Background

For over twenty years the F-111 provided the Australian Defence Force with a strike capability with the  strategic reach to provide Australia with an independent strike option should deterrence fail. With the retirement of the long-range F-111, Australia’s future air strike capability now rests in the capabilities of the F/A-18F Super Hornet and F-35A, both equipped with appropriate long-range strike weapons and supported by a capable air-to-air refueling force of KC-30A aircraft; the air-to-air refueling force necessary to extend the unrefueled range of both the F/A-18F Super Hornet and the F-35A to achieve the desired strategic reach.

While Australia’s geo-political circumstances and regional threats are much changed from those which existed in 1963 when Australia committed to acquire the potent F-111 air strike capability, they are now more complex and much less straightforward than the Cold War heritage scenarios of the 1960s. But one aspect remains unchanged; Australia’s strategic geography, where strategic reach continues to support the case for an independent strike capability. The ability to strike at range brings a new dimension into any unfolding strategic scenario which, in itself, may often deter escalation into armed conflict. While in the event of escalation occurring, the absence of a long-range strike capability both limits Australia’s options for strategic maneuver and concedes to an adversary the ability to dictate the terms of engagement.

An independent strike capability expands the range of options to achieve Australia’s strategic ends; signals a serious intent and commitment about Australia’s national security; and has the capacity to influence strategic outcomes short of resorting to armed conflict.

Joint Strike

Conceiving, planning, programming and delivering a credible strike capability is not easy.  While some elements such as long-range strike weapons can be bought off the shelf, the integration of the various elements of a strike capability is complex and takes time before the conception develops into a mature and credible military capability. But a strike capability without the enabling capabilities such as electronic warfare support, surveillance support and air-to-air refueling is of little utility, hence enabling capabilities must also be part of the acquisition plan.

Plus, there are the doctrinal, C2, training and sustaining elements of the capability to consider. In short, the complexity and time required to build a nation’s strike capability is such that a government has little option other than to retain a strike capability within a nation’s force structure as, like many other elements of national power, the maturation timeframe for a strike capability is measured not in years but in decades.

There are also important lessons flowing from the last two decades of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These operations have illustrated the need for an integrated and sophisticated targeting process, for without perceptive and sophisticated targeting, strike operations achieve few useful outcomes. Targeting is intelligence-led and fundamentally joint in nature and the experience gained from the past two decades of air operations will be invaluable in establishing Australia’s future long-range strike capability.

While the speed, reach, responsiveness and flexibility of an air strike capability are compelling arguments for Australia to retain an air strike capability within its order of battle, there are also other military capabilities that extend strike operations into the joint arena. The evolution of Australia’s strike capability will also need to consider the contribution from evolving technologies, such as electronic warfare, unmanned systems, and of the contribution from new technologies which not only seek to employ traditional kinetic effects but also non-kinetic effects. A sophisticated strike capability seems a continuing and essential arrow in Australia’s quiver of national power.

Aim of the Seminar

This seminar seeks to build a common understanding of the need for an independent joint strike capability to provide Australia with a powerful and potent deterrent and a means of demonstrating strategic intent.  It will highlight the impact on the national, campaign, operational and tactical levels, and discuss the ways joint strike can add a further dimension to future Australian Defence and national security policy.

It will provide a historical perspective on the development of the Royal Australian Air Force’s strike capability dating back to World War 2, and look to partner air forces as to how they have developed and employed a strike capability in recent campaigns.

We will hear the perspectives of the Australian army, navy, and the joint commanders, as well as contributions from our coalition partners in the United States and United Kingdom, with the emphasis on gaining a better understanding of the strike options available and of the best way of delivering a balanced range of strike capabilities across the Australian Defence Force.

The seminar will highlight some of the emerging technologies, not just in the weapons but also in the enabling support, planning and targeting systems.  It will assess the impact on training systems and on the role of modelling and simulation in the optimising and developing a mature and sophisticated long-range strike capability.

The seminar will also serve as an opportunity to provide an industry perspective on joint strike and, in particular, the role industry can play as a fundamental input to capability. It will highlight the opportunities associated with co-operative programs and the potential to contribute to payload and seeker technologies.

Above all, the seminar will emphasise the impact of a joint strike capability on a broader strategy of deterrence.  This will involve discussion of both conventional and nuclear strike options and the ways and means of delivery, and their potential impact on the balance of power in the region.

WillliamsStrikeSeminar23Aug18 2

The hypersonics photo is credited to NASA.

By Robbin Laird

During my current visit to Australia, I had a chance to continue my discussions with Ross Babbage about the challenges of dealing with 21st advanced authoritarian states.

