Maybe I’m just not seeing the revolutionary part of the Australian Defence Force’s new Joint Operations Doctrine, which, according to the head of the ADF Angus Houston, describes “how we will fight in the future”. Try the following:
In Future Warfighting Concept 2003 the ADF adopted Multidimensional Manoeuvre (MDM) as its approach to future warfare. MDM seeks to negate the adversary’s strategy through the intelligent and creative application of an effects-based approach against an adversary’s critical vulnerabilities. It uses an indirect approach to defeat the adversary’s will to oppose us. MDM becomes reality through the application of tailored strategic responses to achieve the desired effects. A fundamental of MDM is the ability to employ NCW and operate in joint task force, interagency and/or coalition arrangements to conduct effective operations.
Translation: we’ll trying the same essential trick that every military theorist since Sun Tzu has recommended, but this time we’ll send out the orders by email.
More seriously, the subtext of this report seems to be that the taxpayer will have to fork over a lot more money to support the “hardened, networked” defence force this document outlines. But it doesn’t contain any analysis to (and clearly wasn’t intended to) justify why these outlays are actually necessary. For a comprehensive analysis of the strategic situation Australia faces, you have to go back to the white paper of the year 2000 - yes, that’s right, barely after the East Timor operation; before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before September 11, and eight years before the upcoming crunch when Australia commits to the most expensive set of defence purchases - the air warfare destroyers, the amphibious landing ships, and most of all the new fighter aircraft - we’ve made in peacetime. Even the last, fairly cursory update was done in 2005.
The net effect of all those hugely costly defence purchases - as outlined by John Birmingham in his 2005 Quarterly Essay is to build a force far more closely aligned with expeditionary operations, but one that’s only survivable against a real opponent as an adjunct of the United States (who are the only ones who can supply air cover out of the limited range of the RAAF). Given that strategic switch, and the endless rivers of dough required to support it, doesn’t the government owe us a decent explanation as to their reasoning?
POSTSCRIPT: I honestly didn’t see this until I had written this post, but it seems that Labor would also like to know.
Oh, man. I wish I could say I’d never written a paragraph like that.
Why couldn’t they just say that old wars are like Mario, and the new wars are going to be like Mario 64? That’s a lot clearer. You know, that third dimension—time to buy our troops some new controllers with thumb-joysticks.
Can’t pass this one up: you chop it, you mull it, you roll it, lick it and twist the ends shut, then you pass it around your mates. Nothing to it, ADF.
Actually, apparently new wars are going to be more like Real-time strategy games, if you read the stuff about network-centric warfare.
The relevance of all this nifty communications gear is of course open to question when your enemy is burying old artillery shells under the road…
Robert Merkel:
[[John Birmingham’s essay sounds terrific …. but not at $14.95 thanks …. I am a pensioner living very frugally [internet is my luxury splurge] and I do have to prioritize my spending. :)]]
Now, down to business …..
1… Since when did squandering huge sums of other peoples’ money ever give us really effective defence or advance our interests or frustrate our actual and potential enemies?
We can - and must - get a lot more bang for our buck ….. with a lot less bucks.
2…. Your quote from ADF boss-cocky Angus Houston, above, on MDM explains it all. Now we know why the ADF failed, for example, to engage our own theologians, as familiar with all 114 Surahs of the Quran as with current affairs, to help undermine any religious or quai-religious foundations of the insurgents and the so-called “taliban” . No need for any of that funny stuff. All we have to do grab a 30-round magazine of MDM and “in your own time, go on”.
Yeah. Errr, right. Guess what. It doesn’t matter how much whiz-bangery you have - at the end of the day, your enemy is still a living, breathing, courageous, fearful, determined, vacillating human being. If you are not concentrating on that reality then victory will continue to elude you - regardless of what pretty war-toys you have bought or how much they cost.
Graham: it’s an interesting essay. If you can, visit your public library and have a look.
He he, we’ve moved on since Mario 64. The JOD is Haze for PS3 or perhaps Crysis for PC (depends on whether ADF is with Sony or Crytek.
We are now going to be pawns, ahem, assets, played on the big screen in the Pentagon.
On the other hand maybe Angus has Bourdieu in mind.
