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Talk of innovation and the need for cross-pollination to break down stove-pipes is widespread in today’s Air Force, but it is sometimes difficult for those in the field to see beyond the strategic messaging to embrace the operational importance of these concepts. In this review of The Hunter Killers: The Extraordinary Story of the First Wild Weasels, the Mavericks Who Flew the Most Dangerous Missions of the Vietnam War, Squadron Leader Jimmy draws our attention to the reality of wartime innovation and how a blending of the tribes laid the foundation for a defining capability of modern air power. Wild Weasel concept was first explained to him. “You want me to fly in the back of a little tiny fighter aircraft with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he’s invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me?” Bottom line up front; those that seek to understand the pressures and realities of fast jet air combat, gain a practical insight into electronic warfare (EW) or understand Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) should read this book. The Hunter Killers is a collection of gritty fast jet air combat vignettes woven together through a deep knowledge of the subject matter to produce an engaging narrative that is full of rich and relevant lessons for any air power professional. The Hunter Killers is the story of the USAF ‘Wild Weasel’ program from inception as a response to the radar Surface to Air Missile (SAM) threat in 1965, through operations and ongoing development throughout the Vietnam War. This book covers a broad swathe of issues that pose excellent signposts for a modern Air Force. Junior members will gain a tremendous insight into the excitement, frictions, brutal realities and the complex science that goes into the application of modern air power in a high threat environment. The explanation of the SA-2 GUIDELINE system, and description of the engagement process for that system in the book’s Prologue is simply one of the best threat lessons available for the uninitiated. Later chapters describe the iterative developments and counter-developments in the cat and mouse game of SAMs vs SEAD; these lessons remain critically relevant in the contemporary and anticipated operating environments. North Vietnamese SAM crew in front of SA-2 launcher. (Image Credit: U.S. Air Force) The ‘Wild Weasel’ program is described in illustrative detail and provides a useful model of agile organizational and technical innovation. The Weasel program is a useful reference for practitioners in contemporary defence innovation; ultimately it delivered a credible, unprecedented initial capability into theatre in a very tight timeline. Operators were engaged with industry partners early in the system integration phase of a rapid capability development and procurement process. Operator and trials feedback influenced a broad swathe of details from ergonomics to antenna types and locations; and it worked. The Hunter Killers tells us that operators were rapidly integrated in a trials and development program before deploying to theatre as a formed body; B-52 Electronic Warfare Officers, amongst others, were teamed with ‘crazy fighter pilots who think they’re invincible.’ The narrative describes, in revealing detail, the frictions brought about by the unceremonious fusion of these diverse tribes into a crew concept. It highlights the risks of poor crew integration and the subsequent benefits of working as a truly integrated crew in combat. The narrative offers a warning on capability development without effective integration of threat intelligence and tactics development. The initial ‘combat evaluation’ in Vietnam reflects the attritional impact of the subsequent ‘trial by fire’; half of the crews of the first two Wild Weasel programs were Killed in Action. The author of the book, LTCOL (Retd) Dan ‘2Dogs’ Hampton, was an F-16 ‘Viper’ Wild Weasel. He is a graduate of both the USAF and USN weapons schools and weaseled in Kosovo and both Gulf Wars. Hampton has 21 kills on SAM sites, four DFCs with Valour and a Purple Heart. In short, he knows his stuff when it comes to combat aviation and killing SAMs, and this lends real authenticity to the narrative. However, his writing style does detract from the quality of his narrative; his manner and tone towards anyone that isn’t a fighter pilot is often dismissive. Suffice to say that of the ‘humble, approachable, credible’ qualities of a weapons officer, he may have underperformed on the ‘humble’ aspect but he has certainly nailed ‘credible’. The book is based on extensive interviews and engagement with Wild Weasel veterans and reference to a broad range of primary sources, so it is certainly a credible retelling of the Weasel story. In order to provide context to the Weasel story the author takes a couple of chapters within the book to provide the geo-strategic and political context of US operations in Vietnam. The facts are informative in these sections, but the opinions and views of the author are certainly not objective and should be treated with caution. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of air power, the Vietnam War, or innovation in conflict.  It is essential reading for junior intelligence officers and anyone else likely to find themselves in the kill chain. Squadron Leader Jimmy is a current serving RAAF Intelligence Officer. He has a background in fast-jet strike and EW, ISR and Air-Land Integration. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #AirPower #EW #Innovation #VietnamWar

This year’s opening article revisits the F-35B debate sparked by Jenna Higgins’ post from December 2016. Steve George’s response addresses the key issues. Back in November 2014, I wrote a piece for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on potential F-35B operations from the new RAN LHDs (LHD and F-35B: The Debate Opens Up). It received a mention in a recent piece here on The Central Blue by Flight Lieutenant Jenna Higgins (Is ‘A’ really better than ‘B’?), which set off a spirited discussion. As a result, I’ve been asked by The Central Blue team to provide a stand-alone piece to update my original article and touch on some of the main issues raised. My aim, however, hasn’t changed – to stimulate informed and objective debate on how the Australian Defence Force (ADF) could best deploy its F-35 force capability. FLTLT Higgins referred to ‘a heated debate’ on the F-35B/LHD question. It’s worth noting that discussions about naval (or maritime) air power often seem to get ‘heated’, particularly when the word ‘carrier’ appears, or when it appears to compete with land based air power. Sadly, it’s my experience that much of the heat doesn’t shed any light, and the recent discussion thread on The Central Blue had some examples of the genre, which I’ll address. I’ll also update my assessment of the technical issues surrounding F-35B/LHD integration. Strike Capability I believe that the core issues can be simply framed.  How much air strike effect does the ADF want to be able to apply at long ranges from Australia? Can it (and should it) rely on Host Nation Support (HNS)? Would F-35Bs on LHDs provide a useful capability, and would it be cost effective? Any debate on the use of air power should recognise the iron laws of distance, time and speed that affect all air operations. Increasing the distance from base to objective reduces the amount of air power (time over the target) and the weight of ordnance that a force of aircraft can deliver in a given time frame. This isn’t a criticism of land-based air power, it’s a simple statement of physical fact. The further you have to fly, the longer the time spent in transit. Time spent in transit (both ways) is time you can’t spend delivering combat effect. If you want the same combat effect, you need more aircraft. This leads to my key conclusion. Proximity equals capability. Or, closer is better. This is why the US and the French have committed carriers to the current campaign in Syria and Iraq, located in the Eastern Mediterranean around 50 to 100 miles off the coast of Syria. It’s also why the Russians took the risk of basing their strike force on land in Syria. While I’m not arguing that Russian air strike tactics are a model for anyone in the West, their choice of a nearby land base has allowed them to deliver concentrated and devastatingly effective aerial bombardments. Naval air power in the Mediterranean: French Navy Rafales from the aircraft carrier FS Charles de Gaulle fly in formation above the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. [Image Credit: US Navy] Meanwhile, the ADF’s HNS for Operation OKRA (Iraq and Syria) is located in the UAE, well over 1000 miles away. Surely, no one could argue that this is the optimal location for medium range aircraft such as the F/A-18. Proponents of land-based air power solutions will point to AAR technology and the ability of their aircrew to conduct very long-range missions as the solution. It is, if your solution is simply to be seen to contribute. But if you want to materially influence events on the ground in a reasonable time frame, you need maximum time on task and weight of effort. If you have to fly over 1000 miles to get to the target, that’s millions of gallons of fuel burned and hours of flying time spent not delivering weapons. (The ADF’s own figures from their website http://www.defence.gov.au/Operations/Okra/atg.asp) show average F/A-18 sortie durations of around 7.6 hours). They simply can’t deliver much ‘air power’ time over the target at that range, as nearly all of their flying hours are being spent getting there and getting back. Nor can they deliver much weight of bombs. Their own figures show that less than one weapon has been dropped per (long) sortie. This isn’t an isolated example, and history demonstrates that HNS is very often not available where you really want it.  However, proponents of land based air power solutions sometimes simply deny that the problem exists. Back in 2014, the ASPI argued that: …the ADF would reasonably expect to be able to operate land-based aircraft from the country whose own defensive efforts Australia would be supporting, or with whom we could come under common attack… it’s prudent to assume that the [RAAF] would have access to land bases … to make a contribution to a future coalition air campaign… Two years on, we might conclude that while the ADF certainly has access to land bases, they certainly aren’t in the right place. Other arguments are deployed in an attempt to make the HNS issue go away. One recent post asked  ‘how often (would) the Australian government … want to bomb countries that the neighbours of that country do not wish to be bombed’? With respect, that’s a good example of ‘situating the appreciation’ – asking the question you want to answer. The question could be framed as:  ‘why might countries deny us HNS?’ and there’s a long list of answers to that one.  The first is the obvious one – they don’t want us to bomb their next-door neighbour. (Or their co-religionist.) But history provides us with lots of examples why a country might want a neighbouring country to be bombed, but might still refuse HNS. They might not want to be seen to be involved. They might not want it bombed by you, because they disagree with you over something else. They might have an election coming, and they might have an issue with a certain segment of their population that shares certain cultural values with the country you want to bomb. They might offer HNS, but with strings, such as only for only for AAR sorties, not actual strike missions. Countries that you don’t even want HNS from may deny you overflight. In my view, any debate over the utility of carrier-based aviation should look at the evidence offered by history. The ability to forgo HNS issues and locate a meaningful force of aircraft at a time and place of a country’s own choosing is precious and useful.  Maritime nations that possess such capabilities use them, all the time, all over the world. (Every enemy aircraft shot down in air combat by the UK since the end of WW2 has fallen to a carrier-based aircraft.) I suggest that Australia, by reason of basic geography, is a ‘maritime nation’. Of course, others may differ. The Cost So, what about the cost aspect? Nobody suggests that putting F-35Bs on to LHDs would be a cost-free exercise. Various improbable figures have been put forward, many resting on an assertion that this would be a risky technical enterprise, with many unanswered questions. The USMC’s recent successful trial of their ‘Lightning Carrier’ concept on board USS America, as noted by FLTLT Higgins, must surely lay many of these concerns to rest. The Canberra-class LHD was designed to accommodate 12 F-35Bs. That ski jump is a valuable (and currently unused) asset.  