A balancing game

DCAF AVM Geoff Brown on change in the RAAF

I think there is some changes for us. If you look at us now I think maintenance wise we’ll probably go to a slightly smaller maintenance force and some of the administration tasks we’ll try and get more efficient with the way that is done how it is done through Defence. What we really need to be able to do is to put more people into analysis of the information flows that these aeroplane are able to produce So I think you will see increases in our military analysis, our intel specialisation need to get bigger because all the platforms we’re getting have a pretty big ISR focus and ISR pipes so again if you look at what you need to be able to do it is important that you have that sort of global situational awareness and I think that is a role where Air Force plays a big part, not the only part, but a big part., ISR part.

“It is still a matter of re-engineering the workforce, in that our current workforce is not necessarily exactly the one we want in 2020.”

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We’ve got a core of people in that role. It probably needs to double I think over the next ten years. But again the trick for us is that we have a capped man power limit, so we have to adjust the outfit to be able to grow these people. And they are really quite specialist and they take a while to grow so it’s not something that you can turn the tap on overnight and grow that sort of capability.

We’ve got pretty reasonable sort of organic capability, not only in air force but in DIGO and DSD and so that sort of strategic agencies that use that sort of capabilities.

Yeah although, when you say delays you know Wedgetail is going to come in November this year and I think within 12 months w will probably have it up and running. When we say delays Wedgetail is an interesting one – I think there was certain optimism about the development timeline of that. If you really benchmark it against the timeline that it actually takes complicated projects like that its probably about right the added time that it has taken us. To hit the original time lines everything would have had to have gone right, we would have had to designed it and built it and tested it and all the testing would have had 100 percent –

It has caused us some issues – the main issue that we have got is that some of the guys are further up the rank chain than we would have ideally liked for the introduction, but again that’s not really a big deal, it has given us a great opportunity, I think that at one stage we had over 20,000 hours of awac’s experience that we got courtesy of the US Air Force, again the US has been incredibly helpful to us in standing up that capability. In fact at one stage we had an E-3 crew that was all Australia, captain, co-Pilot and all the back end were all Australian. So there’s a fair depth of knowledge that will allow us to stand up that the capability very quickly once it comes into service.

“The money part is the easy part; the trick is to put it in a reform that means you can still produce the same capability or more capability at less cost.”

If you look at an air force I always say that they’re a complicated engineering, logistics and support organisation. If you look at it, the percentage of aircrew which is what the public normally see is really quite a small percentage of the outfit. I always say there is no more useless implement war than aeroplane that can’t fly, so the core of a good air force is the ability to produce serviceable, fully mission capable aeroplanes. You have got to make sure that that part of the outfit works really well, so your engineering logistics is really critical to your overall capability. But with modern technology and more modern aeroplanes, it’s a bit more of a modern car there are less requirements in that maintenance space, they are better designed for maintainability, so you can use less people in that. And again, as we have through this SRP process, my hope is that we’ll benchmark ourselves some of the best practises in industry – if you’ve got RFID tags on spare parts and you have better control of your spare parts , you need less people in those sort of areas.

Maintenance is certainly an area is where we can contribute in that savings areas, it’s one of the areas that we’re working hard. But also in some of the administrative aspects of the Australian Defence Force, by making more common processes across the entire organisation and putting a better ‘backbone’ through the organisation I think we will use less people, and that is the overall aim.

I think that is the advantage that we are going program with. I think you probably haven’t seen a lot of detail of how this is going to be implemented yet, and that is because there is a much slower ramp up to the requirements. You can actually get the money, the $20 billion dollars is not hard to get, the trick is to get the $20 billion without losing any capability in the process, because you can just spend less money, just do less hours, you can have logistic shortfalls. The money part is the easy part; the trick is to put it in a reform that means you can still produce the same capability or more capability at less cost. If you look at commercial organisations, that is where they aim the entire time.

For us I think the key issue is, and I talk about it in terms of valuing people’s time, a l lot of the time in the defence force we don’t value people’s time to the same extent as they do in commercial operations. So we’ll often rather complicated processes, where the real art form is to make the process as simple as you can, and really value an individual’s time at work, so he’s actually contributing to the value chain to produce a serviceable aeroplane, you don’t have ahim tied up with an antiquated computer system that waiting to fill in some paperwork, or he’s not waiting for tools or auxiliary equipment – it’s all well planned and his time is spent with a spanner on the aeroplane.