Recently, he co-authored a study entitled “ Countering Comprehensive Coercion: Competitive Strategies Against Authoritarian Political Warfare,” and with that as the predicate we discussed the nature of the challenge posed by 21^stcentury advanced authoritarian states and how to deal with that challenge.

https://sldinfo.com/2018/08/information-warfare-and-the-authoritarian-states-how-best-to-respond/

Question: Your new report lays out the nature of the challenge.Where is your project now headed in terms of working both the challenge and response to what I would call 21^stcentury advanced authoritarian states?

Babbage: This is a starting point but we need to dig more deeply into their own thinking, their own literature, their own doctrine, and their own practices in political warfare.

We are proceeding by generating a series of case studies to highlight what those methods and approaches are so that we can assess them more concretely.

There is a lot of history.

Both the Chinese and Russian approaches are rooted in their history but using modern methods to execute their templates of political warfare.

Question: How would contrast the authoritarian approach to our basic liberal democratic mindsets?

Babbage: For the liberal democracies, there is a pretty clear break between what we would consider war and peace.

For the Chinese and the Russians, there is not quite the same distinction.

They perceive a broad  range of gray areas within which political warfare is the norm and it is a question of how effective it is; not how legitimate it is.

They are employing various tools, such as political and economic coercion, cyber intrusion, espionage of various types, active intelligence operations and so forth.

For example, in Australia, certain Chinese entities have bought up Chinese newspapers here so that there’s very little Chinese language media in Australia, which is not pro-Beijing.

And they are leveraging their business people, students and visitors to work for broader political means within Australia as well.

In contrast, the West is employing very traditional means such as diplomacy and military tools.

Our tool set is clearly constrained compared to the innovative and wide ranging tool set with which the Russians and Chinese are working and they are learning to use their presence in our societies to expand their influence on our policies.

Aaron Friedberg at Princeton really got it right when he said words to the effect that “a primary driver of Beijing’s international policies is to make the world safe for all authoritarianism.”

And that’s what we’re seeing.

What we’re confronting is a new version of a long-standing theme in Chinese strategic thought which emphasizes the importance of shaping the strategic environment in your favor by reaching a long way into the enemy’s camp, and putting him off balance, and getting him focused on internal problems and exacerbating those internal problems.

The goals are to distract and weaken the enemy and get him to not focus on things other than the main game.

The political warfare approach is one of interfering, disturbing, distracting, confusing, disrupting the institutions and the normal operations of democratic states.

The head of the Australian  Security and Intelligence Agency (ASIO) has stated that the scale and pace of foreign intelligence and  espionage activities in Australia is now higher than they were at the peak ofthe Cold War.

Question: What can be done?

Babbage: A key aspect of meeting the challenge is to recognize it exists and encourage the public focus on its existence and operations.

Regardless of domestic political persuasion, our people do not like to see this kind of authoritarian coercion operating in our society.

When they realize what is happening, they’re upset , they’re angry about what a foreign country could be trying to do, these sort of things, and they want to galvanize action.

And many pose the question of “What can we do to actually stop this and fix it?”

At present we are not telling the story of foreign political warfare broadly enough within our political and economic sectors.

We’ve got to improve our information operations. We need to throw sunlight on what these guys are doing and do so in a comprehensive and sustained manner.

Beyond that effort, I would identify a number of potential components  of what one might call an effective counter strategy.

First is a denial strategy.

Here the objective is to deny, not just the operations and make them ineffective, but also to deny the political benefits that authoritarian states seek to win by conducting their operations.

Second is a cost imposition strategy.

We need to find ways to correlate their behavior with an imposed cost.  We need to make clear that if they are going to behave like this, it will cost them in specific ways.

Third is focused on defeating their strategy, or making their strategy counterproductive.

We can turn their strategy on its  head and make it counter-productive even within their own societies.

Their own societies are fair game given the behavior of the of our combined assets Russians and Chinese.

Fourth is to make it damaging, and even dangerous, for authoritarian regimes  to sustain their political warfare strategy.

Authoritarian regimes have their own vulnerabilities and we need to focus on the seams in their systems to make their political warfare strategies very costly and risky.

And we need to do this comprehensively as democratic allies. 

There’s no reason why we can’t coordinate and cooperate and make the most of our combined resources, as we did in the Cold War..

But do we have the right tools and coordination mechanisms for an all-of-alliance strategy to work well?

In my view, the Western allies have a great deal of work to do.