Perhaps the costs of putting the F-35B to sea should be re-examined. An F-35B takes off from the flight deck of USS America during the Lightning Carrier Proof of Concept Demonstration. [Image Credit: US Marine Corps] Some argue that any additional expenditure within the current national defence budget must by definition displace an existing capability. Not necessarily. If you have a fixed budget and want to do so something additional, you can increase the budget, or you can stop doing something that you’re already doing. Or, you can do something you’re already doing in a different way. Strategy, priorities and politics drive the choices. Of course, once a service (for example the RAAF) has its desired equipment programme (a substantial F-35A buy), it’s easy to argue that anything else is unaffordable. But if we are to talk costs it might be interesting to get better visibility of the actual costs of the ADF’s current long-distance air support operations. Spending around 10 hours in the air for each weapon dropped (from ADF figures) to ‘take out’ a pick up truck fitted with a cannon cannot, in my view, be an economically sustainable form of war. AAR tankers deliver huge amounts of fuel – but they also consume large amounts themselves, and frequently have to dump unused fuel to land back at base. Apart from the colossal fuel bill, these flying hours are generating huge aircraft support costs in manpower, parts and repairs. They will also be consuming the (fixed) service lives of the aircraft. Have these sums been done? A counter-argument recently advanced is that the ‘substantial’ additional cost to the RAAF of getting pilots trained to fly at sea (described as a ‘non-combat’ skill) could only be met by losing or degrading an existing RAAF aircrew ‘combat skill’.  In the first place, carrier deck training isn’t a ‘non-combat skill’. Ships and their air groups go into combat. Such training delivers a combat capability – delivery of high tempo operations from a mobile sovereign base. Describing it as a ‘non-combat‘ skill illustrates a profound misunderstanding of how maritime air power is generated. But automatically assuming that learning to operate from a ship would result in a ‘loss in combat-related training across the RAAF’s air combat capability’ or a ‘decrease in proficiency’ is, in my view, another example of ‘situating the appreciation’. I’m sure that RAAF pilot training constantly gets adjusted to meet changing requirements and to field new equipment. If the Government decided to go for F-35B, the training would be part of the cost. How big might that cost be? It would be substantial if the objective were a full ‘cat and trap’ or ‘STOBAR’ capability, where getting aircraft back on board takes high-end pilot skill levels, and executing a high tempo flying programme from a small deck area requires a well trained and thoroughly worked up ship. However, F-35B has been specifically designed to provide low workload launch and recovery to small flight decks. F-35B operations will require a much (much) smaller training ‘delta’ for aircrew than either ‘cat and trap’ or legacy STOVL aircraft. The LHDs will already have to work up a core capability to operate their current complement of aircraft – F-35B ops would be another small ‘delta’. Survivability of the ADF Fleet There is also the issue of defending a deployed ADF fleet. With China and India fielding capable ship-based combat aircraft, the issue of how to defend the fleet against air attack must be considered. F-35B would offer a hugely capable air defence capability in addition to its strike role, but the idea has attracted some passionate opposition. One (somewhat novel) argument put forward against the F-35 in this role is that that putting a potent air defence capability on the LHDs would invite an air attack on the LHD that otherwise wouldn’t happen. It’s further argued that it would be less risky to rely on missile defences to provide ‘air denial’ immediately around the fleet, relying on the new Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD). (Strangely, an AWD would apparently not attract attack in the same way that an F-35B equipped LHD would.) Actually, this is a hugely risky strategy. It’s been tried and it usually fails. In my view, this is wholly flawed thinking. What if the foe wants to shadow your fleet at or beyond your missile range? Or wants to attack a fleet asset other than the LHD? Or wants to attack the LHD because it’s already your capital ship, and the biggest (easiest) target? Or wants to attack you because you have no defences? I’m no expert on air power terminology, but aiming for basic air denial over the airspace immediately above your own fleet looks to be rather a long way down the capability scale – it’s only just above ‘air incapability’. I think you’d probably want at least air parity over the whole fleet, but I’m happy to be corrected. (I note that air power proponents have no difficulty in making the case for land-based air defence aircraft to provide air supremacy for land-based operations.) I’d be interested to know how the ADF plans to use land based F-35As to provide air defence for the surface fleet. Those iron laws of distance and time haven’t changed since the UK’s Royal Navy was supposed to be defended by RAF Phantoms in the 1970s. It didn’t work then and it’s unlikely to work now, unless the RAN is planning on staying very close to the mainland. Technical Issues Two years on from my previous assessment, it’s clear to any impartial observer that the US has put a massive effort into getting the F-35B cleared and capable from decks and ships that are comparable in size and capability to the RAN’s LHDs. Along the way, many myths and misconceptions have been laid to rest. The flight decks don’t melt. The gear around the flight deck doesn’t fall apart under jet blast. People don’t get blown away by the jet blast. The aircraft can happily perform ski jump launches. It can be supported at sea, and can safely take off and land from small decks. The aircraft software works, although there’s still much to do. In a nutshell, there are now very few issues with the F-35B that aren’t shared by the F-35A and which aren’t being solved. The capability of the aircraft is clearly a huge step on from first-generation STOVL aircraft such as Harrier. In combat evaluation, the aircraft is showing what its massive situational awareness, and data collection and handling capability can bring to the fight. Imagine what such a platform could do when linked up with modern ship mounted radars and sensors to build a truly integrated intelligence, air defence and strike system. Conclusion Countries’ defence plans are always changing in response to circumstances and external developments. In my view, the ADF’s intended area of operations, which is largely maritime in nature, will become a far less certain place in the years to come. Again, just my view, but previous assumptions on the availability of HNS will have to be reviewed along with existing plans for deployments of a purely land-based F-35A force. The F-35 will deliver a ‘game changing’ capability for the ADF. Surely, as F-35B equipped US LHAs and LHDs (and possibly the UK’s Queen Elizabeth-class carriers) become increasingly common visitors to the China/Pacific region, the ADF will have to look again at how it might develop an ability to more freely deploy its main striking force at long range. Or how it might protect its surface forces against developing air threats. When those reviews take place, it is to be hoped that objective and honest analysis prevails over single service interests. There’s too much at stake. Steve George was an air engineer officer in the Royal Navy for 28 years, and served in HMS Invincible during the 1982 Falklands operation. During his career, he was closely involved with the Sea Harrier, and also with joint RN/RAF Harrier operations. Retiring from the RN as a commander, he joined the JSF programme to work on F-35B ship suitability. He is now an engineering consultant. #strikeoperations #aircraftcarriers #AirPower #HostNationSupport #OKRA #F35B #LHD

Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper detailed the government’s intention to acquire armed unmanned aircraft within the next decade. A paper titled A New Direction for Australian Air Power: Armed Unmanned Aircraft, commissioned by the chief of air force, Air Marshal Leo Davies, and written by Dr Peter Layton, examines the key issues surrounding this often contentious issue. The essay’s centrepiece is its “Ten Propositions Concerning Armed UAVs”. UAVs have been around for decades, but it was only after their innovative use during the Israeli Air Force’s brilliant campaign in the Bekaa Valley in 1982 that their potential began to be taken seriously by many defence forces. Since then, their rise has been both spectacular and irresistible. Today, they are an indispensable element of any advanced defence force’s information gathering and dissemination capability, for tactical, operational, and strategic purposes. Equally as significant but far more controversial has been the rapid growth of armed UAVs. In the current war against Islamic State, for example, more than one-third of the US Air Force’s land strike missions are being conducted by armed unmanned aircraft. This trend, which will only increase, represents nothing less than a radical change in how military organisations apply force in general and air power in particular. The use of armed UAVs has generated widespread concerns over the apparent removal of people from the field of combat, the so-called “rise of the robots”, and ethical and legal matters. Dr Layton’s informed and measured analysis addresses these concerns, and succeeds admirably in his objective of dispelling myths and resolving confusion. As noted, the essay is structured around its “ten propositions”. This approach, previously employed by the distinguished American air power scholar Dr Phillip Meilinger in his booklet 10 Propositions Regarding Air Power (Air Force History and Museums Program: Washington, 1995), facilitates a clear and accessible presentation. In the context of the current debate over the use of armed UAVs, three of the propositions seem especially important to this reviewer. The first is that armed UAVs can be employed ethically. Layton examines the character of war as it is “traditionally understood”, that understanding having been strongly influenced by the work of the 19th century Prussian soldier-scholar, Carl von Clausewitz. Abstract notions such as what war is or is not, honour in war, and the nature of risk, are all discussed. Perhaps Layton’s most telling observation is that “seeking to share risk in some even-handed manner unethically imperils one’s own forces … there is no morally compelling reason to make one’s own forces as vulnerable as an opponent’s”. To paraphrase the British man of letters Hilaire Belloc: Whatever happens, we have got [Armed UAVs], and they have not The second key proposition is that armed UAVs have been developed to meet the law of armed conflict. Some of the criticism of UAVs has bordered on the irrational because, as Layton points out, the law of armed conflict governs their use just as much as it does any battlefield weapon system. The fact is, UAV technology has evolved in a manner that is entirely compatible with the four core LoAC principles of discrimination, military necessity, (avoiding) unnecessary suffering, and proportionality. Indeed, UAVs’ long loiter times, high resolution sensors and precision weapons, and the access their operators have to real-time intelligence and legal advice arguably enable a superior compliance with LoAC than is the case for most other weapons systems. Third and last, Dr Layton argues that while the platforms may be unmanned, they are (remotely) controlled by a large distributed crew with diverse skills. That crew can include pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, legal advisors, ethicists, weapons specialists, and so on. As he states, “an armed UAV mission represents an operations-intelligence fusion that manned aircraft cannot easily match”. His comparison could be extended to just about any other weapons system, “manned” or otherwise. The remaining seven propositions are as follows: that UAVs bring greater persistence to the application of air power; are one part of a much larger system; offer new ways of providing close air attack to ground forces; offer new ways of conducting interdiction operations; provide unsurpassed deployment options; are best suited for operations in areas where defences are limited or suppressed; and are a complement to manned aircraft. In a sense, the question over the future of armed UAVs has been answered. Their continuing and rapid growth within the inventories of advanced defence forces is evidence that the jury is in. At the same time, it is essential that political and military leaders who wish to exploit this technology in the interests of national security should bring their wider communities forward with them. They could do no better than to inform themselves and their constituencies with this intelligent, well-written booklet. See Dr Peter Layton, A New Direction for Australian Air Power: Armed Unmanned Aircraft (Air Power Development Centre: Canberra, 2016, 40 pp). Dr Alan Stephens is a fellow of the Sir Richard Williams Foundation #RAAF #ArmedUAVs #LawofArmedConflict #Decapitation #UAV #2016DefenceWhitePaper

