Peter La Franchi/CANBERRA
Toward the end of last year, the Royal Australian Air Force undertook a low-key but highly significant restructuring of its operational Air Command, to bring into being what is now designated the Surveillance and Control Group.
Planned as the home of Australia's future airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft, the new group also draws in a range of key strategic and tactical sensor systems.
These include a new air-defence command and reporting system, to be developed by Boeing, new Lockheed Martin TPS-117 tactical air defence radars, and Australia's only operational over-the-horizon radar system, the 1RSU array, located near Alice Springs.
The group is also expected to assume control of the full Jindalee over-the-horizon radar network, which is to come on line in early 2002.
Further out, the group is also likely to become the home of even more sophisticated technologies. These range from a proposed space-based surveillance capability, to unmanned air vehicles, such as Global Hawk, which is the subject of negotiations between the Australian and US Departments of Defence, RAAF and Teledyne Ryan.
The importance of the new group resides not just in its linking of a range of like air force assets, but in the broader priorities of the Australian Defence Force, to use information dominance on the battlefield as a key element of its strategic planning.
According to the Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force, Air Marshal Errol McCormack, "...the way of the future is in fact to have a lead service that looks after specific capabilities, like surveillance and intelligence, across the spectrum. You don't have to actually do it all, but you have to co-ordinate it.
"I see that as the way to go," says McCormack. "The air force is in a good position with the Jindalee radar, AEW&C, microwave radar, and all of those sorts of systems, to do a good deal of the fusion work. That is what you are really talking about, fusing the information together.
"The navy and army will have their specific requirements and they will do some of the work, but I think the air force is well positioned to take the load."
The longer term implications of Australia's priority on information dominance, McCormack acknowledges, incorporate the concept of "information forces" with RAAF again favourably positioned for a lead role. McCormack says, however, that the full implications of taking that step are still to be fully understood.
The RAAF's future, he says, needs to be approached "-one step at a time. We have our Surveillance and Control Group, we will bring new equipment and capability in. A lot of it will depend on communications capabilities. But the knowledge edge is one of our key criteria in defence and that really is what information is all about."
BIG PICTURES
Australia's priorities for the development of its defence capabilities are defined by current strategic policy as being dependent "-primarily on our success in exploiting technology, doctrine and geography". Of particular importance, according to Australia's Strategic Policy 1997 statement, is the exploitation of concepts emerging from a "revolution in military affairs", which is now affecting armed forces around the world.
The revolution, the statement says, has particular significance for Australia. "Not only will new technology provide military personnel with an expansive breadth and depth of information about the battlefield, but sophisticated strike weapons will give forces the capability to destroy targets with an unparalleled degree of precision and effectiveness".
Exploration and exploitation of this "revolution", the statement says, will be the highest single priority in the spectrum of Australian Defence Force capability development. The "revolution", it says, offers Australia a "knowledge edge" in warfare. "That is, the effective exploitation of information technologies to allow us to use our relatively small force to maximum effectiveness."
The integral elements of the "knowledge edge" the statement says, will be intelligence, command and control systems, and surveillance. "Our aim is for an integrated system which incorporates all three." Turning the knowledge edge concept into a practical architecture, in air power terms, has proved itself to be a significant challenge to Australian defence planners.
According to Air Vice Marshal Peter Nicholson, who heads strategy policy and plans at Australian Defence Force headquarters, the surveillance mission alone presents problems of a major magnitude. "Australia's geographic circumstances," he says, "predicate a surveillance system with enormous coverage.
"This suggests a move to space-based sensors, but economic realities deny us an independent, full-coverage, sovereign [space]capability, although we must take full advantage of information obtained from our major ally, the United States."
The surveillance architecture currently under development is a layered system, based around the concepts of wide-and-broad area surveillance.
The wide-area mission is to be carried out by sensors such as the Jindalee Operational Radar Network, with the option of a supporting space-based capability, which is currently being explored.
The wide-area sensor systems are intended to be used to cue other broad-area systems, including the RAAF's own Lockheed Martin AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, being upgraded by Raytheon Systems.
The broad-area mission may also be filled by a small Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS)-type aircraft, or unmanned air vehicle such as Global Hawk, which would carry a synthetic aperture radar payload. This concept is being explored via a project known as Joint 129, originally established to provide airborne surveillance for land forces, but now also looking at a blue water role.
The RAAF's Project Air 5077 AEW&C requirement straddles the divide between wide-and-broad area concepts, but again would also use cueing from the Jindalee radar, and any future Australian space system, to specify potential areas of interest.