The featured photo comes from Alan Porritt/AAP

For past discussions with Dr. Babbage, see the following:

The Changing of the Threat Envelope for Australia: The Perspective of Ross Babbage

The Chinese Challenge WITHIN Australia

Dealing with Reality Shock: Refocusing on the World We Have Rather than the World We Wish We Would Have

 

 

Hypersonics has been a key priority for the US until the last Administration pushed the work done to that date into dormancy.

But neither the Russians nor the Chinese went to sleep while the US focused on and resource the land wars instead.

They continued to make progress on this new capability, and with the coming to power of a new Administration, the US is returning to the hypersonics realm.

The new head of Pentagon R and D clearly has highlighted both the threat and the need to focus on hypersonics research and capabilities.

“It is our adversaries, not us, who have chosen to weaponize this type of capability,” Griffin said, adding that the U.S. would not be eclipsed by Russia and China.

Griffin’s comments came on the heels of Chinese reports announcing the first successful testing of a hypersonic aircraft, a feat the U.S. has yet to accomplish.

When asked about China’s sprint to deploy this new breed of weapon, Griffin described Beijing’s efforts as “much more thoughtful” compared with Moscow’s developments.

“The Chinese have been much more thoughtful in their systems development because they are developing long-range tactical precision-guided systems that will be really influential in a conventional fight,” Griffin said. “The Chinese ability to hold our forward deployed assets at risk with very high speed and very hard to intercept precision-guided systems is something to which we have to respond,” he added.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/10/space-force-pentagon-blames-russia-china-for-militarizing-space.html

But there is a key question: how best to pursue and deal with the hypersonic threat?

With the President’s emphasis on building a new space force through a space corps, naturally, the space element has been heightened as a key element to deal with hypersonics.

And with the appointment of Griffin and loading the Pentagon with space stalwarts, the emphasis could really be narrowly focused on space as the venue and instrument.

Sandra Erwin of Space News recently highlighted the space dimension of the hypersonics dynamic as follows:

The Pentagon’s panel of four-star generals known as the Joint Oversight Requirements Council will be briefed this fall on potential solutions to a major national security vulnerability: hypersonic weapons that fly into space at supersonic speeds and descend back down to Earth directly on top of targets.

Current sensors could track some portions of the flight but more coverage is needed for the midcourse.

China has been testing hypersonic glide vehicles successfully, and is advancing the technology at an alarming pace, warned Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin. 

The hypersonic threat brings a “new urgency” that the United States has not seen since the Cold War.

A defensive shield would require global coverage and the cost of doing that with ground radars would be prohibitive so this has to be done in space, Griffin said.

“Our response has to be a proliferated space sensor layer, possibly based off commercial space developments.”

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is reviewing proposed concepts for a space-based sensor layer from nine companies: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, Maxar, Draper Labs, Leidos, Millennium Space and Boeing.

Industry sources said the studies will include options such as constellations in low and medium orbits.

Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who chairs the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, has asked MDA to come back with an “assessment of the sensor requirements.” What will the sensors have to be able to see? How large should the constellation of sensors be? How would sensors in space connect to command and control systems?

“Those are big hard requirements,” Selva told SpaceNews last week at a Mitchell Institute breakfast. “We asked for a systems engineering assessment for how they will link all that together.” The JROC expects to see a more concrete plan this fall.

During a roundtable with reporters last week, Griffin cautioned that the traditional approach to developing “exquisite” military satellites is not going to work.

The Pentagon already has a network of early warning heat-detecting satellites in geostationary earth orbit that can see missile launches.

The new layer of sensors will be aimed at low-flying hypersonic glide vehicles.

What’s needed: “persistent, timely global, low-latency surveillance to track and provide fire control for hypersonic threats.”

If the solution is in space, Selva suggested, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if a commercial constellation of satellites actually had some capacity? If that’s true why would we build our own?”

(SN Military Space, August 14, 2018).

But shaping enhanced sensing in space or an ability perhaps to strike before or during the early launch cycle from space is only part of what is required.

The core problem is how to defend deployed assets through effective endgame strategies leveraging  a kill web.

How does is the fleet admiral and the surface warfare officers empowered to kill incoming hypersonic threats?

To know you are going to be killed is not enough; it is to have the means, processes, procedures and information for the weapons officers on what and how to execute the kill function.

Ed Timperlake addresses this challenge in both of his pieces in this special edition focused on hypersonics;  first in his S cubed piece and secondly, in his discussion of the kill box challenge.

It is important to put the challenge in perspective.