One of the key ways of improving air-land integration in the Australian Defence Force is through the conduct of effective joint exercises. In this post, Squadron Nathan Thompson identifies some of the barriers to effective air-land integration and proposes a solution through the adaptation of existing Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force’s single-service focussed exercises. The Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) are very different organisations. These differences are self-perpetuating, with a large contributing factor being the inherent limitations of air power. These limiting factors are being reinforced by the current Australian Defence Force (ADF) exercise construct. This post describes the factors that currently limit conventional land forces’ effective use of air platforms and presents a course of action to drive further air-land integration through joint exercises. The trouble with air “If your plan relies on 12 Hercules to complete an air-land operation, you might need to reconsider your plan”Major General Stephen Day, Australian Army, 2015 Air assets are not reliable. Some of the reasons for this, such as weather impacts and maintenance requirements, are unavoidable. They combine to cause short-term negative impacts for planners. The surprise nature of these factors forces planning staff to have to account for them, and therefore not rely on air assets. This reinforces the cycle of Army not integrating with air assets. In addition to the obvious limitations, there are several more nuanced factors that need to be accounted for with aviation. Examples include safety buffers, engineering tolerances, risk management and other governance impacts, and the synergy between asset capabilities. Understanding these factors requires a significant investment of time in education and training. This investment is impractical for those not involved in air power application, which is a key reason for the requirement for liaison officers. Unfortunately, due to the diversity of assets the liaison officer is required to advise upon, the individual nuances are difficult to fully detail and account for during planning. This contributes to the inability to fully integrate an air capability into the land scheme of manoeuvre. An example of governance impacting a land force’s ability to use air capabilities is the requirement for drop zones to be surveyed prior to use during domestic exercising. The use of aerial resupply to forward echelon troops becomes impractical as they advance on the battlefield, as a drop zone survey qualified member needs to be with the forward echelon to enable any airdrop. Compounded by weather and maintenance risk, this requirement means that aerial resupply becomes a rear echelon function, thereby diminishing the air power characteristics of reach and responsiveness. C-17A Globemaster takes off from Nackeroo Airfield in the Northern Territory during Exercise Pitch Black 2016. [Image Credit: Commonwealth of Australia] Another contributing factor to the ineffectiveness of air and land integration is the difference in planning methodology. Air planning occurs according to time, within the Air Tasking Order cycle. Land forces plan through phasing, with phases progressing as conditions are met. The conditions that land phases are based on have time estimates associated with them, but the estimates are flexible within the assumptions they are based on. This leads to a land sequence of events that is fluid, while air assets appear relatively fixed in time. Without significant White Force or Exercise Control management, this leads to the air assets arriving on station to find that the land scheme of manoeuvre has progressed, and they are unable to contribute effectively. “We burned holes in the sky for two hours and went home without dropping our weapons”Squadron Commanding Officer from Air Combat Group, 2015 Finally, the Theatre Air Control System is reliant on the Defence Secret Network for information flow, while current Australian Army systems include Battle Management System, Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, and recently the Mission Secret Network. Lack of systems interoperability detracts from the effective integration of air into the land planning, or worse, the requirement to ‘air gap’ information between systems introduces the potential for error. The above limiting factors contribute to the Army’s perception that they are required to plan as though their effects alone must achieve their endstate. Because air can’t be relied upon, and because it requires a disproportionate investment to understand, it is easier to plan as though air support will not be a deciding factor. F/A-18 Hornet conducts a low pass in support of Australian Army units as part of Exercise Predator’s Run, conducted in Cultana training area, South Australia. [Image Credit: Commonwealth of Australia] The current land exercise construct reinforces this perception through an inaccurate air scenario, inadequate air knowledge within Army exercise control, and a practical inability of the RAAF to decisively contribute to an Army exercise. The inaccurate air scenario and inadequate knowledge of air within Exercise Control are a result of the investment required for understanding– air threats require detailed understanding of capabilities to allow accurate simulation. Similarly, air detection and air attack threats have a security clearance and legislative burden that restrict realistic domestic exercising. Forces Command (specifically Army Intelligence and 16 Air Land Regiment) have limited resources which do not allow full expertise in simulating air threats to land forces, surface threats to air assets, or understanding the information that needs to be transmitted to support air assets through the Army Air-Ground System. The practical limitations on Air Force decisively contributing to Army exercises are an understandable result of cost, priorities for limited assets and inadequate Exercise Control involvement. The inadequacy of Exercise Control leads to the problem of air assets not being integrated into the scenario, and therefore not contributing to the ground scheme of manoeuvre. Exercise planning determines flying windows months prior to the exercises; however, exercise control does not integrate these flying windows to ensure they provide maximum opportunity for integration, due to the heavy focus on the land scheme of manoeuvre. “It seemed like the battle had already occurred, and we dropped our weapons at the end for the sake of it”Aircrew member of Air Combat Group, 2016 To summarise the points above, during Exercise Hamel 2016 there were four planned periods of F/A-18F Super Hornet support, which were identified and scheduled at the Final Planning Conference held in May 2016. The results of these sorties are shown below: A possible solution Land forces do not fully integrate air capabilities into their plans due partly to a lack of understanding of how to integrate them. However, it is difficult to understand the capabilities without practiced integration. The current exercise construct does not break this chicken and egg cycle. If air-land integration is to be successful the exercise construct needs to change to force this understanding. It is proposed that forcing a reliance on air capabilities in order to conduct land manoeuvre, whilst requiring air forces to have a defined land objective, will lead to the desired air-land outcomes. By combining the RAAF’s premier force integration exercise (Exercise Pitch Black) with Army’s Brigade readiness exercise (Exercise Hamel) it is possible to more effectively achieve joint training outcomes. To achieve this, both exercises would commence simultaneously. Hamel would be initiated at the start of the current Large Force Engagement (LFE) training period of Pitch Black during which Air Force would achieve its tactical training requirements. While this is occurring the land forces would conduct the Mission Appreciation Process (MAP) portion of Hamel. The timeframe of the exercise could occur as follows: Exercise Hamel has supported greater integration between Army’s land forces and its organic air power, such as the Tiger Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter. [Image Credit: Commonwealth of Australia] The endstate This post proposes a joint exercise construct that includes Army and Air Force mutually supportive training objectives under one Joint Task Force Commander. Therefore, a key requirement of this exercise is mutual training objectives. If both services have gains to be made this will lead to investment by both air and land planners, with commensurately more accurate inputs and outcomes. Such an exercise construct will contribute significantly to progress on the Air-Land Integration schedule of work under Plan Jericho. During the planning of the exercise, staff will be required to increase their understanding of their counterparts’ requirements and capabilities. During execution, the Commander Joint Task Force will be required to articulate priorities to his component commands and allocate resources accordingly. Both land and air component staffs will be forced to understand how integrating capabilities will achieve their specified tasks. Hamel, as it currently exists, does not contribute to the progress of this desired endstate, and should be changed. An exercise construct that forces the land component to rely on air power will lead to greater understanding and air-land integration. This will contribute to breaking the cycle of the chicken or the egg. Squadron Leader Nathan Thompson is a serving Royal Australian Air Force officer. He is currently posted to 1 Brigade as the Brigade Air Liaison Officer. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Army, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #Training #Hamel #PitchBlack #Army #Exercises #AirPower #Joint