It’s a balancing game. At the moment when you look at the whole program for the transitioning it’s rather large but we’re actually introducing four new types in the next two years, so that’s Wedgetail, KC-30s, Super Hornet and King Air as an interim replacement for the Caribou. To be honest with you we have set up transition teams and we have had a model where we set up a transition team to handle all those projects. That’s worked particularly well and I don’t have any fears that those particular transitions. Some of the other ones are a bit further down the track, so our planning isn’t quite as advanced, but again we’ve handled those four pretty well, and we have the next lot to come and I don’t have a lot of fears with that. The SRP program is another overlay on it, but the advantage with introducing new aeroplanes is that you can actually start with a bit of a clean sheet in the way that you do business, so SRP practises actually fit nicely with new aeroplanes, so there are some advantages in doing it at this timeframe, that you can actually set your base line up properly and maybe not drag over with previous practices

No in fact there was a defence budget audit done and there has been a fair bit of analysis on xxx the funny thing is it actually kind of does work out in relative proportion so it doesn’t seem to be a player in fact if anything the interservice corporation on lots of aspects of the SRP has been really quite good and maybe better than it has been before. I mean the whole organisation has matured to the stage where there is an underlying respect to the three services and for each other which maybe wasn’t there ten years ago and i think the joint operation construct on the way we are is that everybody knows what their bit of the contribution is to make an operation work. So i think there is less rivalry and competition that was previously there and from my point of view a whole lot more corporation.

It was an interesting paper; i suppose it gets down to what you think the easiest thing is. I can see where he is coming from an operations point of view, but my argument would be that the xxx structure goes to that part of the iceberg that is below the water xx with the air force or any sort of aviation operation, what the public sees, even in an airline, is only a very small proportion of what it takes to run aviation type organisations. The advantage of the xxx structure for us is its alignment with the defence material organisation in that we have our force element groups and we have its supporting xxx and they normally sit side by side and there is great interaction there, probably better than any other interaction and from my point of view it’s that xxx xxx sustained logistic s part of the operation, it’s the hardest part of it. When you come to ops, as long as you have a flexible adaptable workforce they’ll look at the problem and find some way to solve it and organise themselves to do that. The xxx structure is a very much xxx structure , it is an operational structure so we’ll pull elements out of xxx to go and do an operation I think the classic example is probably the Heron Operation in Afghanistan, we actually pulled elements out of all air force element groups, but mainly out of Air Combat Group to run that UAV operation. So I’d argue that within the xxx structure we operation we operate fairly flexibly.

Id say that Heron is a classic example where that hasn’t been the case, we’ll have bought guys in from P3s Air Combat Group. Air force practically adapt well in a flexible organisation, I would say it values speed above most other things you just need to see the response to the tsunami, we can get aeroplanes anywhere in the world pretty quickly and get stuff places and we will take our basic xxx structure and cherry pick out of it for what we need to go and do the job. So I’m not sure it is a valued argument as far as I’m concerned.

I’d argue that that happens now to a point the Chief has spent very little time as a two star and ended up being chief of the air force so I’m not exactly sure, it’s always good to have these sort of ideas and it gets back to like the criticism of the xxx structure the funny thing about that is the other two services look at xxx structure with I’d love to have something similar to be able to make it work the same. It’s like all ideas it’s good to have a discussion thing but you need certain levels of experience, it’s a bit like Canberra, Canberra is a different operating environment to our bases and you need to know how it works, but you also need to know how the bases work.

We’ve been down that track for the last nine; ten years that’s been pretty much air force policy. In fact with the air force recruitment we actually pulled a guy back from Qantas who was an expert in land systems to come back in, we have done that a bit. We’ve sort of slowed that down at the moment because we are full so we don’t have a lot of room to move from a personnel point of view, but certainly if talented people have worked in other areas and they want to come back we certainly have a look at them because we can use that diversity.

And again it just comes to, we’ve actually our wastage rate is now below 6% and that has just put us under a bit of pressure, we don’t have a lot of room to move with numbers at the moment because our wastage rate is probably a little lower than we would normally have so that’s the main reason we have put a cap on it, it’s a financial one more than anything else. It’s not that we don’t value or want those people it’s just that we can’t do it at the moment.

We have it as a rolling wave of programs; the first one is looking at our air lifters. We are going through and doing the C-130s first, then we will move onto Hornet and the Hawk and we will also look at the horizon radar, so not only aeroplanes but the other systems.

and again it gets down to an analysis. There is a fair bit of work in – what are we actually trying to produce with these C-130s is the analysis it goes back to which is the best way of doing that. So that is a fairly large analysis. So
it’s a fairly large analysis phase and then you look at how you are doing it and making sure that what everyone is doing is actually integral to the end product. If you go through that deep analysis you often find that there are a lot of tasks that are going that are really not contributing to the end product, can we get rid of that, is it necessary, is there a better flow of work to actually produce that product. Simple set of tools, the biggest thing is actually changing the culture of the organisation it really is a big change in work practises and how you do that work sometimes and you have got to be able to question some of the processes and procedures you’ve now got in place, is that really worth the cost.