I wonder what a new white paper would say about which country we source our equipment from. The F-35 and the F/A-18 Super Hornet are both probably inferior to the Russian Su-27/30 Flanker in terms of dogfighting capability and we cannot realistically afford the F-22. Our possible opponents are starting to buy the Flankers in significant numbers reflecting the fact that its about half the price of American equivalents. On top of this there items in the US inventory that are particularly far behind overseas equivalents. Anti-ship missiles is an area that comes to mind.
Our dependence on American equipment means we have to spend double our opponents just to stay even. As our oppenents economies catch up with us we won’t be able to afford this.
swio, US equipment is still in most cases the best or equal best with a european supplier and about the same price. While it’s an entertaining thought the ADF buying Russian (or Brazilian etc) gear, it’ll never happen for several good reasons. I would like a little more transparency in why we make the purchases we do though, we do seem to buy american ships far too unquestioningly.
Apparently Israel and Turkey combined to replace the avionics of the very airworthy Ka-52 helo. The results would be interesting.
I don’t agree that we can’t afford the F-22, I think we can’t afford to not have it. Third worst purchasing decision made by this Government.
As for this Joint Operations Doctrine, it’s something that will quickly be forgotten. I have no idea who the new Labor Defence Minister will be (I suspect they dont either) but I hope it’s someone competent and independent enough to take on the entrenched idiocy at Russell house.
Oh, I would never want us to start buying Russian stuff, but we could do a more thorough evaluation of European equipment, (or at least threaten to purchase European equipment to get a better deal). While the European stuff is not cheaper than US equipment it can be better suited to our needs. The Israel/Turkey work on the Ka-52 helo is the kind of thing I am thinking of. We could be a bit more creative in our combination of equipment to get a much better outcome by buying stuff from smaller countries like Israel who have a good track record on smart lower cost innovation. At the moment we purchase like we are just another part of the US military with all the problems in terms of inapplicability to our unique needs and lack of creativity that entails.
I don’t agree we can afford the F-22. The US can afford only 278 of them. Our military budget is only 3.5% the size of the US ($22bn vs $617bn). If we purchased F-22’s at a similar rate we would get about 10 aircraft. I know this comparision is not apples to apples. The US operates a much wider military budget so we could afford a higher proportion of our budget to F-22’s. But at best this might get us up to fifteen F-22’s. Is this really a viable number? Allowing for a loss of three aircraft and maintennace this would barely be enough to defend the airfield they operate from.
I understand the argument that we cannot afford to not have F-22’s because without them we lose air superority in the region, unless perhaps we purchased the Eurofighter instead of Super Hornets. But they are just too expensive. We might just have to accept that our combinantion of econmic size and acceptable weapons system suppliers means we will not have air superiority over our neighbours for much longer.
Joel Fitzgibbon is the Shadow. I’m led to understand that he’s pretty keen on the Ministry if Labor wins it this time or next time. How he’d go is anybody’s guess.
And they are, wilful? Consider the current standard small-arms used by the Army: the Aussteyr, a licenced copy of an Austrian staple, the AI sniper rifle from the UK, and the FN MAG and F89 Minimi from Belgium. They’ve got European Tiger helicopters, British Javelin rockets, they’ve still got German Leopard tanks for a few more years, the artillery are buying Israeli drones, and the ASLAV is a flat-out Canadian knockoff of a Swiss design. The Bushmaster IMV, bizarrely enough, is made in Australia with French capital. I’d love a bit more non-US purchasing, frankly, but first in line wouldn’t be the Top Gun shit, it’d be 4×4 Toyotas painted khaki for resupply, a few of the new C130J Hercules lifters, and when they come out, Airbus A400Ms.
Militarised freight/airlift? Yes please.
As noted on previous discussions on Russian gear, some concerns are:
* does it actually live up to its specs? Not unique to Russian equipment, sure, but particularly a concern with it.
* they have a reputation as being pretty woeful on spare parts supplies
* none of it works with western gear, making the networked warfare idea much harder to implement (which, all jokes aside, is kind of useful)
* do you really want to make Vladimir Putin and his successors a partner in key aspects of the defence of Australia?