As one leading researcher on hypersonics put it with regard to U.S. dormancy during the last Administration as well as the evolving Chinese and Russian threats:

The magnitude of the Chinese investment, the number of people they have, the facilities they are building, the ties to their academia, make it all real.  

They are flight-testing regularly, and with amazing success.

And hypersonics fits in perfectly with their doctrine.

The Chinese saw Hypersonics as an area that they could develop and surpass the US, and we made it easy for them. 

Frankly, an enemy intelligence operative couldn’t have disrupted our progress in the field more effectively than we have done to ourselves.

The USAF flew its X-51 successfully in May 2013- what have we done since then?

Instead of continuing and building on that success, we were penny wise-pound foolish; the Air Force gave away most of its money in this area to DARPA, which effectively started over from scratch.

As a result, in the year 2018 we are farther away from flying a scramjet-powered hypersonic craft than we were in 2010.

How insane is that? 

The Russians are also a threat, but in their case it is more hype than worry.

And as a senior retired USAF officer put it with regard to the Chinese program on hypersonics:

First, they have a long way to go to operationalize this vehicle.

Second, the US should already have an operational hypersonic military aircraft, but neglect by Congress and past Administrations to ensure our military was funded to capitalize on advanced technologies, and instead shifting those funds in the 90’s and 00’s to the “peace dividend;” explosive growth in entitlement spending; and strategically misguided Army occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan squandered our military technological advantage.

That misallocation of national resources is still continuing today.  

Unfortunately, it will take another catastrophe to wake up America to the need for the advanced capabilities and capacities that are required to achieve military preeminence to deter high-end warfare in the future—and to fight and win if necessary.

Featured Photo: Starry Sky 2, China’s first experimental hypersonic waverider vehicle, is launched inside a rocket on Friday. China Daily

Our current edition on defense.info is focused on the hypersonic challenge, and can be read as a single report as well.

The Coming of Hypersonics

 

By Robbin Laird

The PRC is combing military with economic with political warfare means to expand its global reach.

In the words of Ross Babbage, the PRC and Russia are focused on making the world safe for authoritarian states.

Information Warfare and the Authoritarian States: How Best to Respond?

As the context within the Pacific changes, Australia, Japan and the United States will shape ways and means to work together to shape a containment belt against the Chinese projecting power and disrupting what is often called the rules based order.

The latest Pentagon report on Chinese military power provides an update on key developments as well as critical challenges, which the Chinese authoritarian state poses to the liberal democracies.

The report provides a compressive overview, but I want to highlight a small number of items.

One of the most interesting pieces in the report is contained at the end of the report and his entitled: “Xi Jinping’s innovation-drive development strategy.”

The piece underscores the significance of an ongoing innovation strategy for shaping an innovative military industrial complex.

China’s push for leadership in global S&T development comes at a time in which dual-use technology advances, applicable for both commercial and military purposes, increasingly occur in the commercial sector.

This means that efforts by China to cultivate a broad base of S&T talent, particularly given its stated focus on dual-use sectors, will be relevant to China’s military power in coming decades.

 Specific examples include advanced computing, essential for weapons design and testing; industrial robotics, potentially useful for improving weapons manufacturing; new materials and electric power equipment, which could contribute to improved weapon systems; next generation information technology, which could enable improved C4ISR and cyber capabilities; commercial directed energy equipment, which could contribute to the development of directed energy weapons; and artificial intelligence, which could contribute to next-generation autonomous systems such as missiles, swarming technology, or cyber capabilities.

The report describes an overall force modernization strategy for China, but also identifies some innovations in concepts of operations different from what the US and its allies in the Pacific are focusing upon.

A case in point is the importance laid on using bombers in a maritime strategy.

The PLA has long been developing air strike capabilities to engage targets as far away from China as possible. Over the last three years, the PLA has rapidly expanded its overwater bomber operating areas, gaining experience in critical maritime regions and likely training for strikes against U.S. and allied targets.

The PLA may continue to extend its operations beyond the first island chain, demonstrating the capability to strike U.S. and allied forces and military bases in the western Pacific Ocean, including Guam.

Such flights could potentially be used as a strategic signal to regional states, although the PLA has thus far has not been clear what messages such flights communicate beyond a demonstration of improved capabilities.

A third key issue discussed in the report is the effort to shape a more effective joint force, which can be used in a peer-to-peer conflict.

As the Chinese have not engaged in land wars far from their area of strategic interest, they have been investing in relevant capabilities for peer-to-peer conflict.