The integration of the wide and broad layers, in command and control terms, is being pursued as part of the Australian Defence Force's Joint Command Support Environment being created under a project known as JP2030. Progressive phases of this project have created a common command and control system, linking all major Australian headquarters and with Phase 5 bringing into being a specific Air Command Support System.
Communications between the wide and broad levels incorporate a satellite capability, developed as Project JP2008, military satellite communications, as well as a strategic level HF communication system being developed by Boeing under Project Air 5397.
DATA PILOT
The potential future of the RAAF as an "information force" emerges from considerable work undertaken over the past two years, aimed at reconciling Australian strategic planning with the ongoing development of air power concepts by other western air forces, the US Air Force in particular.
According to Nicholson, the approach taken by Australia in defining its knowledge edge concepts is thus far "very conventional". This assessment, he says, is particularly the case in the light of emerging technology and operational concepts. The knowledge edge, Nicholson says, "...can be characterised in ways in which it might be applied across all levels of war and in terms of its components."
The rapid development of information technology, he argues "...has opened up a wholenew field of warfare in the knowledge domain that must be treated holistically, if it is tobe mastered."
Twelve months ago, at the RAAF's biannual Air Power Conference in Canberra, Nicholson predicted that the importance of information, as an element of warfighting, would see the rise of a new service arm within the ADF structure. The new service, he suggested, would link air power - in particular precision-strike - with new information force concepts.
In the past, Nicholson told the conference, the elements that are converging to create the information force idea "-have been seen as disparate elements. But in the new domain of knowledge warfare, there would seem to be little sense in dispersing these functions among several staff branches, such as intelligence, operations and communications.
"Rather, they would be better grouped together at the operational level, to reflect the central position of knowledge warfare in attaining decision superiority."
Nicholson told the conference that the implications of knowledge warfare as a driver in RAAF force development meant that "...sophisticated sensor management and complementary sensor systems are prerequisite capabilities for both battlespace situational awareness and targeting. "Unmanned air vehicles and future airborne collection aircraft will provide the balance between autonomous sensors on-board our fighter and strike aircraft, and off-boardspace-based systems."
The "effect of precision engagement, based on superior battlespace situational awareness", Nicholson said, coupled with an enhanced off-board sensing and target designation capability "...is that a small strike force like that of the RAAF becomes extremely viable."
ORACLE 2030
To consolidate both prevailing strategic planning and the broad-ranging visions of the future of air power in the new century, the RAAF has begun a major study of likely developments and trends in the Asia-Pacific region, out across the first half of the 21st century.
The study, known as Oracle 2030, is intended to form the basis of a substantially improved forward-planning system for the RAAF and has close parallels with the US Air Force's 2025 study, including the use of "alternate futures" methodology. This approach aims not so much at grand prediction, as at providing a range of possibilities based on detailed extrapolations of the present.
According to the Oracle project manager, Wg Cdr Warren Fletcher: "Clearly, the future is unknowable, and alternate futures planning is just a tool to stimulate thinking ... nevertheless, through Oracle 2030 the RAAF will be better placed to address a range of possible future environments and to consider the different activities and force qualities that might be required".
To support the project, the RAAF has contracted US-based Toffler Associates, a futures and social-analysis organisation, to assist in setting up research and the development of an initial set of eight possible models of the future - or in the words of the Oracle study team, "alternate worlds".
Toffler Associates was closely involved in the USAF's own 2025 study.
Each "world" developed by the Oracle team will present a detailed model of what the Asia-Pacific region might look like in 2030. For four of these worlds, those selected to be "the most useful and most stressful to RAAF", according to the project office. The study will also include the preparation of a plausible "history" to provide the necessary extrapolation from the current year.
A second phase, beginning in the second half of this year, will analyse the world models, in terms of direct implications for RAAF strategic planning.
According to data released by the RAAF, the analysis will concentrate on "functional areas such as operations, logistics, manpower, personnel and training, command and control, research and development, infrastructure and the revolution in military affairs."
According to Fletcher, the objective in this part of the study will be to "-develop appropriate concepts and strategies to assist [RAAF] -to contribute effectively to Australia's security in a range of possible futures".
Air Cdre Peter Criss, director general policy and plans - air force, says: "What we hope to get out of Oracle is that we can better advise the [Australian force development] system from an air force perspective of what we believe is the way to approach the future.
"That doesn't mean that everything we come up with, out of Oracle ,will be acceptable. But at least we will be able to brief the Chief of Air Staff so that he can go forward from an air-specialist point of view and advise on what we believe is the most appropriate way to develop the force for the future."
Source: Flight International
