There are five articles that I commend to you in this last Australian Army Journal edition for 2013. The Land Warfare Studies Centre (LWSC) started an embryonic relationship with our British counterpart to ‘swap’ articles and the first of these appears from Colonel Tim Law, discussing the way in which the British Army is grappling with the same practical and theoretical issues as our army in the post- Afghanistan world. The structural (re)adjustment theme is carried on in two good articles. The first, penned by Lieutenant Colonel Martin White argues for a greater focus on strategic logic in Defence planning while Colonel Craig Bickell outlines the combined arms imperatives he believes are behind the need for Plan Beersheba. A very good attempt at demystifying the world of cyber warfare for neophytes like myself is made by Major Nick Rose. And an argument for how the Australian Army should look at cultural training and why is convincingly made by LWSC’s own Major Matt Carr. Lastly, we don’t often publish lengthy reviews of books; however we have made an exception in the case of Bob Lowry’s outstanding treatment of Lieutenant-General Kiki Syahnakri’s book Timor Timur. Bob uses his voluminous knowledge of the subject matter to put both the book and the topic into context.
Sadly, this edition of the Journal also represents the last time that LWSC will be responsible for its production. That is because LWSC is to be disestablished with effect 31 December 2013. The Centre was established in 1997 with the aim (in part) ‘…to influence the professional, academic, and community discussion of defence policy, land power development, and related issues.’ The innovation that those who supported the concept wished to engender in the unique organization was evident in the DCA’s 2005 Directive that charged LWSC with providing land warfare advocacy, raising the level of professional and intellectual debate within Army and promoting and conducting applied research ‘…free of the constraints inherent in normal staff processes.’ It was a challenge that many took up with gusto throughout its history, but there remained a great deal of unrealized potential in the concept.
Future land warfare research and advocacy is now to become a staff function within Army HQ. Some research tasks will be contracted out. I can’t help but think that just as the Army needs innovative thinking, engagement and advocacy to take us through the challenges of a post-operational environment, we appear to have withdrawn from the intellectual field of battle and made advocacy and research just another Army HQ staff function, subject to the normal vagaries of posting plots and subsequent staff churn.
It is hard to imagine where potentially innovative military thinkers will be allowed to explore and develop ideas amongst a group of people with relatively diverse skill sets and experience, and advocate for them based on how well developed and argued they are, rather than what the next most senior person thinks of them. True independence of thought becomes constrained the moment it becomes a staff function. The then-DCA acknowledged as much in his 2005 Directive. If Army wants to encourage innovative and independent thinking then LWSC is the sort of institution that you would need to invent if it didn’t exist, and yet Army is going the other way. I note that the RAAF has maintained the Air Power Studies Centre and the RAN the Sea Power Centre, while Army has disbanded its Centre and replaced it with an Army HQ Directorate.
It has been interesting, as a reservist Director of LWSC who was not resident in Canberra to see how Army encourages and encourages its members to think. As an army I believe that we place more value on the doers rather than the thinkers, and alacrity as a staff officer is prized more than the way in which an officer can develop, articulate and advocate an idea. As a profession we are taught the value of structure and how to write to inform each other, rather than the value of passion and innovation and how to argue a point in the broader community. Staff branches demand and therefore encourage the former, while a small organization such as LWSC was designed to facilitate the latter. In the absence of LWSC it will be interesting to see how we as an Army provide an institutional ‘home’ for people who want to be intellectually curious and innovative but not a staff officer, want to engage with academia and defence-related interest groups and advocate for Army. I am not sure that subsuming functions into the staff system, contracting them out to academia or farming them out to Defence training institutions is the answer.
Still, a decision has been made and that is the end of the discussion. I hope that people enjoyed reading the Centre’s publications, following our tweets, attending our seminars at Russell and our roundtables at Duntroon, and listening to our staff speak to various career courses on innovative thinking or at various conferences on issues various. I am sure the same people would have enjoyed our future planned but never-to-be realised future innovations.
It would be remiss of me not to personally thank all of the current staff at LWSC for their generous support for my efforts to have the Centre pursue its program of research, collaboration and outreach with the occasional tilt at windmills. Most succeeded, some didn’t and some of the potentially most fruitful were works in progress but will now die on the vine. The staff we currently have are very talented and I hope Army is able to make use of their intellect within the organization for as long as possible. It is also challenging for the two Deputy Directors who worked for me during my time as Director to have a boss who is both ARes and in Sydney. My Canberra radar was never switched on which allowed me deal with issues on what I considered to be their merit, while they constantly had to deal with ARA superiors whose Canberra radars were never switched off. It can’t have been easy for them. Finally, thanks should also go to the past Directors of LWSC who both built it and maintained it when it was difficult to convince people that such an institution was required in the Army. The 16 years that LWSC existed for is testimony to their doggedness and determination.
For all of its frustrations I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in LWSC and dealing with the Journal and other publications. For all my complaints of Army officers’ lack of writing skills and intellectual rigour I have been fortunate to be reminded of their professionalism and camaraderie every time I have had to go to Canberra. When I was told that LWSC was to be disbanded, I wrote to a friend telling him that ‘the Visigoths have breached the walls’ – the remark was made mostly in jest but not entirely. Army needs officers who are questioning and both intellectually curious and rigorous; they will be sorely needed in the years ahead. Yet neither the staff nor the military education systems are set up to develop either. Without LWSC as a small beacon of intellectual diversity within Army, the organization runs the risk of seeing thinking purely as another staff function with all the inherent limits that this imposes. But that is now for other people to think about. To the rest of you, thanks for the opportunity to serve and good soldiering.