The PLA is a historically army-centric organization, and bureaucratic intransigence has for years limited the PLA’s ability to transform itself into a modern joint force. Beginning in 2015, the execution of PLA reforms are addressing this need, as well as critical related issues such as institutional intransigence borne of corruption and the parochial interests of senior PLA leaders.

In addition to strengthening Party control over the PLA, China’s leaders directed a complete restructuring of the PLA headquarters to strengthen CMC administrative control of the PLA and to establish a joint command system capable of organizing and directing operations on a routine basis…..

Reforms in 2017 and the resulting restructuring of PLA forces have highlighted the PLA’s vision for the future of PLA combat operations. They included the disestablishment of five group army headquarters, the reorganization of many divisions and regiments into combined arms brigades, and the formation of some air assault brigades. A PLANMC headquarters was established and the Marine Corps is tripling to seven brigades across all three naval fleets. The PLAAF reorganized its Airborne Corps into nine brigades, established additional air bases, and restructured its fighter and attack divisions into brigades subordinate to the new bases.

To standardize training, operations, and equipment development, the PLA is also reorganizing its system of academies and research institutions. Organizations have been realigned to enable joint oversight and management of equipment research and development to create efficiencies in the acquisition system. Joint operations and warfighting concepts are being infused into academic curriculum, targeting mid-level officers, to enhance joint interoperability and command proficiency.

PLA leaders are also revising personnel and promotion systems to reduce nepotism, broaden the experience of PLA officers, and encourage and grow operational experience.

The PLA will likely face challenges in fully implementing these reforms, foremost of which is to sustain their scope and pace amid senior leadership transitions and expanding PLA missions. Their success likely depends greatly on strong centralized leadership and direction that can dispel inter-service rivalries, guide and assess organizational change, and influence corresponding reforms in China’s defense industrial base and other supporting institutions.

To capitalize on joint organizational reforms, the PLA will probably need to field significant quantities of new weapons and communications systems required to operationalize its combined operations warfighting concepts.

Finally, as China’s leaders pursue their ambitions for a more globally deployable strategic force, the PLA will need to develop the doctrine, institutional structures and procedures, infrastructure, and platforms to project, support, and sustain forces abroad – all of which appear relatively nascent today.

Clearly, the liberal democracies need to build a comprehensive strategy to deal with a modern authoritarian state clearly focused on expanding its influence, leveraging the weaknesses of our societies, and our proclivity to believe that globalization somehow lead to global freedom and inevitable human progress. 

We need to stop being effectively Rousseauian with regard to China.

We need to shape a SIOP designed to counter the Chinese and learn to stress their societies to expand our influence.

And we should re-engage with Taiwan as part of the overall effort to shape a more deliberate strategy towards the China that is evolving, rather than seeing the China we hope will be there one day.

For a report, which focused on ways to counter the Chinese strategy by shaping a SIOP approach see the following:

To read the full report see the following:

https://media.defense.gov/2018/Aug/16/2001955282/-1/-1/1/2018-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT.PDF

Or the report can be downloaded here:

2018-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT

Appendix

In a 2013 piece written prior to the publication of our book on the remaking of American military power to deal with dynamics of change in the Pacific, I laid out a way to look at the evolving Chinese challenge which I think underscores the comprehensive nature of the challenge and how to shape a way ahead.

2013-04-07 The rise of China in the last 20 years is a significant global event.

The challenge for the next twenty is to understand how Chinese military power is intertwined with Chinese power projection and how the West and Asia will respond.

But a key element is simply to understand the challenge of how the military dimension fits into the Chinese global presence.

In the accompanying brief, the Second Line of Defense team has put together a way to understand how these different variables are coming together and evolving over the next 20 years.

We start with the question of three ways forward or how the PRC can built out its capabilities.

The basic bottom line is that the Chinese are clearly trying to extend reach from a more secure homeland base. 

And they’re doing this in a couple of different ways; one way is building their nuclear deterrent by having a more survivable force hidden in tunnels and deployed via mobile systems.

And at the same time, they are building what is referred to as anti-access, anti-denial capabilities, which at this point in history, is largely is an extension of the homeland.

They are trying to secure the area from which they can operate over time.

This provides them then with a base; the policy is based on the concept that adversaries will accept the sanctuary and demonstrate a lack of interest or capability in intruding into the sanctuary.

It forms the basis for projection power further into the Pacific and the South China Sea up into Japanese waters, up to the Arctic and towards the Malacca Straits and further south.

The question then becomes the approach being shaped to project power into the maritime zones ultimately for the Arctic and for the great royal route to the south.