Swio, I was hoping not to turn this into yet another fighter argument thread, but the thing with the F-22 is that the USAF has already paid for all the R&D for us.
Any more F-22’s Lockheed Martin turn out now are essentially money for jam, and so the incremental cost is much, much lower than your calculation would suggest - something in the order of $120 million a pop flyaway costs, I believe.
P-p-p-please? Miliporn is a lot more fun than comparative defence doctrinology.
Which is another point about Russian gear—it’s designed to be used by brutalised conscript armies, in Russian doctrinal operations involving lots of friendly casualties and the kind of nothing-personal-we’ll-just-obliterate-your-pissant-ex-Soviet-Republic’s-capital slaughter-warfare that’s made the CIS what it is today. It’s not as if the Russians have ever had any choice about fighting land wars in Asia, but we do.
(Wouldn’t mind some of their AA rocketry, though, they’re noice).
Fiasco, have a closer read and don’t try and misquote me with some square brackets. We can and do buy euro gear (there are more examples than you’ve provided), but second or third tier suppliers come with a range of extra problems as Robert Merkel has outlined.
I’m perfectly aware Fitzgibbon is shadow Minister. Not sure individuals in the Labor Caucus get the jobs they want.
Restating the wish that this shouldn’t be about fighters, but credible sources are saying the F-22 and JSF will be about the same price, since we’re paying for the JSF early run costs. Lunacy.
Of course, this all really comes down to, what are these expensive toys to be used for? I like the C-17s and the Canberra ships - because they’re very useful for humanitarian aid.
Mate, that’s not misquotation, it’s a non-conventional multi-dimensional application of a network-centric strategy of sentence object displacement (NCSSD).
I like the C-17s as well.
Wilful, you said
….. and one of the reasons is that defeated armies don’t have much money at hand to buy anything …. and thanks all the same, I would rather see the ADF victorious than wiped off the face of the Earth ….. so let’s put a stop to chucking away our options.
Robert Merkel, you asked
A couple of years ago, I would have taken that as a jocular question but, after seeing more and more blunders by America’s unimpeached failed Emperor and his born-loser courtiers, blunders that will cost us a lot in blood-and-treasure, that is no longer a silly question. How sad.
Everyone:
There are several factors in our defence situation:
i. Finance.
ii. Raw Materials and our ability to mobilize them quickly.
iii. Our Own Human factors - including training, morale and clarity of purpose.
iv. Enemy Human factors - especially enemy social weaknesses.
v. Human factors of the Non-Involved throughout the world [i.e.: who would rush to our aid if we were attacked?].
vi. Consistently Reliable Intelligence.
vi. Weaponry, hardware, ordnance, aircraft, ships, guns and all the other things that cost a squillion.
So why all the obsession with war-toys to the exclusion of all the other important factors in our defences?
[and, a Pathian shot: I’ve already got the Defence White Paper …. and there are another two spare rolls in the toilet when that one is used up]
PaRthian [damn it!]
It seems to me that there is a trend towards Euro gear at the moment anyway - our helo fleet certainly has a Eurocopter flavour to it, which may well increase when they get around to replacing Seahawks and Seasprites. The LHD project is a choice between either a Spanish design or a French ship, and the DCC preferred option for the AWD project is the Spanish design.
The risks of purchasing items outside the Western style of design, implementation and certification would likely outweigh the cost savings that appear initially. The ADF has a hard enough time certifying stuff that comes from the Yanks, let alone something that the Russians or the Chinese are building.
I’ve blogged recently saying that the F22 is by far and away the better buy than the JSF, which is only partially stealthy. The F22 has a radar signature of a large insect which gives it a 144:1 force multiplier capability, as discovered at recent Red Flag exercises. The F22 makes particular sense therefore if you have only a small air force like we do. It is definitely worth the money. The rest should go no unmanned craft.
Be that as it may, both recon. and offensive equipment is now moving into unmanned and semi base controlled flying. Hence the network capability of flying assets being the prime requirement and a wishlist spoken of in the WP.
We will never get Russian equipment, certainly not now, even if it were superior, and that is for obvious political reasons. We are a client state in every sense.
