and air-to-ground command and control provided by the Air Force’s E-3 Sentry, Navy’s E-2 Hawkeye, and 18th Wing’s 623rd Air Control Squadron, all of whom worked seamlessly to ensure battlespace situational awareness while expertly handing-off key targeting information to the U.S. Army’s 1-1 Air Defense Artillery’s Patriot surface-to-air missile battery. Marine Air Control Squadron-4 helped track the operations and were able to test integration capabilities for their systems at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Japan.
“My unit and I were excited to be participating in a joint large force mission of this type. We had the unique opportunity to work with the Army ADA through the 623rd ACS to integrate as a cohesive air defense team,” said Capt. Shawn Storey, 961st Airborne Air Control Squadron. “This exercise delivered a great opportunity to plan, execute and debrief in person to develop relationships and hone our joint integration, communications and execution skills face-to-face.”
As part of the ACE strategy, to extend and improve the availability of aircraft during a contingency, Air Force maintenance Airmen were positioned on the ground at MCAS Futenma to provide a quick refuel so the aircraft could swiftly be launched and returned to the fight.
“The ACE concepts being developed are not confined by current maintenance doctrine or tactics,” explained Lt. Col. Johnny West, 18th Maintenance Group deputy commander. “Our senior leaders are encouraging maintainers and logisticians to be more creative and assertive at lower levels to overcome generation and re-generation limitations that could occur in a highly-contested environment,” he said. “Today’s Rumrunner exercise allowed us to practice operating in a simulated austere environment, which is fundamental to the ACE concept, and our maintainers successfully refueled F-15s and launched them back into the air.”
Overall, Brig. Gen. Joel L. Carey, 18th Wing commander, described WestPac Rumrunner as a success and a valuable learning tool for the U.S. Pacific Air Forces and joint services.
“I couldn’t be more proud of our efforts today,” said Gen. Carey. “This event was a big win for us in the Pacific. Being able to test our ACE capabilities with our joint partners highlights the importance of interoperability and the capabilities of our Airmen and sister services. Working in conjunction with the Navy, Army and Marine Corps was crucial to the success of Rumrunner and its ability to be a powerful learning tool moving forward.”