Today, 2nd December, marks three months since The Central Blue published its first post. Though the start has been modest (25 posts including this one), it has been successful. In the short period that the blog has been active we have received and published posts on a range of topics, from fiction to F-35s, written by a diverse group of authors, from lawyers to Combat Controllers. But there is still a ways to go. The editors’ vision for The Central Blue is that it will become the preferred outlet for discussion, discourse, and debate of the ideas, challenges, and opportunities that have, do, and will define Australian air power. To do this, we need to broaden the scope of topics that are our posts cover, and expand and diversify our contributor pool. It may surprise some readers to read that this is not as easy as putting out a call for submissions. There appears to be a, perhaps understandable, reluctance to put fingers to keyboards to express ideas, challenge the conventional wisdom, identify a novel way ahead, or even to seek clarification for concepts that are perhaps oft-used but poorly understood. In an effort to address this reluctance, I decided that now, three months into this experiment, is a good time to outline my own personal reasons for (1) co-editing this blog, and (2) submitting my own thoughts to the blog to invite comment and challenge. It’s my hope that this personal reflection may demystify the blog and encourage more people to become engaged in the debate on the past, present, and future of Australian air power that this blog seeks to promote. To Avoid Self-Destructive Inertia Every now and then you come across a quote that speaks to you in such a way that it stays with you despite the passage of time. These can come from books, movies, songs, poems, or, as is increasingly likely, internet memes. For me, I stumbled across such a quote while reading for a course. The quote comes from JFC Fuller’s 1925 book The Foundations of the Science of War. Though the book itself is a challenging read, one comment stood out as capturing my views on some of the problems that I saw in the way doctrine is viewed : The central idea of an army is known as its doctrine, which to be sound must be based on the principles of war, and which to be effective must be elastic enough to admit of mutation in accordance with change in circumstances. In its ultimate relationship to the human understanding this central idea or doctrine is nothing else than common sense-that is, action adapted to circumstances. In itself, the danger of a doctrine is that it is apt to ossify into a dogma, and to be seized upon by mental emasculates who lack virility of judgment, and who are only too grateful to rest assured that their actions, however inept, find justification in a book, which, if they think at all, is, in their opinion, written in order to exonerate them from doing so. In the past many armies have been destroyed by internal discord, and some have been destroyed by the weapons of their antagonists, but the majority have perished through adhering to dogmas springing from their past successes-that is, self-destruction or suicide through inertia of mind. Major General John Frederick Charles “Boney” Fuller: Army Officer, historian, strategist. [Image Credit: © IWM (Q 71653)] This quote is a powerful, and indeed colourful, indictment of a military education system that places importance on the completion of modules rather than the depth of understanding of concepts. This is as true of today’s Air Force as it was of Fuller’s interwar British Army. But it is not fair to place the blame for this squarely or solely on the shoulders of those charged with the development and delivery of Professional Military Education and Training (PMET) within Air Force. The changes in PMET delivery, focus, and feedback has significantly improved the effectiveness of the system over the past few years, and continues to improve even now. What has been missing from Air Force’s PMET suite, however, is a simple and accessible platform to promote continued engagement with air power concepts outside of the mandated compulsory education modules. Such a platform would enable Air Force personnel, and those with an interest in air power, to expand and deepen their understanding of air power concepts and strategy in an interactive forum, the purpose of which is engage not to assess. Unfortunately, the nature of military organisations means that there was a reluctance to create an official forum with the explicit intent to publicly air self-criticism. This is the gap that I see The Central Blue filling. One of the aims for The Central Blue is to enable contributors, commentors, and readers alike to explore ideas that are only glanced upon during the formal education process, and rarely if ever truly discussed in the real world. What we are starting to see is that this blog enables airmen and those with an interest in air power to go beyond clichés to develop true understanding. Hopefully this enables them to, amongst other things, pragmatically adapt concepts such as ‘centralised control, decentralised execution‘, explain what is meant by the term ‘air superiority’, and explore the untapped potential of airborne ISR beyond its traditional roles.  It also provides an outlet to develop innovative ideas for new capabilities, and discuss different ways that Air Force can develop its airmen. By providing an outlet and promoting the discussion of the concepts that underpin the development, management, and employment of all aspects of air power, The Central Blue exists as a powerful tool for airmen and those with an interest in air power to ensure contextually adaptable doctrine does not become contextually blind dogma that leads to Air Force’s ‘self-destruction … through inertia of mind.’ But this will only be possible with broad and diverse engagement in discussion, debate, and discourse. Dispelling the turboencabulators A related but sufficiently different aim of The Central Blue is to simplify and clarify the discussion of air power. Along with the oft used/little understood doctrinal throw-away lines of ‘air superiority’ and ‘centralised-control decentralised-execution’ discussed above, air power discussions are also replete with buzzwords, technobabble, and jargon that can be similarly poorly understood. Terms such as ‘network-centricity,’ ‘effects-based operations,’ ‘multi-dimensional manoeuvre,’ ‘gray zone conflict,’  and even ‘fifth generation enabled’ have become common place in the discussion of modern military operations. These buzzwords are often thrown around without a true appreciation of their meaning, significance or relevance, which limits the usefulness of any discussion in which they are used.  To provide an example, in a recent discussion on the requirement to fully engage with the Air Force’s Plan JERICHO, a statement was made that we needed to embrace the ‘Fifth Generation Air Force.’ The question was asked in response as to what that actually meant. The reply: ‘You know… Fifth Generation Air Force. You know… F-35 and stuff.’ This apparent lack of a true appreciation of a buzzword is not isolated, nor is it rare. I am myself guilty of throwing around buzzwords with reckless abandon. In fact, following one such discussion with a colleague I was asked if I had ever heard of a turboencabulator. I took that subtle advice on board and most of the time I am able to limit my use of ambiguous jargon. But it is an unfortunate reality of military life that jargon is a necessary component of any discussion we have about what it is we do. So though we may try to minimise it, we can never be completely free of it. Here again, I see The Central Blue playing an important role. In fleshing out the meaning of concepts, breaking them down into their component parts, and even debating the fundamental assumptions upon which the concepts rely, progress can be made in baselining understanding such that when we talk of a ‘Fifth Generation Air Force’ we are aware that it is more than simply the ‘F-35 and stuff’. The Aspiration For the editors of The Central Blue the future is full of possibilities. Though we realise there are challenges we face in ensuring this blog becomes a foundation stone in the professional development of those with an interest in air power in Australia, we see the signs of life that have emerged over the last three months as incredibly positive. But to achieve our goals of avoiding the self-destructive inertia of dogma and to weed out the turboencabulators from our necessary pool of fifth generation jargon, we are reliant on those involved with or interested in Australian air power to participate actively in the blog, moving from reading, to commenting, to writing. A challenge to be sure, but one worthy of the effort. Squadron Leader Travis Hallen is an Air Combat Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. He is also a Sir Richard Williams Foundation Scholar and editor at The Central Blue. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #PMET

When we discuss the politics of air power it is generally in the context of its employment, not its development. The F-35 appears to have changed this as its cost overruns and production delays have attracted close political scrutiny both in Australia and globally. In this post, originally published on The Strategist on 24 November, Christopher Cowan explores the Canadian experience of how an election promise to cancel the acquisition of the F-35 is impacting on the country’s air power capability. The first Royal Australian Air Force F-35 will arrive in Australia in 2018, with Number 3 Squadron to become the first operational F-35 squadron in 2021 [Image Credit: Lockheed Martin] Canada, much like Australia, has seen its plans to replace its current fleet of ageing fighter jets bedevilled by controversy. Tuesday’s announcement that the Canadian government intends to acquire 18 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets to supplement its current fleet of 77 CF-18s and hold an open competition for their eventual replacement isn’t likely to help matters. While the acquisition of 18 Super Hornets for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is by no means the worst solution to Canada’s fighter aircraft problem, it’s a political fix to a problem of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own making. The decision to acquire a few Super Hornets now and eventually replace the fighter fleet down the road can be traced to the toxicity of the proposed F-35A acquisition in Canadian politics. Concerns over the acquisition and support costs of the sole-sourced F-35A contract led to the dissolution of Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government in 2011. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, campaigned in 2015 on the promise that ‘we will not buy the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber’. After winning office, he cancelled Canada’s F-35A purchase in favour of a new ‘open and transparent’ competition for a new fighter. In hindsight, immediately disqualifying the F-35A from any competition may not have been the most prudent decision. Interestingly, the Government of Canada’s official news release suggests that the F-35A will be allowed to enter Canada’s upcoming competition, contrary to Trudeau’s election promise and previous prime ministerial statements. That makes sense given the current amount of Canadian industry involvement in the program (thought to be worth around C$825m). Thus, it appears that the F-35 could still win the competition and eventually form the core of the RCAF’s fighter arm, much to the RCAF’s delight (it has always wanted the F-35A) and to PM Trudeau’s chagrin. In some ways acquiring Super Hornets as a stopgap before a decision is made on the permanent fleet makes sense. Kicking the can down the road gives the US Air Force and Lockheed Martin time to work the kinks out of the F-35. Reducing the aircraft’s flyaway unit cost by ramping up production before a prospective Canadian CF-35 purchase (assuming it wins the competition) would make the acquisition more politically palatable. But the Super Hornet solution won’t be as cheap as many in the Trudeau government would hope. While the price for Canada’s prospective deal is unknown, Australia paid A$6.1bn (in 2010 dollars) to acquire and support the 24 Super Hornets it purchased in 2007 as a hedge to delays in the F-35A program. The flyaway unit costs of the Australian aircraft accounted for about half of that total, while the rest was spent on facilities, training, support, and sustainment. Canada, with six fewer aircraft, will face the same fixed costs as Australia did in 2007, but Australia’s purchase came while the Super Hornet production line was hot, which helped bring unit costs down. The Super Hornet has already provided effective operational service for the Royal Australian Air Force as part of Operation OKRA [Image Credit: Department of Defence] Luckily for Canada, the Super Hornet production may be heating up again. Kuwait recently inked a deal to buy 40 Super Hornets (plus the necessary logistics and support) for US$10.1bn (A$13.6bn) and the US Navy is also looking to add another 16 Super Hornets to its fleet by FY2018, in addition to the five it acquired in FY2016 at a flyaway unit cost of approximately US$70m. The Navy estimates that those 16 Super Hornets will have flyaway unit costs of around US$76m (2016 dollars), an increase of about 10% over the FY2016 Super Hornets. The Kuwaiti purchase may help bring that unit cost down for the Canadian Super Hornets through economies of scale, but it’s difficult to say when or by how much. Considering that the US Air Force projects that the F-35A costs will come down to around US$99m per aircraft (2016 dollars) by the 2020s, the Super Hornet will only be about 20% less expensive than the F-35A Canada decided not to buy (and that’s just an acquisition cost). But the real issue is that this decision is ultimately a political solution to an avoidable problem. The delay of the CF-18 replacement aircraft by successive governments has left the RCAF with a capability gap according to Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan (although RCAF officials disagree). But PM Trudeau is unwilling to break his election promise that Canada won’t be buying the F-35A under his tenure and acquiring 18 Super Hornets as an interim solution to a capability gap that may or may not exist, allowing him to keep that promise. The government’s statement that a decision on a permanent replacement will be made five years after the competition opens (a competition that the F-35A may very well win) also allows them to push back the decision until after the next election. So the Canadian taxpayer ends up paying for the Super Hornets now, as well as the fleet’s permanent replacement in 2020s all to keep an election promise. Politics has trumped common sense, and the average Canadian’s wallet will be lighter in the future as a result. Christopher Cowan is a research intern at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This post first appeared on ASPI’s blog, The Strategist on 24 November 2016. #F35

