The Medium-weight Force: Lessons Learned and Future Contributions to Coalition Operations
Abstract
This article is based on an address by the Chief of the Australian Army, Lieutenant General Peter Leahy AO, to the Royal United Services Institute of the United Kingdom at the Royal Palace of Whitehall on 8 June 2006. Lieutenant General Leahy outlines why the Australian Army is seeking a significant increase in combat weight when most Western armies are lightening their forces. He argues that Australian military history is the backdrop against which this apparent anomaly can be resolved.
This discussion of the medium-weight force in coalition operations will focus on those aspects that are unique to the Australian Army. From the outset I should emphasise that certain crucial aspects of our Australian strategic circumstances, culture and history are unique. Furthermore, they have exercised a decisive effect on the structure of the Australian Army. The past is prologue and the move to a medium-weight force represents a significant transformation of the Australian Army. We are engaged in this process of transformation right now; the end-state for the achievement of the medium-weight force is what we refer to as the ‘Hardened and Networked Army’. As I will illustrate, this transformation is best understood in the context of the Australian Army’s formative history.
I would like to focus first on commonalities. I am encouraged by the degree of unanimity among the advanced armies of the West regarding the increasingly lethal and complex nature of the battlespace, and the implications of this for our force structures and the capabilities required by our land forces. Of course we may all be wrong, but I believe that recent operational experience and the most likely future environment have vindicated our approach.
It seems to me that all of us have concluded that there is likely to be a diminution in state-on-state, force-on-force, conventional warfighting. However, the ability to conduct such operations, especially through the mastery of sustained close combat employing the combined arms team, remains the core contribution of an army to national power. The Australian Army remains firmly committed to professional mastery of warfighting at medium to high intensity levels as the best guarantee of success in other missions across the spectrum.
While conventional warfighting must be the ultimate benchmark and cannot prudently be ruled out, it seems likely that most of our armies are likely to be confronted by hybrid wars and non-state enemies, whether militias, terrorist groups or transnational criminals. While once this would have had no implications for our force structures, the impact of globalisation has been such that small teams of irregular enemies can now deliver the lethal kinetic effects that were previously the exclusive province of conventional armed forces. Our adversaries have exploited the general increase in individual lethality that is characteristic of the information age.
Moreover, today’s adversary is networked through the proliferation of cheap secure communications. To survive and prevail in the complex environment constituted by this threat we need to be better protected, agile, flexible and adaptable and thus able to devolve into semi-autonomous small, combined arms teams. While the current insurgency in Iraq epitomises this trend, in fact, we have been on notice since the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 and the various wars in Chechnya over the past decade.
The Australian Army has drawn the obvious conclusions from all of this and has embarked on a development trajectory to become a Hardened and Networked Army—what is commonly referred to as the HNA. It is at this point that I digress from our shared assumptions and common forecasts about the future. Whereas most Western armies are lightening their forces to respond to the complex environment I have just described, in Australia, the transformation to the HNA represents a significant increase in combat weight to afford the Australian Army greater protection and firepower. We are moving up while other armies are rebalancing or moving down. Even with these shifts, as a small army, we will not meet our contemporaries in the middle. We will remain quantifiably and qualitatively below the levels of capability of many of the advanced Western armies.
How did this come to be? In answering that question, I must provide a potted history of the Australian way of war which, through the interplay of a range of cultural, geographic and historical factors, is unique—despite falling within the broad classification of the ‘Western Way of War’.
The Australian Army was one of the first forces to grasp the lessons of the Western Front in 1916–17. It was among the first to introduce what the eminent American strategic thinker, Stephen Biddle, described as the ‘modern system’ of force employment constituted by mutually supporting combined arms teams in response to the ‘metal storm’ that was the feature of the industrial-age battlefield. At the battle of Hamel on 3–4 July 1918, as part of a British, French and US coalition, Australian troops demonstrated their mastery of this new way of war. Their success at Hamel was achieved through the sophisticated orchestration of effects including the use of aircraft for observation of fires and battlefield illumination, as well as close cooperation between infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery.
During the Second World War, Australian forces performed creditably in the Middle East in coalition with the British. The Australian 9th Division, in particular, distinguished itself at El Alamein. In coalition with our US allies we defeated the forces of Imperial Japan in New Guinea, where our land forces again demonstrated their ability to master modern warfare.
That conflict in New Guinea was our only war of national survival. Throughout most of our history our land forces have been deployed offshore in an expeditionary mode, in support of our national interests and values as part of coalitions of like-minded nations. This reflects our status as a relatively small nation, populated largely by European migrants, which has ultimately developed liberal democratic institutions and a free market economy.
