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  Foreword The Australian soldier has a well-earned reputation for expertise in counter-insurgency. Perhaps this reputation is born from Australia’s experience of the Malayan Emergency, the Borneo Confrontation or the Vietnam War; and it was probably sustained through United Nations deployments as peacekeepers within generally fractured societies. A Framework for Irregular Warfare (the Irregular Warfare Essay Collection), published by the Australian Army Research Centre, responds to this tradition. By …

The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy   by Rebecca Lissner Oxford University Press, 2021, 240 pp Paperback ISBN: 0197583199 Reviewed By : William Westerman   According to US political scientist Barry Posen, a state’s grand strategy is its theory of how it will achieve security and stability for itself in both times of peace and times of war. [1] Once established, grand strategies usually change in two ways: when they are completely overhauled in response to shifts in the …

Context Australia’s strategic geography will continue to present new challenges and opportunities into the future. The nation will remain an enormous landmass with a small population at the bottom of Asia. Yet, no longer is our region a strategic backwater with geographic depth. Our historic geographic advantage is being eroded by grey zone actions, the reach and lethality of modern weapons, the potency of anti-access and area-denial (A2AD) systems, and the broader modernisation of other nations’ military …

Executing What Has Been Started Eighteen months ago, Army released its capstone narrative, ‘Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy’ , which defined the current and future operating environment as well as its vision, frameworks and culture. These documents and Army’s modernisation design principles of Connected, Protected, Lethal and Enabled seek to balance the current and expected readiness demands of being both ‘Ready Now’ and ‘ Future Ready’ . Strategic Environment The Defence White Paper states the …

The acute difficulties of urban operations epitomised by the struggle in Stalingrad recurred in Mosul, Raqqa and Marawi, exhibiting that the fundamental requirement for slow, systematic and deliberate clearing building-by-building is no easier 70 years later. In fact, the shift is in the other direction—things are now more difficult.  The enduring complications imposed by physical structures are now compounded by the presence of populations and informational factors, rendering the modern urban fight truly …

With rising great power contestation and increasing strategic risk across the globe, everything seems to be called ‘war’. Examples of war’s colloquial use include the trade war between the United States and China, and the concept of grey-zone war (sometimes known as grey-zone warfare). This style of ‘political war’ is defined as “…political influence, economic coercion, use of cyber, use of information operations, and …use of military posture” to shape an opponent, their allies and partners. [1] Although …

Emerging Threats and Opportunities (ETOs) is a regular blog series on the Land Power Forum that collects together blogs, podcasts and articles of interest with the goal of creating discussion on the topic of land power. Lessons From ASPI Strategist , a piece from December last year that explores the idea that the US may have learnt a lesson of minimising engagement in the Middle East over the past two decades, and thus, considers what a reduced engagement posture might look like. Coming from Richard Haass, …

Army has established an office within the Future Land Warfare Branch of Land Capability division to increase its adoption of disruptive technologies. The role of the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation Coordination Office (RICO) is exploration, coordination and concept development using disruptive technology. Director General of Future Land Warfare Brigadier Ian Langford said the RICO was “consistent with the CA’s vision of being future-ready by looking for opportunities to integrate technology …

Yesterday on the Land Power Forum—thanks to an article from Army News—we briefly introduced you to the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation Coordination Office (RICO) operating out of Future Land Warfare Branch of Army’s Land Capability Division. The recently established Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation Office (RICO) is responsible for pursuing Army’s interests in Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) and disruptive technologies and ethically leverage …

‘The military that is able to figure it out and… that can weave together the old and new, not just old and new technology but old and new thinking, they will be the ones that win.’ ( Peter Singer ) Inevitable hardening of  military robotics  suggests that development of war munitions won’t be immune to the impact of  mechatronic warfare . Like the almost indestructible  killer robot  immortalised in the popular science-fiction franchise  Terminator , near-future military robots portend to be tenacious and …