The term ‘Red Team’ has made the transition from its origins within military war-gaming to the lexicon of both government and business. What is less well understood is what a red team is, what it does and does not do, and how and why red-teaming can be helpful to an organisation. In Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy, Micah Zenko, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes a well-known yet poorly understood concept and answers these questions in terms that can be easily grasped by the reader based on a central theme that, ‘you cannot grade your own homework.’ Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy [Image Credit: Google Books] The book is broken into six chapters, each dealing with a facet of Zenko’s research into the three core red-team techniques: simulation, vulnerability probes, and alternative analyses. In the first, Zenko distils from his research six best practices in red-teaming: (1) the boss must buy in – if leadership doesn’t support the red-team, the exercise is futile; (2) the team must be from outside and objective, but have familiarity with and empathy for the organisation they are supporting; (3) fearless sceptics with finesse – while red-teamers need to think differently, their output needs to be able to be presented effectively; (4) “have a big bag of tricks” – the red team cannot become predictable; (5) the organisation must be willing to hear bad news and act upon it; (6) red-team just enough and no more – it is stressful and overdoing it can become disruptive. Realistically, the reader could choose to put the book down at this point having consumed the key takeaways; this would be a mistake. Although Zenko’s bottom-line-up-front approach cuts to the chase, these derived best practices lack critical context without the reference points and nuance provided in the later chapters. These are critical for the reader to fully understand how, when and why to use red-teaming effectively. The second chapter covers the origins of and military use of red teams and emphasised the benefits and limitations of red-teaming to address issues such as groupthink created within rigid hierarchies. It begins with an examination of how red-team techniques evolved Army war-gaming in the Cold War to become the Red Team University at Fort Leavenworth as a means to address what General Peter Schoomaker,  former US Army Chief of Staff, saw as ‘the regimentation and institutionalisation of mediocrity’ in the US Army. Zenko then looks at efforts to integrate red-teaming effectively into the US military; with an emphasis on command commitment and willingness to accept the red team’s results. These include the 2012 red team review of the US Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, the limited success of the US Marine Corps Commandant in incorporating red teams into USMC command staffs since 2010, and the intentional crippling of the red-team during the United States’ 2002 Millennium Challenge. Of these, the organisational denial that followed the Millenium Challenge Red Team’s ruthless defeat of the Allied forces on the first day of exercise provides is particularly informative. In the third chapter, Zenko examines the US intelligence community to reveal subtle differences in approach and application while again reinforcing the six best practices. In these organisations, he discovered three barriers to optimised performance: (1) a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of high consequence events to minimise backlash should they occur; (2) socialisation between analysts in a team or section that prevents individuals from developing distinctly different conclusions to other team members; and (3) the “tyranny of expertise” which anchors them in deeply held views on their field of expertise. Zenko again uses examples to explain the limits and utility of red teams, beginning with the corrupted 1976 CIA ‘B Team’ assessment of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and the absence of an independent review prior to the 1998 strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory neither owned by Osama bin Laden nor producing VX gas, before detailing the effective red team estimates that informed the decision to attack the compound in Abbottabad in which bin Laden was killed. Other government agency approaches to vulnerability probes and simulations for critical infrastructure are presented next. Aspects of the best practices are again reinforced through further examples, the most disturbing of which relates to the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) red team established in the 1990s following the Lockerbie bombing. This specific example highlights that despite the resourcing and motivation of the red team itself, their efforts become effectively irrelevant in the absence of leadership commitment to their findings. In this case, the FAA leadership’s choice to consistently ignore the red team’s recommendations regarding security at Logan airport is causally linked by Zenko to the success of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In the fifth chapter Zenko looks at red team use in the private sector. The key distinction between this and the previous military/government usage appears to be motivational. When executives in private firms use red teams, they appear to do so as either a means to improve strategies and gain a competitive edge in the market to achieve individual advancement in the company, or as a form of insurance against a failed strategy in which they can highlight that they applied due diligence by engaging a red team. While this self-interest is not surprising given the more direct accountability in the commercial world compared to the government sector, the potential for the red team to be token in nature is increased. Zenko closes by describing the limitations of red-teaming and the problems that can result if it is planned and executed poorly. In contrast to his best practices he proposes the five worst: (1) the ad hoc devil’s advocate where someone is appointed to artificially provide a dissenting view; (2) adopting the red team’s findings as policy, rather than to inform policy; (3) freelance red teams that set their own scope or are not endorsed by the organisation; (4) shooting the messenger when the red team’s findings do not support a predetermined course of action; and (5) allowing red teams to make, rather than inform decisions. Red Team is inherently interesting, easy to read and contains several concepts that make it a worthy book for consideration as part of a Professional Military Education and Training regime. It clearly demonstrates through multiple examples how an informed and empowered red team can help an organisation overcome the cognitive and organisational biases that constrain not only their decision-making but also their ability to generate courses of action in the first place. Importantly, it also highlights the need for independent and critical thought regarding an organisation’s operations, culture, processes and the core assumptions on which they construct strategic planning. For Air Force, red teaming will be central to the success or failure of Plan JERICHO – without it we risk the institutionalised mediocrity Schoomaker feared. As the Deputy Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) reflected on during his speech to the 2016 RAAF Air Power Conference, Air Force need to harness and develop our iconoclasts – those individuals who have a natural tendency to innovate, to challenge orthodoxy in our processes and decision-making, and who then cannot progress because of our organisational bias against contrarian thinkers. This description closely reflects the core requirement for red-teamers, ‘people who are outsiders and think differently, but haven’t given up on the institution yet.’ WGCDR Jason Begley is an Air Combat Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. He is also a Sir Richard Williams Foundation Scholar and PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #Review #Strategy

The Air Tasking Order (ATO) is the cornerstone of modern air power command and control: If you’re not on the ATO, you don’t fly. But perhaps we have become too wedded to a concept that can be overly restrictive and which can stifle individual initiative. Perhaps we need to loosen the couplings that currently bind the application of air power, and encourage the use of the airman’s intellect and adaptability to create a cohesive and imaginative air power capability. I’ve recently had a lot discussions with fellow airmen about the future of Australian air power, including at the excellent Rowland Seminar run by UNSW. We’ve discussed difficult problems facing Australian air power and tried to come up with innovative solutions to those problems. If we could not find solutions — which was often the case — we discussed where and why we failed, and what might be done to address the deficiencies. I think we learned a great deal. In particular, many of us learned about what we did not know and the limits of our capabilities under challenging circumstances. One of the issues that we talked about a lot was command and control. In particular, we identified that in the kinds of operating environments we may encounter in the future our physical presence in forward areas may present unacceptable vulnerabilities and our access to the electromagnetic spectrum may be contested, if not denied. These twin realities of future conflict challenged our capacity to execute air operations in the exquisitely detailed manner to which we have become accustomed. By necessity in some future scenarios, there may be far less detailed planning and coordination and much more work it out as you go. However, we also understood that exquisite integration was appealing in many respects so would continue to be exercised when and where possible. The real challenge, it seemed, was being able to operate effectively under different paradigms from one day to the next, or even from one hour to the next. Whilst it may seem anathema to airmen brought up on air power’s central tenet of centralised control/decentralised execution, the idea of operating in this manner appealed to many. Indeed, perhaps the most insightful comment I heard was that these kinds of ‘pick up’ operations may be a small air force’s asymmetric advantage. To paraphrase: “big air forces that exploit mass need detailed integration to ensure they get their mass in the right spot at the right time. We do not have that mass so we cannot exploit it, but nor are we constrained by it. Small air forces should be able to thrive in a contested and chaotic environment because we can adapt faster than anyone else.” The tight integration of air operations is epitomised by detailed air tasking orders and voluminous coordinating instructions that emanate from a centralised air operations centre. This centralised approach arose from the lessons of the Vietnam where geographic ‘route packages’ were used to ‘deconflict’ US air power into Navy and Air Force areas rather than integrate them into a single force. As Ben Lambeth has argued, through centralisation of planning and standardisation, US Navy