As regards the capability of Russian equipment, we won’t find out how good it is any time soon, except for the knowledge that the F22 is currently superior to anything the Russians have, but bear in mind they are working on a different way to solve the problem of detectability and that is stealth plasma - that is a very very interesting technology using ionised gas emissions to reduce the radar cross section of an aircraft like the Sukhoi su 35 series. Combined with advanced thrust vectoring and amraamskis that pull 15 G and 270 degree off boresight capability, brings them fairly close to the F22 if not make them even superior. It will be a while before we see an Indonesian or a Malaysian pilot behind the wheel of a stealth plasma Sukhoi however.
it is worth delving back through mists of propaganda. We know now that the Mig 17 frightened the shit out of the Yanks when it first appeared and they were very keen indeed to test it out. They got their chance when two pilots in the Syrian Air Force landed their 17s in Israel by mistake. These aircraft were lent to the US for evaluation. The two migs flew around 200 sorties and it is reported that a Phantom crashed after its pilot lost control after trying to maneuvre with the Mig 17.
From the report: “the Mig 17 was the greatest turning plane any of us had ever seen. it just dazzled us. We couldn’t believe that this guy Mikoyan had built such a great wing areoplane. It was like a boomerang, shaking a Mig 17 off your six was like shaking gum off your shoe. It made an A4 laughable. ”
Furthermore, when the Tumanskii R13 300 tubojet from a Mig 21 became available, Pratt & Whitney, not exactly a novice in engine making and development, undertook blade profiling and compressor mapping. The metallurgy was superior apparently.
All the while, the propaganda machine was telling the west what crap units the Russians had.
FdG: We will not get the Airbus because we do not need it. We have the C17 and the Hercs. We also have the railway to Darwin (don’t laugh - very secure, very capable and can’t be shot down or sunk.) To replace the Caribou we will get either the C-295, which Finland just got, or the Alenia C27J. My money is on the Alenia as it now shares the cockpit gear and glass instrumentation with the latest Herc Js and therefore type training is a snack. It is also being marketed to us by Boeing.
PS The SAS won’t touch the Steyr with a barge pole, preferring the M16A2 with the granade launcher. In this case buying US would have been better.
Ken, from my limited understanding, the plasma stealth is awesome flick of a switch radar invisibility, but it leaves a long and potentially obvious trail of gases that could easily be tracked. So in other words, it’s defeatable.
An area where Russian exports are of grave concern is their current SAMs such as the S-300. India and Vietnam use them, and who else soon? We would want the RAAF to be invisible, because otherwise they’re dead. The JSF may be good enough, but if it relies on air-to-air refuelling and AWACS (which it does) then it’s cactus.
So then we need the AWD. So then we need a sub in the vicinity. Starts sounding rather high-intensity and quite a commitment.
Ken, I’m a MiG lover from wayback, a nostalgist supreme for the good old days of Cold War and long-distance Top Gun standoffs, but you and I both know the probability of any air-air pure fighter battles along the line of Red Flag ever happening in either of our lifetimes. It’s nil.
As to more useful fixed-wing purchases: Apart from being a relatively-cheap turboprop, compared to the “Attach Fuel Hose And Line of Credit Here” C-17 jet, the A400M does duty for mid-air refuelling. The RAAF’s fleet of tankers are old and getting older: a half a dozen of them would be useful just for that.
Fiasco, I think the simple and obvious point about the A400M is that it can’t carry an Abrams (or any MBT). Which means sealift only for our tanks. Which reduces flexibility somewhat.
Everyone:
Defence? Defence?
Isn’t that all about protecting us from harm and not just about fast aircraft, sleek ships, big guns and fancy titles and glorious rituals?
Today, it looks like they failed the Toothpaste Test.
Oh yes, it’s not their responsibility, is it? It’s all the fault of AQIS. Or Customs. Or the state authorities. Or anyone else. So exactly how narrow is their definitions of “defence” and “terrorist attack”. I am not suggesting that this particular case was a “terrorist attack” as the motives were almost certainly fraud against customers — but if it had been a deliberate terrorist attack it could have been launched unnoticed and the alarm would not have been sounded until hundreds of Australians had been killed.
Defence? Singing-and-dancing club, more like it!.