Since our inception as a nation we have attempted to ensure that a global equilibrium favourable to nations of this disposition has prevailed. In order to achieve this we have committed forces to coalitions led by whichever friendly dominant power has sought to enforce such a global order. Successive Australian governments have acted thus, regardless of occasional outbreaks of isolationist sentiment. It is a rational response to our unique status in our region and the constraints of our small population and traditionally low levels of military expenditure.
A glance at Australian battle honours—from the Sudan in the 1880s, through South Africa, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan as well as both the wars against Iraq—reveals an expeditionary military culture that in turn supports a grand strategy built on an alliance with the dominant liberal democratic power de jour.
To date, this grand strategy has succeeded in achieving Australian national security and prosperity. However, it has not exercised a uniformly beneficial effect on land forces structures or doctrine at the operational level of war. Let me explain. The last time our conventional forces were engaged in sustained close combat was during the Vietnam War. Our land forces operated in a complex and ambiguous environment in which they often simultaneously conducted combined arms conventional operations against a very capable foe; counterinsurgency operations against guerillas; civil affairs and nation-building tasks; while also raising and training indigenous forces. Again, our forces displayed exemplary professionalism and readily adapted to the exigencies of modern warfighting. We also matured as a coalition partner through participating in joint warfighting supported by US naval and air forces.
However, Australia acquired its own Vietnam syndrome, albeit different to that of the US. In the 1970s, as a nation, we concluded that the safest way to avoid entanglements in Asia was to restructure the Australian Defence Force (ADF) almost exclusively for the defence of continental Australia. This represented a profound discontinuity in our grand strategy and over time it seriously eroded the warfighting capabilities of our land forces.
Essentially the new grand strategy sought refuge in Australia’s apparently unassailable geography. The bulk of ADF funds were allocated to forces that could deny an invader entry to the continental air and sea approaches. Inevitably, this led to our air and naval forces being maintained at high levels of readiness, while the Army languished as a second-tier force. The Australian Army was deemed to be a mere strategic goal-keeper, required to mop up small groups of enemy who had managed to cross the sea-air gap around the continent.
If it were not a fanciful view of warfare then, it most certainly is now, when globalisation has so severely compressed time and space, and when the likelihood of an invasion of Australia appears minimal. Over time, the effect on the Army of these official strategic assumptions has been quite pernicious.
We hollowed our units, based on assurances from planners that we would have significant lead-time to mobilise, not unlike a nineteenth-century force. Moreover, we steadily disbanded most of our vital expeditionary capabilities, particularly deployable logistics, on the assumption that, while operating exclusively on Australian soil, we could rely on our home infrastructure and contractor base.
What this meant in practice was that our Special Forces became the only land element capable of operating effectively with our coalition partners. This, paradoxically, had occurred while we invoked the rhetoric of self-reliance.
By the early 1990s we had almost lost the ability to field credible combined arms teams in a coalition setting. It was becoming risky to deploy our conventional forces in even a low intensity environment. This was confirmed by the deployment of a light infantry battalion group to Somalia in 1992, when their organic vehicles were vulnerable to militia mounted in ‘technicals’ with heavy machine-guns.
Ultimately, it was another coalition expeditionary operation that sounded the alarm bells about this parlous state of affairs. In 1999—with very little lead-time—Australia was required to lead a multinational stabilisation force into East Timor. Even this modest commitment imposed an enormous strain on our small land forces. Our soldiers and junior leaders performed splendidly. However, we were fortunate that we were accorded permissive entry and encountered no credible opposition with more than small arms.
The Australian Government heeded the message from this deployment. A Defence White Paper released in 2000 directed that the Army be expanded and that it develop the capacity to deploy a brigade and a battalion group simultaneously on expeditionary operations. While refraining from authorising the development of heavy armoured forces, the White Paper did provide the flexibility for the Army to enhance its combat weight in response to changes in the threat environment and to ensure that our forces could survive without undue risk.
While the US Army—having absorbed the lessons of Desert Storm—was attempting to lighten combat forces designed to defend the Fulda Gap, the Australian Army recognised that it had to enhance its combat weight in order to bolster its strategic mobility as a prerequisite for deployment outside Australia. This was not aimed at any particular scale or type of operation, but was simply a case of being equipped to survive on the more lethal modern battlefield.
