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Professor John Spoehr is Professor and Director of the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute (AITI) at Flinders University. He is a social and economic analyst and strategist with over 25 years’ experience delivering high-quality contract research outcomes for government, industry and community organisations. Professor Spoehr is a national industry development and workplace innovation expert regularly called upon to provide advice to industry, government and NGOs on policy, strategy and practice. …

Mr Hamish Gamble is a Senior Project Officer who joined the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute (AITI) in January 2019. His responsibilities include the analysis of statistical datasets to provide insights into the performance of the economy at both a macro and a micro level. As a part of this role he provides monthly written updates on key economic indicators, with a specific focus on the labour market, including time series forecasts to identify the direction of these indicators. Hamish is …

How can we generate more land capability mass at less cost? The Chief of Army has asked us to think differently. My earlier article challenged the assumption that only a full-time organisation can deliver ‘high-end’ competencies for modern warfare fighting – using the example of the Swiss militia army of the Cold War.   This article looks at a very different part-time force. The British Territorial Army (TA) of the Cold War received less formal training than the contemporary Australian reserve, yet it was …

Global demographic trends and urbanisation are combining to increase the size and density of cities… Conflict will be fought underground, in jungles, swamps, deserts, mountains and wherever people are, and increasingly in urban and littoral areas, the electromagnetic spectrum and the cyber and information domains. Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy , Edition 2, pages 18-20. Reflecting common consensus, empirical evidence and even vicarious experience (Mosul, Marawi), the Australia Army’s most recent …

This is the fifth blog in a series benchmarking the French Army – the armée de Terre. To date, this series has ‘benchmarked’ the armée de Terre , its culture , its structure and its people capability . This post will analyse the French Army’s approach to training. In doing so, it will highlight points of convergence relevant to the increasingly important Army/armée de Terre partnership. The author currently serves as Army’s Liaison Officer to the armée de Terre in France. Many are familiar with the proverb …

Part 1 of this series made the case that humanities and social sciences (HASS) and management disciplines are indispensable for the long-term effectiveness of military planning. They greatly complement STEM capabilities and help make military plans more relevant and robust. This second article in the series explores the pervasive antipathy towards these disciplines in the Australian public discourse, and the implications of this for the Australian military. As was explained in Part 1 of this series , STEM …

During the latter months of 2019 and the new year of 2020, Australia experienced catastrophic and widespread bushfires. As the situation worsened, the federal government unexpectedly called out the Australian Defence Force (ADF) Reserves to bolster an already significant deployment of ADF regular forces to contribute to a massive interagency and volunteer community response. This deployment was the largest ever peacetime domestic ADF operation in response to a natural disaster. As the lessons of Operation …

This is the sixth blog in a series on benchmarking the French Army – the armée de Terre. To date, this series has ‘benchmarked’ the armée de Terre , its culture , its structure , its people capability  and its approach to training . This post will analyse the French Army’s modernisation program. In doing so, it will highlight points relevant to the increasingly important Army/armée de Terre partnership. The author currently serves as Army’s Liaison Officer to the armée de Terre in France. An …

This edition of ETOs seeks to promote readings the AARC team recommend for assisting Army to adapting to future threats and opportunities. We deliberately span a range of topics and aim to provide enough time to order books of interest prior to the Christmas holidays. Happy reading! Resilience   Philip H. Gordon, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East , Oct 2020. This book is a clinical review of United States’ efforts to affect regime change in the Middle East since …

The Australian military should strive for a balanced skills strategy, which augments STEM capabilities with humanities, social sciences, and management disciplines. Any military is only as good as its people, platforms and partnerships – its veritable ‘Strategic Trinity’. However, the effects of these are not uniform, with people exerting a disproportionately significant impact on its long-term effectiveness. The calibre of the people – and their overall skills, training and experience – not only shapes …