I’m on the record above saying I like the C17s, wilful. We should have a bunch of them, and not just to lift tanks about.
My point is that smaller airlift for resupply would do wonders for the non-adventurist deployments the ADF is called upon to do, like the Operation Astute force in Timor Leste and the RAMSI, neither of which, AFAIK, have involved the transport by air (or otherwise) of a single MBT.
That’s rather the point, isn’t it. What are the political imperatives behind the ADF’s planning and purchasing? I certainly don’t think ‘protecting us from harm’ is a viable mission that the military can be tasked with, a serious approach on that basis would have just about every arm of the Public Service from AQIS to Centrelink to the Dept. of Weights and Measures dressed in khaki. A well-run civilised State can protect its own citizens from everything bar conventional military attack perfectly well without recourse to arms, thank you very much.
As citizens we should have some sense of the political nature of our Defence budget—as Robert argued.
wilful, it doesn’t leave a trail of gases because the plasma flow is a flow of ionized gas particles. The Russian stealth plasma device creates a plasma field around an aircraft. The field causes the elctromagentic energy of a seeking radar to bend around the aircraft, reducing the intruder aircraft’s radar signature by up to 100 times, or comparable to that of F22.
The Russians are now goint to offer a bolt-on device for plasma stealth as export. See this LINK.
FdG, I think you misunderstood my point. I was merely making the not unreasonable assertion that we are unlikely to find out the relative merits of warcraft performance if we take it from newspapers and telly who take theirs from PR handouts produced by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and any Euro consortia.
A larger point to be made is that the best gear we could buy based on need/logic/objective analysis is also often the cheapest option but if it isn’t geopolitically correct then we won’t get it. Only by looking at the past can we see the wood for the trees however.
For example, the Brit TSR2 was a much better proposition than the F111. When we did plonk our hardearned on the pig, it effectively killed the TSR2 - although it must be said that the brit government and military bureaucracy didn’t do the project any favours either.
The best battlefield helicopter we didn’t get was the South African Rooivalk, which can be armed and field serviced and stripped in the bush by a couple of people using coins as screwdrivers for the universal fasteners. It is built on Puma running gear.
The Mirage was a spot-on choice based on objective criteria. On the other hand, the F16 would have been a better buy. Just look at who has bought it and how it has been used.
The SAAB JAS Gripen is a terrific little plane, admittedly it is a “legacy” vintage airplane, but it would have made sense as a defence of Australia craft forming the bulk of continental defence. It’s multirole, it has a mini AWAC capability and is very easy to fly, so that part-time reserve pilots could easily operate it.
It is reasonably priced so we could have afforded lots of them and still bought 24 F22s as a frontline aggressive power projection tool. The SAAB can also use goat paddocks and bits of road and this makes it very very difficult for any potential aggressor to knock out Tyndal and Learmonth with runway destroying ordinance and thus degrading our response capability.
I would really like to have a decent spray about paradigm shifting in projected war scenarios, which is the REAL subtext of this thread but I have run out of time and your indulgence. But that is truly a fascinating topic that takes is game thory and Bourdieu’s theory of power and practice.
I like it already, definitely being myself a supporter of democratically constituted symbolic violence, though my grasp of game theory ends with the new push-in-the-back rule that did Richmond out of a win last Saturday.
I vote we indulge Ken, I wanna hear more.
I’m with you Fiasco. Maybe Ken could do a guest blog. How about it Robert and Mark?
Gee, I don’t know, I feel the waves of a pisstake coming towards me, FdG. As for you, mobile unit 633, you know I can hurt you. I mean, who else would know that you and Peter Cosgrove served in the cadets together at Waverley College? My my, and how the career paths have diverged…
Senhor da Gama, you said
If ‘protecting us from harm” is tooo broad a function then the current function/functions are far too narrow. Claiming to be the lords-and-masters/ladies-and-mistresses of counter-terrorism is fine ….. just so long as they are actually doing the job …. which is why I cracked off over that contaminated Chinese toothpaste. A minor matter not worthy of the notice of our high-tech warriors, of course, but if it had been a deliberate mass poisoning then the internet and the MSM would be chock-a-block full of the tragedy and our enemies’ celebrations of it.