In this way our development path and that of our likely coalition partners once again converged. Australia recognises that its responsibilities as a coalition partner may involve leading a coalition rather than merely contributing niche forces. That is especially likely to be the case in our immediate region where we are a capable military power. Our regional geography does not serve to inoculate us against the transformation in warfare that has occurred since the end of the Cold War.
Since the turn of this century it has become abundantly clear that the diffusion of the means of violence and the increase in lethality available to individuals and non-state actors has forever severed the nexus between so-called low intensity conflict and irregular warfare. This is also the case in our region where conventional wisdom has long held that light infantry will dominate any conflict.
We in Australia now assume that regardless of the classification of the mission—whether it be delivery of humanitarian support, peace enforcement, counterinsurgency or warfighting—it is likely that our troops will face potent threats in the form of manportable anti-armoured weapons or improvised explosive devices.
We must enhance our combat weight and ability to survive short-range engagements in complex—most probably urban—terrain. This is where we believe the overarching trends in globalisation and demography are taking warfare. To the US Marine Corps concept of the three-block war we must add British General Rupert Smith’s clear insight that war will be fought ‘amongst the people’. Our task is more often likely to be protecting, supporting and persuading rather than killing and destroying.
The Australian Army’s Hardening and Networking initiative has two broad aims: first, to be harder to hit; second, to be able to hit harder. Both aims involve the step-up towards a medium-weight force through the introduction of the Abrams M1A1 main battle tank and the rationalisation of our armoured fighting vehicle fleet to mechanise and motorise our land force right through to combat service support elements. We will also introduce new artillery systems, an armed reconnaissance helicopter, improved direct and indirect fire weapons and tactical unmanned aerial vehicles. Our purpose throughout is to maximise our ability to conduct close combat using combined arms teams. This represents a significant move from a light, leg infantry force towards a medium-weight force.
Finally, a word about ‘networking’—the other element of the HNA. The threat environment that I have described demands more than greater protection and fire-power to ensure that our forces will prevail. We will need pervasive situational awareness, seamless access to joint effects and the ability to match the agility of our irregular foes through the creation of small, tailored combined arms teams. This will also permit us to be more discriminate in the application of effects.
Within the complex, ambiguous battlespace, hitting civilians or culturally sensitive infrastructure under the gaze of the global media undermines our centre of gravity, namely our moral authority. Network-enabled operations are vital to providing the solution to this dilemma—the strategic private. The HNA will seamlessly link sensors and shooters to our joint and coalition partners. The individual soldier will become a node in this network and share a common operational picture with his commander two and three up. Our focus will be on the soldier or the ‘networker’ rather than the technical aspects of the network.
At this point in time, much of this is aspirational. However, the HNA provides the axis of advance toward this end-state. Of course it also carries significant implications for future coalition operations. In the world of failing and distressed states it is probable that the armies of wealthy advanced nations will increasingly be required to conduct intervention and stabilisation operations.
A description of our current operational deployments illustrates this. We are operating in conjunction with the British in southern Iraq and are about to deploy a Provincial Reconstruction Team to Afghanistan in concert with Dutch and NATO forces. This team will be additional to our Special Forces and CH 47 helicopters currently operating as a national contingent as part of the multinational force in Afghanistan.
Closer to home, we are the lead nation in the multi-agency Regional Assistance Mission in Solomon Islands (RAMSI), and have just completed a short-notice, multinational deployment to that nation to stabilise a deteriorating situation. Over the past two weeks we have also rapidly deployed a very capable Joint Task Force to East Timor in response to a request from its government, following a period of lawlessness and political instability there. We are joined in this endeavour by forces from Malaysia, New Zealand and Portugal.
We live in an era in which political sensitivities and issues of legitimacy ensure even the most powerful nations will refrain from the unilateral use of force, preferring to seek partners with similar capabilities and interests for the pursuit of military objectives.
Whether we are operating with our traditional allies or under the auspices of the United Nations, the Australian Army will need the combat weight and communications to collaborate with other sophisticated land forces. Moreover, our need for combat weight, networking, and seamless joint and multi-agency capabilities will be even greater if we are required to be the lead nation.
Until our deployments to Bougainville and East Timor, the lead nation role in a coalition was unfamiliar to us. In recent years, however, our immediate region has earned the title ‘arc of instability’. As the most capable military power adjacent to Micronesia and Polynesia, Australia carries the expectations of the United Nations and our traditional allies to provide the bulk of the forces required for contingencies in this area. But we must also be prepared to make a meaningful contribution wherever our national interests are challenged.
