Intellectual Mastery and Professional Military Journals
At the beginning of the 21st century, advanced armies all over the world are grappling with the complexities of preparing to meet the demands of future armed conflict. The Australian Army is no exception to this trend, and, in the shadow of East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Solomon Islands—along with the uncertainties flowing from the ongoing war on terror—the land force is about to embark on a path towards transformation. This transformation initiative, known as Hardening the Army, will involve moving the land force from being a light infantry towards being a light armoured organisation.
The operational, organisational, cultural, educational and training features of the Hardening the Army initiative are likely to present the land force with a string of complex intellectual challenges. These challenges will include the following questions: What kind of soldiers do we need in the 21st century? If we are to field ‘strategic corporals and privates’, what balance should there be between education and training? How large should the 21st-century Australian Army be and how best can we design our combined arms structure for multidimensional operations across a spectrum of conflict? What is the future of the close battle and of the levels of war in an age of networks? What are the implications of effects-based operations for military force development? How do we adapt advanced technology to serve us in asymmetric conflicts?
Such questions need to be vigorously debated by members of the Australian Army, and the Australian Army Journal (AAJ) intends to be the main forum for such an exchange of ideas. As the American scholar, Peter Paret, observed in his 1962 study, Innovation and Reform in Warfare, ‘the most important problem of innovation is not the development of new weapons or methods, nor even their general adoption, but their intellectual mastery’. Since Paret wrote in the early 1960s, the place of intellectual mastery in preparing armies for warfighting is now well established and Western military journals have often played a key role in shaping change.
Three examples are worth noting. In March 1974, in the RUSI Journal, Michael Howard’s seminal article, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, provided an analysis of the difficulties of planning for war in ‘a fog of peace’. This article has become a standard text. Howard warned that ‘it is in discerning operational requirements that the real conceptual difficulties of military science occur’.
In March 1977, the American analyst, William S. Lind, used the US Army’s Military Review to compare the American doctrine of Active Defense to that of French inter-war thinking based on the Maginot Line. Lind’s article helped to spark a debate on military innovation that would take the US Army from a legacy of defeat in the jungles of South-East Asia to the formulation of the AirLand Battle doctrine and triumph in the Persian Gulf. In 1983, one of the most important American military reformers of the 20th century, General Donn A. Starry, also used Military Review to publish his influential essay, ‘To Change an Army’. Starry argued that the key feature in securing organisational change in armies was to establish ‘cultural commonality of intellectual endeavour’—something that, as Starry recognised, can only be achieved by a consensus that comes from vigorous debate.
In the December edition of the AAJ, we present a variety of articles that we trust will contribute to the debate on how the Australian Army might best respond to the demands of 21st-century military operations. In Point Blank, our section for sharp, critical material, we present two contrasting pieces. Christopher Flaherty examines the use of mimicking operations in information warfare, while Michael Evans seeks to explain the meaning of the Bush Doctrine and the rise of military pre-emption in American strategic thought.
In our main articles, the Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, provides a valuable scene-setter in his important article on the experience of the recent war in Iraq. He highlights the complexities of the art of command and the speed of operational decision-making in an age of instantaneous communications, and goes on to outline the challenges that may confront the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in developing a network-centric approach to modern war. Remaining on the theme of Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Field follows the Chief of the Defence Force by examining the role of embedded planners during Operation Iraqi Freedom, drawing on his experience serving in the Coalition headquarters in the Middle East.
The AAJ then presents another important section on the role of special operations in contemporary warfare. In two valuable and complementary articles, Major General Duncan Lewis, Australia’s Special Operations Commander, reflects on the creation of Special Operations Command and on the reasons for the rise to prominence in joint warfare of the Special Forces community. Major General Lewis’s articles are followed by a perceptive cultural analysis of modern terrorism by Professor John Carroll of La Trobe University. Professor Carroll’s essay is a timely reminder to us that the challenge of terrorism is not so much technical as ideological in character.
In the realm of tactics, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen analyses combined arms in the close battle in complex terrain, focusing on an ongoing debate in the infantry corps on suppression and small-unit manoeuvre. Lieutenant Colonels Michael Ryan and John Hutcheson then take up aspects of force development, assessing the prospects for an expeditionary taskforce and in the organisation for a motorised battle group respectively. In the areas of command and leadership, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Fortune analyses some of the implications of recruiting members of the post-1977 Net Generation into the Australian Army. Looking at training and doctrinal issues, Captain G. A. Chisnall examines some of the lessons of deploying modern military advisory groups based on the Australian experience of service in Sierra Leone. Moving on from Sierra Leone to the Solomons, Michael O’Connor reflects on the background to, and some of the features involved in, collaborative nation-building in what he calls conditions of ‘permissive intervention’. Two interesting articles in the journal’s Military History section consider Australia’s military links with North America. Major Russell Parkin provides an overview of Australian–American military relations in the 20th century and Lieutenant Colonel John Blaxland assesses the extent to which the armed forces of Australia and Canada can be considered to be strategic cousins in their military outlooks.
The AAJ is also proud to publish the winning essay in the 2003 Chief of Army’s Essay Competition at the Australian Command and Staff College. The competition is jointly conducted by the directing staff of the Army component of the Staff College and by the academic staff of the Land Warfare Studies Centre (LWSC). This year’s winner, Major Robert Worswick, provides an interesting examination of the force structure issues facing the ADF in the new millennium. In the AAJ’s Insights section, we present two short articles by Lieutenant Colonel Jason Thomas and Flight Sergeant Martin Andrew of the Royal Australian Air Force. They focus on aspects of reconnaissance in urban warfare and on the Russian experience in urban combat respectively.
In the Retrospect section, dedicated to reproducing interesting articles from earlier Australian military journals, we reprint an edited excerpt from Colonel (later Major General) Stuart Graham’s important study entitled, ‘Tanks Against Japan’, first published by the AAJ in 1955. Colonel Graham’s work has lasting value, in that it explodes the myth that armour cannot be used in South-East Asian conditions. Graham demonstrates how, in adverse tropical conditions, Australian forces successfully employed tanks during World War II in the South-West Pacific campaign against the Japanese. Readers should note that Graham’s study is a useful companion piece to a recent essay by Robert Hall and Andrew Ross on the use of tanks by the Australian Task Force in the Vietnam War, published in an LWSC Working Paper on combined arms in July 2003. This edition of the AAJ also includes a review essay on the history of swordsmanship by Michael Evans, along with book reviews by Michael O’Connor, Brigadier John Essex-Clark, Captain Brett Chaloner, Major General Adrian Clunies-Ross, Lieutenant Colonel David Schmidtchen, Alan Ryan and Major Russell Parkin. The December edition concludes with letters to the editors and with information in our Diary section.
In his celebrated essay, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, Michael Howard called for armed forces establishments seeking intellectual mastery of the profession of arms to engage in a triangular dialogue based on operational requirement, technological feasibility and financial capability. He noted that, although it is always impossible to verify warfighting ideas in peacetime, the real value of these ideas lies in the intellectual debate that they generate. Howard wrote, ‘it does not matter that they [military professionals] have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives’. It is this intellectual process of ‘getting it right’ that the AAJ wishes to foster by publishing the views of Australian soldiers, both serving and retired, of ADF joint warfighters, and of those scholars and other writers with an interest in land operations. We trust that in the second issue of the 2003 AAJ, our readers will find the articles published to be an eclectic and thought-provoking collection that will be of great value in stimulating the Army’s professional development in an era of change and uncertainty.