Traditional power projection tools are being built for these purposes whether they be carriers, airlift, tanking, bombers, long-range missiles.  A variety of Chinese tools are being built to allow the Chinese over time to project power as the United States has understood this over the last 30 to 40 years.

And in fact, the Chinese are following a U.S. model in some respects, that is to say, a very linear air and maritime model using AWACS, using integrated strike packages, and carrier battle group kind of thinking.

But the third level could be understood as leveraging technologies and thinking about the future of power projection very, very differently.

In the interview we did with Mark Lewis, he referred to how the Americans built the USS constitution and that class of frigates in a very innovative way that surprised the British.

We are assuming that some of these game-changing technologies, whether they be hypersonics or innovative use of global ISR assets, space-based e.g., could shape a new approach for the Chinese.

In other words, the Chinese are building out Chinese military power through a building block approach. 

By 2030 or so, they will certainly have a global power projection force, but in the interim period, they are focused on securing a sanctuary and building from the sanctuary outward into the Pacific.

In addition,  the global exports of aircraft, missiles and other very exportable technologies will allow the Chinese to build global alliances in the military domain.

This is the double bounce idea of the technology; on the one hand, technology comes into China and then is re-exported in the form of advancing products from China.

Regional reach is the key focus in the next decade. 

The anti-access, anti-denial efforts are clearly conjoined with a regional reach perspective.  That means, in effect, the coming out into the maritime air domains of the Pacific.

However, this is a crowded and dangerous three-dimensional operational space, that is to say underwater, above water, and air-breathing.

And several competitors of China have been already triggered to re-shape their capabilities by concerns about what the Chinese are doing, whether they be Singapore or Japan, or Australia.

To build out a global presence involves a variety of tools coming together and over time, shaping a more integrated force structure package.  These include the global exports of missiles, aircraft and capabilities, which allow the Chinese to build out global power relationships as well.

The Chinese are also participating in global missions such anti-piracy to give them the kind of experience of operating abroad far from the homeland, something that they hitherto have had no experience doing.

And this lack of experience for maritime and air reach is a key vulnerability that the Chinese have, of course.

Obviously protecting their engagement in raw materials and transit of goods and services is also a very important aspect of building out capability over time, particularly as the U.S. capabilities attrite which currently is the case as the U.S. has half the size the Air Force it once had.  It has a declining number of ships, so there are legitimate gaps in protecting the global commons, which the Chinese will clearly provide and others will see this provision as a legitimate expression of their global role, which it may well be, but all depends completely on how their role plays out.

But what are the critical pieces or the game-changers for the Chinese? 

It really is an interaction between a reactive enemy; and in this case, it’s what the West and Asia do in dealing with the Chinese build out.

The Chinese build out is occurring in a very fluid and dynamic strategic environment, and from this standpoint, one needs to look at what are the most critical technologies or capabilities, which are game-changing for the Chinese themselves.

In other words, it is a question of the build out, the technologies, and the strategic environment and the response of others to this environment. 

It is a highly interactive.  The lack of interactive understanding guides some comments with regard to what the Chinese will be able to do, rather than analyzing what they can do up against what other’s will accept or not accept and what they will do to deny the Chinese with the benefits of enhanced military capabilities.

What actions will be taken by the U.S. or its allies which the Chinese consider the biggest threats to their ascendency?

Which actions will the Chinese target to try to block, and which Asian partners of the United States are most crucial to isolate and undercut in their military modernization efforts to allow for Chinese ascendency?

In our forthcoming book on Pacific strategy, we argue that the U.S./Japanese alliance is the absolute crucial alliance in facing the Chinese in the years to come.

The Chinese military power is coming out into the Pacific and the two greatest naval powers of the 20th century could well become closer together, and this is a major problem facing the Chinese.

And already, the Japanese and the United States have invested in common technologies, Egis, SM-3 missiles and F-35 aircraft, and will seek to integrate this capability in years ahead.

And this integration is a major challenge to the Chinese as the Chinese seek ascendency or an ability to control their environment much further away from the mainland.

In other words, managing the threat is a key part of how you build out military capabilities from a Chinese perspective.

An American-Japanese alliance is clearly a key barrier to Chinese ascendancy.

The Chinese are certainly dedicated to breaking the coalition and its power by undercutting U.S. Military modernization, encouraging the criticisms of the F-35 enterprise, because from a Chinese perspective the F-35 can enable the kind of coalition as can challenge most effectively any Chinese ascendency.

Information warfare involves a set of tools that the Chinese use to try to undercut competitors as well.