and US Air Force air power gradually became a tightly integrated ‘combat pair’ in the thirty years following the Vietnam War. US allies have similarly embraced this approach to ensure they can integrate into US-led campaigns. The highly integrated approach has delivered unprecedented concentration of force in space and time. The impact of which was most apparent in the air campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly the opening nights of the air operations against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. It’s successful use in ensuring the tight integration of multinational air power during the air campaign in Operation Desert Storm cemented the Air Tasking Order as the cornerstone of air power command and control. [Image Credit: US Air Force] But this has been achieved through personnel- and technology-intensive planning processes that demands adherence to the central edicts if you wish to participate in the air war. The trend was exacerbated during the air operations over Afghanistan and Iraq where a benign air environment and a relatively low operational tempo permitted decision-making to be aggregated at higher and higher levels, resulting in ever greater reams of procedural paperwork. Adding to this was the complexity of a coalition, multi-agency environment in which everyone — even the non-government organisations — seem to have their own aircraft that needed to get from point A to point B safely. Further still, the rise of unmanned aircraft that cannot “see and avoid” places an even higher premium on procedural controls. To borrow a term from software engineering, Western air power seem to have become tightly coupled to its command and control systems. Tight coupling is usually associated with low cohesion ,where cohesion measures the strength of relationships between pieces of functionality. Low cohesion typically indicates a fragile, difficult to maintain system because tightly coupled/low cohesion systems have many components whose functions are dependent upon one another. A change to one component necessitates a change to many. By contrast, the components of loosely coupled/high cohesion system function independently — which means the system is robust and one part of the system can be changed without impacting other components. The evolving strategic environment means we need to loosen the coupling and increase the cohesion of air power, lest in future our adversaries render our air power completely decoupled. Some have argued for new command and control models for air power, to adapt existing paradigms, or even to adjust the central bumper sticker. They may well be right, but I think the focus on models is a distraction. For me, the focus needs to be on loosening Western air power’s coupling to command and control systems. We need to enhance air power’s cohesion so that it can better adapt to whatever level of integration can be achieved in a given situation. Cohesion is the asymmetric advantage of small forces because it means we can focus on deciding what to do next in changing circumstances, not figuring out how to execute basic function in the absence of a detailed air tasking order or special instructions. We need to practise being loosely coupled in order to capitalise on the asymmetric advantage of small air forces. As another colleague noted, our operational-level and tactical-level exercises each model their preferred mode of operations. Tactically-focused activities emphasise distributed authorities and initiative, whilst those focused on the operational-level tend to involve exquisitely crafted plans. There are good reasons for keeping them separate. An outsider observing what an over-excited air operations centre does to tactical training outcomes or what the realities of available flying hours and noise windows do to operational-level complexity would probably argue they are mutually exclusive activities. But a software engineer would recognise tight coupling and low cohesion. We need to practice changing those models on the fly so that both training audiences can function effectively, even when everything else is changing. Perhaps the most exciting thing about building cohesion in the force is that it does not necessarily require the acquisition of an expensive new piece of hardware or software. Quite the contrary, enhancing cohesion is about de-coupling air power’s effectiveness from its hardware and software. Instead, air power’s cohesion lies in its collective wetware: the first generation bio-organic fusion engine between everyone’s ears. Wetware is the critical element in extracting benefit from available hardware and software. But it is particularly important when trying to adapt hardware and software to circumstances for which they were not designed. Optimising the capacity and capabilities of our wetware is not a new idea for air forces. Wetware optimisation is arguably the defining feature of fifth generation systems. Exquisitely engineered hardware and software, especially, are used to reduce the cognitive capacity an F-35 pilot must allocate to basic tasks, thus freeing up mental resources for higher-order decision-making. Moreover, enhancing cohesion by optimising collective wetware is the foundation of aircrew staples such as crew resource management and the maintenance of ‘hard’ crews. These measures optimise the crew’s ability to respond to unforeseen circumstances, and they seem to work pretty well. But we need to consider how to optimise our F-35 pilot’s wetware when she is not in the cockpit. Instead, she is working with her staff, as well as coalition partners, in the wing operations centre and has just received a five-line (who/what/when/where/why) order from what is left of the Air Operations Centre. The order appoints her as the package commander for a maritime strike mission on the next day using whatever resources she can cobble together from within her composite wing. No special instructions, no airspace control order, no reach-back (or reach-down); just the people around her on the ground and in the air. Undoubtedly the crews of our aircraft would execute their assigned missions superbly, drawing on years of preparation to do just that. But would the plan they execute be good enough? Or were the first hours of the available planning time spent ‘getting everyone on the same page’ because the key staff members had only met the day before and had no common procedural baseline from which to deviate? Were vital minutes lost bemoaning the lack of an airspace control order or the absence of reach-back intelligence capabilities? I am absolutely confident that we can do this, because air operations used to be loosely coupled. Commanders gave direction, counted the bombers on the way out and then waited to count the bombers on the way back in. In between, crews adapted and executed their plan, led by formation leads and master bombers because they had the best grasp of the situation. That was truly centralised control, decentralised execution. But it relied on cohesion built the hard way, through failure and blood. The one prediction I will make about future of air power command and control is that no model will be optimal or possible all of the time. Therein lies an opportunity as well as a threat. Whether or not a small air force can exploit the opportunity will depend on its wetware more than its hardware. We can enhance our cohesion now, through strategic imagination, or later, through strategic reality. It is time to loosen the coupling. Squadron Leader Chris “Guiness” McInnes is an officer  in the Royal Australian Air Force. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government.

The study of strategy is a daunting undertaking. Not only must students wade through the dense tomes of the strategy masters but they must also be alive to subtle nuance in the texts, attentive to the significance of word choice, and conversant in the influence of context on the strategists’ theories. Given this complexity, it is not surprising that recent compendiums on strategic thought are themselves intimidating to new initiates in the field; Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: a history runs to 768 pages, while Beatrice Heuser’s The Evolution of Strategy is slightly more manageable at 506 pages. [Image credit: Amazon.com] What has long been needed is an entry-level introduction to the subject that makes it accessible to the novice and provides the contextual understanding necessary to make sense of the primary texts, yet does not simplify the inherent complexity of strategic thought. Enter Thomas Kane’s excellent 198-page primer on the evolution of strategic thought. Strategy: key thinkers provides an outstanding introduction to the study of strategy and is a necessary addition to the book shelves of those beginning to study strategy for the first time or needing to refresh knowledge that may have lapsed from disuse. Kane writes with authority. A senior lecturer at the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, he is an established author on strategic matters, in particular Chinese strategy. This experience as a commentator and educator is readily apparent in his ability to identify, tease out and explain in a coherent, concise and accessible way the threads that weave through and interlink 2000 years of strategic thought. This distillation of two millennia of theory into less than 200 pages has rightfully been hailed as a ‘major intellectual achievement’ and has drawn praise from leading strategic thinkers, notably Colin Gray. Gray’s endorsement is perhaps not surprising given his clear influence on Kane. However, as Gray literally wrote the book on modern strategy, it would be difficult for any contemporary author to write without due reference to and reverence of ‘the master’. Kane achieves this without apparent sycophancy, by clearly identifying where his contribution fits within the expansive bibliography of the history of strategy. Although acknowledging that he draws on largely the same strategic canon, Kane emphasises from the outset that ‘where Gray reconfigured insights taken from the older classics, this book attempts to illuminate the insights themselves’, with the aim of helping the ‘reader engage with the classic authors’ thought processes, and perhaps even to emulate them’. This focus is the basis of the book’s appeal to the novice strategist. Kane structures his work chronologically. Although he does not explicitly group the thinkers into strategic epochs, Kane’s progressive analysis, from Sun Tzu to Gray, establishes a clear differentiation between classic and modern strategic thought, with Machiavelli and Clausewitz acting as transitional thinkers. Indeed, Kane compares the shift from the classic to the modern strategists with the discovery of the New World, equating Machiavelli with Columbus, and Clausewitz with Martin Waldseemuller, ‘the cartographer who literally put the newly discovered continents on the map’. The pivotal role these two thinkers have played in shaping modern strategy is reflected in the examination of subsequent strategists by the continued reference to Machiavellian and Clausewitzian concepts. This is not to suggest that subsequent strategists were derivative. Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Schelling and Wohlsetter, to name only a few of the modern thinkers discussed by Kane, provided unique insights that have made an important and lasting contribution to our understanding of strategy. However, the disparity in the number of pages Kane allocates to the pre- and post-Clausewitzian strategists reflects his belief that ‘classic works by long-dead authors often seem more useful than competing offerings from those writing today’. Eleven key post-Clausewitzian thinkers are ‘discussed’ in a mere 56 pages, while the thoughts of Clausewitz and his four predecessors are ‘analysed’ over 93 pages. The greater depth of analysis Kane affords the classic strategists also reflects a need to provide a more detailed appreciation of context for those thinkers more removed from the modern reader. Although it is cliché to refer to Clausewitz being more often quoted than read, the fact remains that On War, along with the other classic works on strategy by Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Machiavelli, are often distilled to ‘sound bites’ devoid of the context in which they were originally penned. Kane’s work seeks to mitigate the unfortunate side effects of this quote-mining approach to strategy by drawing the reader’s attention to the context and reasoning that lay behind the works of the classic thinkers. Translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War [Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons] Thucydides’ Melian dialogue is one such example of where selective quotation leads to misunderstanding of key concepts. As Kane tactfully yet convincingly points out, the international relations theorists who assert that Thucydides was the first realist overlook that it was the Athenian generals, not Thucydides himself, who articulated the realist credo that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Thucydides never voiced support for this position and, in light of the outcome of the Peloponnesian War that was the subject of his study, Thucydides was well aware that ‘realism may be insufficient as a guide to long-term strategy’. The Melian dialogue is just one example of how Kane has successfully achieved his aim of ‘illuminating the insights’ of the classical strategists. Key concepts from Sun Tzu, Vegetius, Machiavelli and Clausewitz receive similar treatment to similar effect, with the reader finishing each chapter with an improved ability to identify and appreciate the nuance with which these authors wrote. Accordingly, both those about to read the strategy classics for the first time and those who perhaps need to refresh their understanding of classic strategic concepts would benefit greatly from Kane’s concise and well-structured analysis. However, this book does not offer much for those seeking the same insight into the theories of the modern strategists. Kane’s focus with respect to the post-Clausewitzians rests almost exclusively on understanding their links to the classics. Key factors that invariably shaped the strategic concepts developed by Mahan (America’s reliance on maritime trade), Douhet (Italy’s geography) and Brodie (managing a defence budget in a fiscally-constrained environment), for example, are overlooked in preference for exploring their relationship with Clausewitzian concepts. In itself, this is not a major criticism of the book. The context in which these strategists wrote are more readily understood and appreciated by a modern readership; however, it does mean the book falls short in relation to illuminating the insights of more contemporary strategists. Strategy: key thinkers is not a substitute for reading the original works of the strategists that Kane analyses. It is a primer that provides the reader the necessary intellectual foundation to tackle the strategic canon that forms the basis of any military staff college. This book should be included in all Service reading lists, and is a must-have addition to the library of any serving member of the military serious about understanding the role strategy plays in their profession. Squadron Leader Travis Hallen is an Air Combat Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. He is also a Sir Richard Williams Foundation Scholar and editor at The Central Blue. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #Thucydides #Review #Strategy #AirPower #Education

The Royal Australian Air Force is experiencing a renewed focus on Professional Military Education and Training (PMET). Not only are reviews underway to identify ways to improve the quality of the current PMET system, but oversight of PMET completion is occurring at the highest levels of the organisation. But as Ross Mahoney, the RAF Museum’s Aviation Historian, discusses in this reflective post following on from his attendance at a Royal Canadian Air Force seminar on air power education, there is more to educating an Air Force than compelling its members complete the required courses. I have just come back from a conference at the Royal Military College of Canada on the theme of the ‘Education of an Air Force’ that was well worth the visit. I am sure most readers will agree that the subject of education is of vital importance and this is something that has been increasingly realised in recent years as modern air forces seek to grapple with the challenges that confront them in the operational sphere. Ideas such as conceptual innovation have become catchphrases for efforts such as the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Thinking to Win programme, the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) Plan JERICHO and the Royal Canadian Air Force’s (RCAF) AIRpower in Formation process. Underpinning these, to a greater or lesser degree, is the importance of air power education. Indeed, as Lieutenant-General Michael Hood, Commander of RCAF, recently noted in the introduction to an article in the Royal Canadian Air Force Journal on air power education and professional air power mastery: There is also a requirement to continually review the training and education we give to all ranks to ensure that it is configured to deliver what we need within the contemporary environment. Nevertheless, phrases like the one above can often be a case of rhetoric versus reality, though having heard General Hood speak at the opening of the conference; I do believe he means what he says about the importance of education. The conference was historically focussed, but by observing the past, as historians, we can identify areas that can be points of friction and that need to be considered when attempting to introduce reform in the education process. What follows are just a few key areas I pondered during the conference. Training or Education? Perhaps the first thing that came to mind was what were we considering? The conference included the word education in the title, but was this the case? Indeed, one key question that needs to be asked is whether those we study understand the distinction we make today between training and education. For me, at the most simplistic of levels, training is about skills development while education is about knowledge, understanding and critical thinking. Is this what was expected by those responsible for creating the institutions that delivered programmes related to professional development such as staff colleges? I suspect the answer is yes but the vernacular used in different eras leads to confusion. For example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, first Commandant of the RAF Staff College, was clear that one issue he needed to deal with was anti-intellectualism and this is a matter of education though the term was infrequently used in the 1920s. By the 1960s, the RAF had begun, as it created a ‘progressive’ system of staff education, to differentiate between the two subjects. Nevertheless, we must be clear about what we are talking about if reform is to be achieved. Australian Command and Staff Course – Joint aims to educate O4 and O5 level officers to prepare them to be Commanding Officers or key staff to senior leaders. [Image Credit: Department of Defence] Culture Military organisations are conservative in character. This is not to suggest that they are not innovative but rather to reflect that they are predominantly reactive rather than revolutionary. Thus, change, unless triggered by defeat, public opinion or budgetary cuts, can be difficult and challenging. This is ultimately a cultural issue and one that needs to be considered when introducing change. Leaders need to bring people along with them on the journey they seek to engender rather than just demanding that it happens. This applies to education as well. If education is to be improved, the organisation’s employees need to understand the need for this process. They need to be shown its value, and this has to be enunciated in a clear and meaningful manner. Indeed, in the modern era where most air forces have been in continuous operations for at least the past decade and a half, it needs to be illustrated why education is of value for those with operational experience. This comes back to the first point above, for example, we train an officer to fly rather than educate them. The Role of Senior Leadership This brings me to the next important issue; the role of senior leaders. These are the people who lead change. Indeed, at the conference, when I made a comment about the culture of military organisations, Hal Winton, Professor Emeritus at the United States Air Force’s (USAF) School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS), quite rightly made the impassioned argument that when a leader who believes in education comes along, perhaps once every 15 to 20 years, then we should take advantage of that person. I completely agree, a champion who can provide top cover is essential, and it appears that RCAF have that in Hood while in the 1970s, the RAF had Marshal of the RAF Lord Cameron, who supported the creation of the position of Director of Defence Studies. Furthermore, support from senior leaders can help shape the culture and values of the organisation by providing an example to subordinates. Non-Standard Education What I mean here is the use of non-staff college education for officers, mainly higher research degrees such as MPhils and PhDs. In modern militaries, it is usual that officers going through the staff college system receive some form of credits towards a postgraduate degree, typically an MA. For example, British officers can work towards an MA in Defence Studies that builds on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. However, this is a relatively standard route and one that has been developed within the Staff College environment. What appears to be less typical, though needs to more readily embraced, is the encouragement of nurtured personal to undertake further research in the form of MPhils and PhDs. USAF do a good job of this through SAASS, and the RAF has a good fellowship scheme that not only encourages Masters work but also supports PhDs through the Portal Fellowship. This need to be promoted as higher research encourages critical thinking and air forces need such people to help develop their conceptual understanding of air power in the defence sphere. Nevertheless, air forces also need to encourage and reward personnel for taking ownership of their education irrelevant of whether the service sponsors it or not. Personnel need to be shown that in developing their critical thinking skills these are as valued as their operational ones. Also, where applicable, personnel should be encouraged to write in various forums from websites, such as From Balloons to Drones, The Central Blue, War on the Rocks and The Strategy Bridge, to professional journals. However, this requires encouragement and critical mass and it is interesting to reflect that the RAF, RCAF and USAF all have journals but the RAAF does not, though the latter’s Air Power Development Centre does produce useful material. Overall, by encouraging ‘non-standard education’, air forces have the opportunity to develop knowledge and encourage informed discussion about air power in the public and policy sphere rather than what often currently occurs. Officers or NCOs? Alternatively, Both? An interesting point that came up in one discussion phase of the conference was the question of NCOs. All of the papers dealt with officer education with most focussed on the staff college scenario. However, what of NCOs and their education? We often hear phrases such as ‘whole force’ used to describe the personnel of an air force. As such, should we not be educating the NCO corps? Another challenge is that the current NCO corps is becoming better educated; it not unusual to find airmen and women entering service with degrees. If we are to develop the ‘whole force’ then similar opportunities afforded to the officer corps should be made available to NCOs especially as they are promoted and take on senior leadership roles. This is probably a conference of its own but a subject area that deserves consideration both in a contemporary as well as historical sense. What I have written here is by no means the panacea for professional military education, and indeed much of this is axiomatic of any analysis of the field. Indeed, most of these challenges are just as applicable to each of the services; however, I would suggest that these difficulties need to be overcome and also understood in the context of air forces seeking to improve education provision. Nevertheless, the conference provided plenty of food for thought on the subject of the education of air forces as modern services strive to deal with operational and personnel challenges that they currently confront and will continue to do so into the 21st century. Another key positive of this conference was the involvement of the RCAF both regarding the opportunity to visit the Canadian Aerospace Warfare Centre but also to hear how they are dealing with current challenges. This post originally appeared on From Balloons to Drones on 8 November 2016. Dr Ross Mahoney is the resident Aviation Historian at the RAF Museum, UK. A specialist on air power, he is currently writing a social and cultural history of the inter-war RAF. He is also researching the culture, ethos and ethics of the RAAF and command and staff training in the RAF. He is the editor of ‘From Balloons to Drones.’ The views presented here do not represent those of his employer, the Royal Air Force Museum, or the Royal Air Force or the Ministry of Defence. #Education #PMET #StaffCollege

