Login
iscover
The Jericho initiative is rapidly gaining traction in terms of its awareness within the Australian Air Force, according to veteran RAAF jet pilot and chief executive of military services firm Milskil John Lonergan.
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
Create free account to get unlimited news articles and more!
Plan Jericho is the Air Force’s campaign to transform itself into a fully integrated networked force, with the freedom of action in the air, space, electromagnetic and cyber domains.
Lonergan said that when Jericho was first launched, many parties active in the defence vertical cast the notion as something of an ephemeral vision.
"It's talking about a defence force that didn't exist when the vision came out and … I think in the beginning, people weren't sure whether that [Jericho concept] just meant innovation, working together or networking," he added.
"I think everyone is now getting a better understanding and certainly the people who I've talked to [are] talking about air warfare destroyers working with JSFs, which is a conversation you generally wouldn't hear before with different service elements, and how things need to pull together, I think people understand the concept of everyone working together as people but [also] with systems working together."
"We are a unique business [in] that really, we're trying to get visibility of exactly what we do because [through] training with all this new equipment we go back to that sitting on the flight line," he said, outlining how Milskil fits into the wider Jericho-centric Defence strategy.
"The whole Jericho vision is that all of this equipment will work together and [that] by working together, everyone will have situational awareness of what's going on and that data is fused."
However, Lonergan said the main challenge going forward was not how to teach someone to fly a JSF or how to operate an E-7.
"It's how to put all those things fused together and for our uniformed people, our war fighters of the future, … to actually do that in a Jericho-enabled sense," he noted.
More specifically, the Milskil CEO said the training challenge would need to involve more than just teaching someone to do a job using their own platform or with their equipment.
"It's how they use everyone else in there and that's where we're positioning ourselves as well," he added.
"I think it is a journey and until you plug all that stuff together, you won't actually realise what you've got and then when you are looking at it, you won't actually realise initially how to exploit it. I think it's a pretty exciting journey."
