Search

This blog is part one of a two part series discussing the economic impacts on Defence in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has already upended everyday life and work around the world. Following the lead of major stock markets overseas, the Australian stock market fell precipitously in less than two months. Additionally, in less than a month, the Australian dollar fell to its lowest level against the US dollar in the last 17 years. This exceeds anything …

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  The  Brookings Institute  examines policy options for maintaining military readiness during COVID-19. It argues the US DoD should extend personnel postings beyond the typical two to three years to maintain unit readiness and retain collective knowledge while exercises are cancelled …

Studies of culture in the social sciences increasingly acknowledge the reflexive approach as a useful tool for research. The reflexive approach (sometimes called  auto-ethnography ) calls on the author to be both ‘ subject and object of the inquiry ’, meaning it includes the researcher’s lived experience in the analytic process. Reflexive practices have developed as legitimate methods of qualitative inquiry in some academic fields, but military studies, which stems from the more traditional disciplines …

This blog is part of a series on Quantum Technology and future land warfare, put out by the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation and Coordination Office (RICO), a part of Future Land Warfare Branch tasked with coordination and de-confliction or Army's Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS)/Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts in accordance with emerging disruptive technology.  Quantum technologies exploit the fundamental laws of nature to reach the ultimate limits of sensing, imaging, …

To develop commanders that are more intuitive requires training against a demanding (near-peer) adversary and the time to allow a degree of free-play rather than just the time to tick off the mission-essential task list. This is challenging to achieve in training given resource constraints and the need for safety. We rarely re-run a training serial. Responding to Major Purdy's ' Down and Dirty Downtown: Future Land Combat 2025 ' in October last year, I highlighted that while technology and numerical …

Introduction The ongoing struggle in Ukraine between government forces and Russian backed separatists – as well as operations in Syria - has provided a range of useful insights into trends in future land combat operations.  Much as the Yom Kippur War and the first Gulf War yielded insights into the future of warfare, these conflicts offer an important chance to prepare for the future operations if we are clever enough to grasp the opportunity.  The recent article by Professor Karber and Lieutenant Colonel …

   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 the  National Defence University , a throwback to 2018 and analysis done on the lessons learnt from the counter-terrorism operations conducted in Iraq by TF714. The key lesson from this study is the ‘irreducible minimum’ level of violence within a given society. For …

This blog is the first in a series of articles benchmarking the armée de Terre—an external, equivalent and contemporary exemplar for the Australian Army. The author currently serves as a Liasion Officer in France. Leading organisations of all types and sizes, including armies, benchmark. And with good reason. Benchmarking—comparing one organisation against another—is extolled by management professionals and commended in countless books, articles, blogs and business degrees. To paraphrase management guru …

Lessons   From the latest edition of  PRISM , and building upon earlier examination in this forum on the ethics involved in the employment of explosive weapons in urban areas, an article exploring the ethics of acquiring disruptive technologies. Disruptive technology is defined in this paper as AI, Autonomous Weapons and Decision Support Systems, and its importance lies in the paper's recognition that Western militaries may have little choice in proceeding with the acquisition of such capability. The …

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  the ICRC , an article examining the impact of explosive weapons in an urban environment, in terms of second-order effects against infrastructure, health and the overall impact to the civilian population. This paper complements a shorter piece published on the  Land Power …