The demand for airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets has grown exponentially in recent years, as commanders recognise the central role of ISR in force protection, situational awareness and decision-making. One area in which ISR can play a vital role – but which has received relatively little attention – is that of humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR). The Australian Defence Force (ADF) regularly provides forces in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters, both globally and within Australia under the provisions of Defence Assistance to the Civil Community (DACC). One of the immediate requirements following a disaster – whether a cyclone, flooding or bushfires – is to determine the extent of the damage it has caused in order to prioritise assistance efforts. Defence ISR assets can conduct aerial reconnaissance of large areas, and feed this information to Australian and national government agencies, as well as local and international humanitarian organisations. Over the past ten years, for example, Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) assets have deployed to provide ISR for disaster response operations following Cyclone Winston (Fiji 2016) , Cyclone Ita (North Queensland 2015), Cyclone Yasi (North Queensland 2011), and the Victorian bushfires (2009). An on-station RAAF AP-3C Orion circles over a bushfire affected area in the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. [Image Credit: Commonwealth of Australia] One HADR example stands out in demonstrating the utility and flexibility of ADF ISR in the HADR role. When Tropical Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu in March 2015, the ADF launched Operation Pacific Assist 2015 to assist in delivering humanitarian assistance and repairing infrastructure. One of the first tasks involved RAAF assets conducting aerial reconnaissance to identify the worst affected areas, allowing Australian and Vanuatu organisations to prioritise their immediate efforts.  This reconnaissance was conducted by RAAF AP-3C Orion and KA-350 King Air aircraft, as well as Australian Army rotary wing aircraft. The King Airs and helicopters also provided inter island transport, demonstrating the flexibility that can be achieved with air assets fulfilling multiple roles. There is nothing new about the employment of ISR assets in a HADR role, and performance of these tasks requires little in the way of additional training or resources. What may require more attention is incorporation of this role into doctrine, improved processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED), and improving engagement with whole of government and civilian actors. RAAF doctrine refers to ISR moving beyond traditional conflict roles but does not discuss its utility in HADR. Further, the RAAF website omits ISR in a list of services it provides as part of humanitarian support. As remotely pilot aircraft (RPA) are increasingly integrated into the RAAF fleet, the capacity to provide dedicated and responsive ISR support will correspondingly increase. The RAAF will therefore need to consider the potential contribution of these assets to HADR operations, in tasks such as route reconnaissance and damage assessment. The US Air Force provides a useful model, having successfully employed RPA to conduct infrastructure assessments following the 2010 Haiti earthquake as well as supporting domestic disaster response operations. The use of air assets to collect imagery of disaster affected areas is the most visible aspect of ISR support to HADR operations; however, collection is only one aspect of the ISR enterprise and the RAAF’s expanding PED capability will provide an invaluable source of analysis and intelligence output. In terms of PED, the RAAF should ensure it can quickly establish appropriate mechanisms to process and store information, and disseminate this information to relevant stakeholders, including Australian and host nation officials, other government agencies and non-government organisations. This dissemination might range from passing raw imagery to creating bespoke products that fuse imagery, observations and information collected from social media. The value of RAAF PED in the HADR role was demonstrated during the ADF response to Cyclone Marcia in 2015. Receiving hand-held imagery collected by RAAF KA350 aircraft flying from Townsville, the RAAF’s, at the time interim, Distributed Ground System (DGS) processed the images to provide intelligence-type products to local and Defence authorities commencing their disaster relief efforts. The contribution of ISR PED to HADR is illustrated by this processed image from an RQ-4 Global Hawk showing passable and obstructed roads in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. [Image Credit: U.S. Air Force] Finally, the ADF’s capability to collect, analyse and produce intelligence to support HADR operations will be limited by the ability to integrate as part of a whole of government response.  Increased engagement is required across government agencies (state and federal) and civilian actors, in order to increase the humanitarian community’s awareness of the capability that ISR assets provide, as well as identifying opportunities for improved collaboration and information sharing. The ADF may also have to share airspace with others on future operations – the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has released a report on UAVs in humanitarian response, and civilian organisations are now available to deploy UAVs at the request of humanitarian organisations. Without this engagement, the significant potential of the ADF ISR to support HADR will be underutilised to the unnecessary detriment of those requiring assistance. The ability of military forces to contribute niche capabilities as part of HADR operations has long been recognised. ISR represents one of these unique capabilities – one that has been well utilised but sometimes under appreciated. Further emphasis on incorporation into doctrine, improvements in PED and engagement with other humanitarian actors could improve Air Force’s capability to support these operations now and in the future. Squadron Leader Alexandra McCubbin is a serving officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and an editor at The Central Blue. The opinions expressed are her’s alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #RPA #Doctrine #PED #AirPower #HADR #UAV #ISR

Strategic imagination is as important to the Royal Australian Air Force’s future success as the innovation that lies at the heart of Plan JERICHO. In this post, Pilot Officer Oliver Jiang defines strategic imagination and explains the importance to developing problem conceptualisers as well as problem solvers. The inability of national intelligence agencies in the United States to predict the 9/11 attacks has been described as a “failure of imagination”. And yet where the CIA, FBI and others failed, Rick Rescorla, the Security Director at Morgan Stanley, succeeded, anticipating future attacks, including the potential for a plane to fly into one of the towers. Rescorla drilled the employees of Morgan Stanley in evacuation procedures prior to the 9/11 attacks, with the result that only six employees out of 2700 would die on 9/11. Tragically, Rescorla was one of the six, refusing to leave the building until he was satisfied that every employee in his care had evacuated. Rick Rescorla, Jorge Velazquez, and Godwin Forde leading the evacuation on 9/11 [Image Credit: Rickrescorla.com] If the failure of America’s national intelligence agencies was a failure of imagination, then Rescorla’s success must have been one of imagination. More specifically, his triumph was the success of strategic imagination. Strategic imagination has been defined as the interaction between three types of imagination: descriptive, creative, and challenging. Descriptive imagination is the ability to see and explain the current situation in a new way; creative imagination is the ability to see and explain what is not out there; challenging imagination is the ability to deconstruct and challenge what is and is not there already. Or, put it another way, strategic imagination is the ability to put aside what was true yesterday in order to imagine how tomorrow might be different. Modern conflicts have clearly demonstrated the ability to circumvent militaries in order to strike directly at civilian targets with little advance warning. Imagining how tomorrow might be different is therefore critically important to the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) ability to anticipate, pre-empt, and respond to threats to Australia, its people, and its interests. The inherent characteristics of speed, reach and flexibility mean that air power is often called upon to provide the initial Australian response. As such, flying ‘strategically blind’ is a very real possibility, one that risks multiplying the effects of strategic shock and giving up decision superiority to a hostile aggressor. The application of strategic imagination can help alleviate this risk before any attack occurs. The RAAF has innovative problem solvers, but problem solving does not mitigate a lack of strategic imagination. Instead, these two cognitive processes run in parallel, with problem solving dealing with the past up to the present, and strategic imagination dealing with the present into the future. Thinking up tomorrow’s problems therefore requires more than problem solvers; it requires problem conceptualists, who can apply their strategic imagination to come up with unorthodox scenarios, and then develop solutions to those scenarios. The risk of an overreliance on problem solving, and an underappreciation of strategic imagination, is that it places the RAAF in the unenviable position of waiting for a problem to develop before being able to recognise and respond. In peacetime, this hinders its ability to rapidly respond to escalating situations. In wartime, this may result in the injury or death of Australian personnel. The RAAF does not have a formally documented and widely-accessible Air Force strategy, nor does it have many publicly identifiable strategic thinkers. This is a reflection of a failure in how the RAAF approaches strategy; it is seen as an unchangeable product, dictated by Government, and so not enough attention is given to how Air Force can input into the process which leads to its creation. In particular, the stage at which strategy begins, strategic imagination, is almost entirely ignored. For the RAAF to continue to meet the expectations of Government and the Australian people, this must change. In the same manner in which the RAAF has been promoting innovation, through initiatives such as Plan JERICHO, a similar drive towards cultural and institutional change to embrace strategic imagination should be implemented. As part of this, priority must be given to the establishment of an Air Force Journal, a regular Service-level publication dedicated to the Air Force profession of arms that stimulates strategic imagination and facilitates strategic writing. Initiatives such as the Central Blue can play an important contributory role to this change by acting as a less formal conduit for communication between junior thinkers and senior decision makers. We have already seen the consequences of one failure of imagination this century. As an organisation in the profession of arms, the RAAF must ensure that Australia does not suffer the consequences of a second. Pilot Officer Oliver Jiang is an Air Intelligence Officer trainee in the Royal Australian Air Force. The opinions expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence Force, or the Australian Government. #Education #Strategy