Speed to effect: The post-DSR Army takes shape

For the Australian Army, the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the supporting 2024 National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program have seen the culmination of a longer-term narrative, shifting the tactical and strategic focus of Army towards confronting the challenges posed by this era of renewed great power competition.

At the centre of this narrative is the dual focus on transforming Army into a littoral-focused force, supported by the formalisation of Army’s role as the tip of the spear for the nation’s long-range fires capability, at least until the arrival of the future conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine fleet beginning in the mid-to-late-2030s.

As we have been frequently reminded, however, we live in the “dangerous period since the Second World War”, with our long-vaunted, 10-year “strategic warning time” no longer existing, driving the need for an acceleration of Australia’s military modernisation and recapitalisation.

To better confront the challenges of emerging peer and near-peer competitors, across the force, the Australian Army is acquiring a suite of advanced capabilities and core reorganisation to reshape the Army into a critical component of the $36–$44 billion over the next decade and a focus on what Chief of Army LTGEN Simon Stuart AO, DSC calls “Speed to Effect” while also embracing and accounting for the lessons learned in the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.

In the last 12 months, Army has achieved several key milestones in this broader force transformation, including:

• Reorganising command and control to which as Army says, “train as we fight”.
• Enhancing and strengthening Forces Command’s force generation capacity at the macro and micro levels.
• Refocusing the roles of Army’s existing combat brigades and consolidating them across northern Australia.
• Shifting the focus of the 2nd Australian Division to prioritise Australia’s domestic resilience and security.
• Expanding the transformation of Army’s world-class battlefield aviation capability.
• Raising the 10th Brigade in Adelaide to provide long-range and air defence missile systems.

Speaking to Defence Connect at an industry media roundtable, Chief of Army LTGEN Simon Stuart AO DSC explained the driving force behind this push to deliver “speed to effect”, saying, “In the short 16 months (since the delivery of the DSR), Army has achieved a lot, because speed to effect matters.”

At the core of this approach is the need to take an adaptable approach and getting Army, Defence and industry comfortable with being uncomfortable and the complete rewriting of the Army’s Land Domain Operating Concept, including the update of doctrine and updating of Army’s Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs).

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According to LTGEN Stuart, the most significant changes at the structural level were in Forces Command, which as he explains, a prioritisation on creating a single, holistic “Army Training System” that can best generate forces in support of ADF campaigns.

LTGEN Stuart detailed this, telling Defence Connect, “we’ve got a formation that can generate out of contact, can scale, and do Army’s part of mobilisation’” and role more broadly within the new “integrated, focused force”.

“Importantly, the key changes in disposition for Army are either all under way, or the planning has been done and those orders will be executed from the pre-management cycle in 2025,” LTGEN Stuart added.

Information is power – data and analytics

Embracing a technology-focused approach, both in terms of physical platforms and the underpinning digital architecture across the force will empower Army to make decisions faster, more effectively and as LTGEN Stuart explained, “more effectively utilise our resources, while allowing us to understand what is working and what isn’t and providing us with a much keener understanding of performance”.

This is already yielding results, with Army leveraging data and critical analytics to entirely change its approach to readiness, towards an approach where Army is building readiness while forces are deployed operations, activities, and investments around the Indo-Pacific.

LTGEN Stuart explained the importance of this approach saying, “this approach moves Army away from consuming readiness in the lead-up to deploying, to now leverage technology to generate technological offsets to counter our lack of scale”.

Bringing Army to its new dual responsibilities of serving as the nation’s sword and shield function, balancing the long-range strike and littoral manoeuvre capabilities alongside Army’s role in the broader integrated air and missile defence capabilities required by Australia’s “integrated, focused force” and alongside our allies and partners.

Sword and shield functions

Army’s shifting mission and new role providing both a sword and shield function is set to benefit from the acquisition of a host of new capabilities, including the modular Boxer Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle fleet, Hanwha’s Redback Infantry Fighting Vehicles, the new M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams main battle tanks, AH-64E Apache and for the first time in Army’s history, an armoured bridging and breeching capability for engineers.

For LTGEN Stuart, this collection of capabilities represents the “best combined arms fighting system we have had in our Army’s history both in an aggregated or disaggregated capacity” and will be further empowered by “being partnered with a Littoral Manoeuvre Group that will operate out of north Queensland with the idea of being able to project force and to manoeuvre in the littorals.

“Now when we use the word littoral, people go to a picture of a ship or a watercraft, and they are important obviously, but the idea of littoral manoeuvre is that we were not previously able to access the maritime side of the littorals for manoeuvre to establish a positional advantage for the integrated force.”

Learning lessons from the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza is also a driving force behind the shift towards the Army’s transition to a “sword and shield” function, with recent demonstrations of Ukrainian combined-arms manoeuvre operations within an electronic warfare denied environment and an air defence bubble proving to be of paramount importance.

Bringing us to the Army’s acquisition of HIMARS and, to a lesser extent, the self-propelled howitzers and towed M777 howitzers, which will enable the Australian Army to enter and add capability at the strategic level, giving the operational commanders a range of “different clubs in the golf bag”.

LTGEN Stuart said, “having the capacity for an airmobile gun is quite useful” with platforms like Army’s existing M777 inventory providing a robust, reliable capability leveraging a range of new and increasing range and lethal munition options.

Meanwhile, Hanwha’s AS-9 Huntsman and AS-10 armoured ammunition resupply vehicle will both serve a critical function in the 3rd Brigade combined arms fighting system, with LTGEN Stuart explaining that is because of the unique capabilities provided by those platforms and “providing Army with a range of tactical fires”.

Finally, for LTGEN Stuart, HIMARS is increasingly important, as “it can fire a number of tactical munitions, including ATACMS and GMLRS in the range of 40 kilometres to 300, but then with the Precision Strike Missile it will be able to reach out to operationally and strategically relevant distances in the hundreds of kilometres. Importantly, this will provide that land-based anti-ship missile capability which is a key part of Army’s contribution to the integrated force”.

Interestingly, LTGEN Stuart explained that despite a “larger” number of M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams being acquired by Australia, our fleet remains modest and will not change the number of tanks in the operational circulation while providing better cost outcomes for the overall fleet.

Detailing the lessons learned from the use of main battle tanks and armour in the Ukraine War, LTGEN Stuart explained, “as much as require improvements to the protection, there are two other key aspects and they are about employment. One is, if you apply flawed TTPs, then you should expect to be killed and we have seen a lot of that.

“The second is that you need to work as part of a system and once again, we are having to get used to looking up and not controlling the skies, so in that joint fight, being able to generate in a multi-domain sense windows or envelopes of where we do own the airspace or we can create conditions where we reduce the threat, which brings us to the application of our air defence capabilities and our proximal tactical electronic warfare capabilities to establish the shield component in the last few hundred metres against a determined or dug in enemy.”

All these factors combine to form the protective cocoon around the Australian warfighter, while also providing a web of enabling capabilities that allow Australian soldiers to close and engage with an adversary, both peer and near-peer and emerge victorious in a decisive manner.

At the core of this quantitative and qualitative leap for the Australian Army is its core mission within the combined “integrated, focused force” envisioned by the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the supporting 2024 National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program, respectively, and will serve to reaffirm the Army’s pivotal role in providing tactical and strategic solutions for the nation’s leaders.

You can hear more about Lieutenant General Simon Stuart AO, DSC’s plans, priorities and goals for the future of the Australian Army at the 2024 Land Forces Chief of Army Symposium in Melbourne on Thursday, 12, September 2024.