It should never been allowed to happen …. and NO!!, I am not being too demanding..
We should all be grateful to the crooks in that Chinese toothpaste factory because they have shown us just how flimsy our counter-terrorism defences really are.
Ken Scott:
Plasma field stealth? Wow! [Does it have adverse effects on crew?]
Wonder if we would get it any cheaper by buying it in a package deal with those nice torpedo speeder-uppers?
Gripen might be vintage but good old Aussie make-do ingenuity would make a very nasty and cost-efective “museum-piece”. Wonder if the Swedes have any spare blueprints gathering dust somewhere?
Not familiar with the South African Rooivalk but what would it take to build them or something similar in Australia?
We could quite easily make the Rooivalk here, indeed, it was offered to us with full offsets for manufacture. The aircraft is based on an existing platform, that of the French Aerospatiale Puma. Engine and running gear are off the shelf. It’s like going down to Repco…
Australia considered it but powdered because the submarine contract was at that time just coming apart at the seams. There came a realisation that we can’t make ANYTHING in this country any more. We’ve lost the technical expertise, the will, the discipline. Even the motor cars we make are just assembled from components imported from elsewehere.
And if we could, of course, we all know what would have happened; the ADF geniuses would have want a “special for Australia” mods, like those with the sub and the Kaman helicopter that have caused all the design problems - perhaps so it could carry a load of sheep to market, accommodate a barbecue, plus a fish freezer, a tinnies fridge, a vestibule for storing Drizabones and Blundies, as well as a hat rack, not to mention a stereo player with a 20 inch bass driver.
Having said that, battlefield helicopters are literally a dead loss nowadays and only useful for terrorising unarmed or very lightly armed civilian populations. There are now on the market numerous person-portable laser beam missiles that will take down a helicopter with the greatest of ease.
I always take with a grain of salt the claims of military flacks who claim THEIR helicopter is invulnerable to ground fire, especially since the Iraqi fellahin with a WWI bolt action rifle took down a US Apache with a shot through the (externally exposed!) fuel tank. No amount of Seppo spin could quite overcome the TV moving pictures of the proud farmer standing next to the downed chopper in a field with a Kyron generated white circle around the bullethole.
Graham, “plasma stealth” wiki, hit enter. It is very interesting stuff and may make not just the very expensive stealth shape tech obsolete but also, ditto, current radars. There’s food for thought. This is what I meant by paradigm shifts. (I’ll post my thoughts on this on my own site, F dG and post a link).
BTW Graham, the Gripen is not “vintage”, it is current tech. I meant “of a certain generation”, not old.
The Gripen appears to be very short range relative to our needs. Though otherwise it’s probably a bargain performer. I do think that the F-22’s stealth is a force multiplier that can’t be denied. Otherwise, UAVs are the way to go.
I’m surprised there aren’t UAV aerial refuellers being designed (that I’ve heard of).
There have been many criticisms of military spending recently, even from the likes of defence enthusiasts like Hugh White of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and the 2006/2007 Australian National Audit Office questions about maintainability of our aircraft fleet once we’ve emptied out pockets to buy them.
I’ve made some other notes about failures when sourcing qualified personnel for IT operations here as part of a general diatribe.
Ken Scott, you said
Yes indeed! Commonality and Lower Costs are incompatable with Aust defence thinking.
Thanks
My reference to age[?] of Gripen was marketeer-inspired irony, Can we have a hundred and forty of them for Christmas please? Thanks for that link; I was delighted to read
it makes such a pleasant change from take-it-or-leave-it and stop-beefing-about-cost-overruns-and-incredible-delays that Australians have come to accept in military procurement..
Helicopters still have lots and lots of military uses …. even after so many nice Soviet Mil-24s were knocked down in Afghanistan. It’s just that they make a poor substitute for a well-directed 155mm [or 152mm?] artillery shell these days; the penny will drop one day that the Viet-Nam War is over and helicopters are no longer magic carpets.
Wilful:
Shorter range? That’s easy. Buy lots of them. Arm with longish-range weaponry. Place on airstrips closer to the action. Sit back and watch the fun.
Stealth? Russian [or competitor??] bolt-on stuff perhaps?