The key is to pressure the U.S. lynchpin role in the Pacific to limit what the U.S. can do to reinforce what Asian allies do. It is a Ben Franklin situation where if the allies work together and they work together interactively in the United States, there’s more than sufficient capability to manage the Chinese challenge. If they do not they will have to confront the Chinese challenge largely in isolation from one another.

At the same time, the Chinese are using a diversity of power of tools including information warfare tools to convince folks that there is no real Chinese threat.

Things like the request constantly for transparency from the Chinese, even when the Chinese fly fifth generation aircraft over people calling for the transparency misses the ultimate point that the Chinese are clearly selling the idea that what they’re doing is not threat-based, but it’s a normal projection of Chinese power.

The Chinese power projection effort which is inextricably intertwined with their military is a central reality of the 21st century. 

It is a table setter.

How the US, the West and Asia respond will determine the shape of the competition to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Robbin Laird

Australia is building an integrated force and working to extend the reach and range of that force.

This is a core effort for the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force and clearly focused on dealing with challenges in the Indo-Pacific region.

But what is the role of the Australian Army in this effort?

Clearly, the Australian Army has been a key player in working relationships such as with Indonesia and Malaysia, and with the new amphibious capability will expand its engagement in the region.

But if we are in the midst of strategic shift from land wars in the Middle East to crisis management in which peer competitors have force on force capabilities which significantly impact on our combat and diplomatic success, what is the role of the ground force?

The Strategic Shift Facing the Liberal Democracies: Williams Foundation Report #8

This is a challenge not only for regular Army forces but for Special Forces as well.

We have dealt in a preliminary fashion with the question of the impact on Special Forces in a recent article, but the question being addressed here is how does a regular ground force, such as the Australian Army, adapt to the new conditions and what force modernization priorities need to be emphasized an highlighted?

The new chief of the Australian Army, Lieutenant General Rick Burr, has provided some baseline elements for answering the question in his initial Commander’s intent published on July 14, 2018 and in his Futures Statement published on August 8, 2018.

The Commander’s Intent highlighted what the Chief of Army sees as an “Army in Motion.”

To be ready now, we must harness the whole Army and leverage the potential of the joint force and the entire enterprise. We need both capability and capacity. We must be physically, morally and intellectually prepared for operational deployment, at any time, wherever we are needed. Army must also transform to capture future opportunities. Being future ready is a way of challenging the status quo; constantly evolving how we think, equip, train, organise and prepare to compete in the future.  

The statement then goes on to note:

The evolving character of war and the realities of an increasingly competitive and disruptive world demand we unlock our full potential. 

We must create and leverage new opportunities to team with other militaries as well as across the joint force, government, industry, academia and community to generate capability advantage. 

We will optimise what we have at every level in Army by thinking of new ways to operate, by experimenting, innovating and accepting risk.  

And the statement concludes with this comment:

Army is always in motion. 

Our next steps will be guided by a strategic framework, and articulation of our future warfighting concept, Accelerated Warfare.

What we can take away from this is a clear emphasis on the centrality of Army working effectively in the joint and coalition force.

That begs the question, that if the joint and coalition force in question in the Indo-Pacific region is engaging in dealing peer competitors, notably China, what role will the Army play and what innovations are crucial to play that role?

With the release of the accelerated warfare statement preliminary answers are provided to this question.

The Challenge

The challenge is described as follows in the accelerated warfare statement:

We live in an era of increasing competition where the rules-based international order is coming under increasing pressure. Being future ready means continuing our contribution to an open and fair international system, and being prepared for increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Geopolitics.

Our region is becoming increasingly defined by a changing geopolitical order and operating spectrum of cooperation, competition and conflict. At the same time, the pace of urbanisation and regional competition in littoral environments is bringing its own form of complexity. These trends are a major factor in accelerating the speed and dynamism across diplomatic, informational, economic and military interactions between sovereign states and other actors.

Threat.

Our operating landscape is changing – adversaries, including violent extremist organisations and state-based threats can now control and influence all operating domains. The advent of rapidly evolving, easily accessed technology increasingly offers asymmetric capabilities to both established powers as well as non-state actors and even individuals. The ability to sense and strike from long range as well as swarming low-cost technologies are increasing the vulnerability of major military systems.

Future strike capabilities will not just be physical but also digital, executed often at the speed of a mouse-click. Sophisticated Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities offer the ability to deny manoeuvre while distributed systems that are ‘smarter’ and smaller are becoming increasingly essential to survivability. Networking will be critical in terms of generating a system capable of ‘cooperative engagement’.

Technology.

While the nature of war as a contest of wills is enduring, technological disruption is rapidly changing war’s character. These characteristics include the convergence of big data, artificial intelligence, machine-learning, robotics, unmanned and autonomous capability with precision weaponry. Fused, synthesised and assured information for decision superiority is also likely to be an essential battlefield enabler with the challenge to protect this information from disruption and deception.

Technology is not the sole answer. Our challenge is to underpin technological change with a joint warfighting philosophy linked to future investment, force structure, mobilisation and logistics transformation to be relevant, adaptable and survivable in the modern operating environment.

Domains.

The reach of sensors and fires means Army must address all domains and comprehensively integrate across them. Space and cyber have not been fully contested in previous wars and therefore we have limited knowledge for how conflict in these domains will play out in the future.

Our ability to operate in the traditional air, sea and land domains are at risk of being debilitated from space and cyber yet there is also great opportunity in these domains for military advantage. Future conflict is likely to be across domains where networks and integration are the key to generating military power.

Put together, the geopolitical context, changing threat, disruptive technologies and domain integration means that we must prepare for an accelerating environment. Future warfare, in certain parts, will be fought at the speed of machines with success belonging to the side who can adapt the fastest.

Future advantage will lie with the side who can ‘own the time’ and best prepare the environment.

Let us take some of these items separately.

The ability to sense and strike from long range as well as swarming low-cost technologies are increasing the vulnerability of major military systems.

This is true but the Williams Seminar to be held on August 23, 2018 will focus on how the Aussies can have relevant technologies highlighted here.

And if it is to be long-range strike and active defense, much of that will operate in Western Australia.

What is the Army’s plan to work with Air Force on shaping an active defense and mobile defense of Western Australian defense assets to ensure longer range strike and support for the forces engaged deep within the region?

Future conflict is likely to be across domains where networks and integration are the key to generating military power.

Of course, the reverse is true, namely that Australia needs to have core capabilities to disrupt networks and rip apart adversary combat formations.  What is the Army’s role in the offensive-defensive enterprise?

The US Army at Fort Sill is certainly trying to work through how offensive and defensive systems can support disruption of adversary systems and capabilities, although the US Army is falling short of sorting out how their systems will integrate with Air Force and Naval systems, in operations in an integrated battlespace.

The reach of sensors and fires means Army must address all domains and comprehensively integrate across them.

Of course, this is a major challenge because it boils down to rapid insertion of new sensors and software into combat platforms and integration of those ground based platforms, above all with Air Force.

How is the Australian Army going to address that challenge?

Australian Army Response to the New Threat Environment

The final section of the Accelerated Warfare futures statement addresses the question of how Army will respond to the threat environment.

Within this accelerating context, Army must respond. We must push ourselves to think in creative and unconstrained ways to ensure our warfighting philosophy is appropriate and informs our future capabilities.

Accelerated Warfare as a description of ‘how we respond’ means owning the speed of initiative to outpace, out-manoeuvre and out-think conventional and unconventional threats. It requires excellence in the art and science of decision-making as well as deep thinking about Army’s role in understanding, shaping and influencing the environment.

Our role for creating access, persistence and lethality in the joint force are areas for greater discussion. This includes aligning shared interests to create access to our preferred operating environments, technologies and partners.

We must discuss how we leverage persistent presence through access, endurance and our people-to-people links. Applying lethality on the land, from the land and onto the land for potency and influence across all domains must remain a central focus for our role in the joint force.

As we discuss ‘how we respond’, we will also think about our organisational elements.

Our people must be leaders and integrators who contribute to multi-disciplinary teams, enabling us to thrive in uncertainty, adapt to change and generate solutions.

We must leverage emerging technology as a potential source of advantage, integrating new technologies within the joint force. Partnerships through teaming with our international military partners, industry and academia will be of paramount importance to unlock potential and strengthen relationships for mutual benefit.

We must pull the future towards us rather than wait for it; Army must respond proactively by rethinking our contribution to joint warfighting philosophy, strategy and concepts. I look forward to your engagement as we explore these ideas together, define the next steps and inform our capability development priorities.

The key question of course is where one is doing this.

Geography matters.

Does the Army’s role vary dependent upon which geography within the Indo-Pacific region it will be asked to deploy?

There is no one size fits all integration, and the ADF has emphasized this point with its emphasis on shaping a task force concept.

Where do the ground forces fit within which task forces to deal with which missions and in which geographical sectors in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond?

The new Chief has set in motion an interesting approach and we will see where it will and can go in the period ahead.

For the Williams Foundation seminar report on Land-Air integration, see the following:

Williams Foundation Report #4