Well there are internal but there is a slightly different thing is we actually run a training program for people that work here we probably train two or three hundred people the tools and techniques and the biggest part of the initial phase when you go in is actually showing everybody what the possibilities are. We are using some external consultants but we are also making sure that we are training up the people inside so it is a continuous improvement project because if you don’t do that all you do is kind of backyard blitz type of thing and you walk away from it xx go back to the way it was so if you don’t bring the people onboard and they see this is a better way of doing business and this makes their life better it won’t work. That’s why for us it’s been a fairly slow ramp up and why we are doing it in a series of waves rather than just buying a whole lot of consultants and do it right across the group.
So once we have done the C-130 we will have an analysis phase of what has worked and what hasn’t and that will roll into the rest of our programs as we go through. And again there is a monitoring phase which keeps going but it’s important that you get xx right across the team and that’s where you get to spend the most time because people don’t like to change, most people are quite happy with how they do business. In the end we still need to produce the same or more capability with less money , with a more cost xx budget capability, so we have to change the way we do business, if you look at industry there are better ways of doing business out there as to the way we do it.

We’ve got a core team here, we did have a management services agency at all our bases which we’ve trained in these techniques we’re also bringing in consultants as well to help, but it is very much focused in training up people inside the force element group so that they do understand, it isn’t being done to them they are doing it themselves. The teams will work through how to do this with the individuals in the Force Element Groups.

They have to have ownership, and that is why we have done eight or nine smaller training programs to see what sort of savings can we get out, what sort of productivity increases can we get. We can get them. But there has got to be a total buy-in across the FEG, so that’s why we are just concentrating on just one to start off with, and we will have that extensive debrief and lessons learnt process and we’ll roll that into the next one.

Its probably about a six month program and then the implementation will roll over a two year time frame so there is no instantaneous win there – its a bit of hard work to get it to where we want it to go.

Hercules – they are about two months into it. They have done the analysis so they will be starting to roll a few things out. Tsunamis and earthquakes haven’t helped us to much at the moment. The last couple of weeks they just been absolutely flat out. We had 9 C-130Js, 4 C-130H’s, 3 C-17s basically in operations for the past two weeks, which has been incredible, absolutely max effort.

I don’t think a lot of people realise what an enormous, i call it a strategic white capability the C-17 is but you can get anywhere in it and you can get anywhere fast. When we get there there are refuels which gives us even more flexibility with the C-17 it really means you can go and put people where they need to be very very quickly and fairly large amounts of equipment as well.
Again we will work through the tasking basically joint operations , we need to get a bit of a reconstitution xxx here so hopefully no more natural disasters and we get the guys a bit of a break for a while they don’t get much they only get xxxxxxx
There is a great deal of satisfaction in that sort of job when you can go in there with equipment and help people I think that anybody in the ADF enjoys that sort of operation.

We’ve moved a long way since xxxxx on weigh point which we needed to do anyway and i think we have come to quite a good xx arrangement with Airservices. The core of it is that we are actually going to try and buy the same equipment, which i think once we do that it will allow a lot of synergy there. We are pretty interoperable now actually if you compare us with most other places in he world. If you look at civilian air traffic at the moment, you take off from Sydney and go through military airspace it is controlled by military controllers, xxx Townsville, its transparent that there is military airspace there the majority of the time you can see that we have had a look at some of our restricted airspaces and well we can close, not all of it needs to be 24 hours so we’ve had a look at this. We will always need to maintain our own organic traffic control capability because, a classic was Timor, if you’re doing that sort of operation you need to be able to set up some sort of tower operation even if it is in a tent with some radios with flexible procedural control as well so the skill sets while they are the same a lot of the time we do demand some different skill sets from area traffic controllers and the civilian ones even if they have come from the air force, which is quite a few of them, after a period of those sector operations there is a certain sameness with the way that that is done and that doesn’t necessarily have the same flexibility that we need

That was on the basis that we wouldn’t need radars at our airfields. If you have a look at what airservices have done the only place that they have consolidated approach control around is actually Canberra and Melbourne, but all the other airports they still have approach controllers. We still need approach controllers; we still need them at Williamtown and places like that. Hopefully we will get the synergies that actually have a look at a common system, be able to buy a common radar, cut down on the maintenance costs and things like that so we might be able to do things like use one of our centres as one of the backup centre for the entire Australian system so that we have some redundancy in the air traffic management system. But at the moment with “MATS” and the way air traffickers are we pretty much run to the same standards, the same book. It’s a matter of just a good evolutionary path more than anything else.

I’d argue that happens now out at Darwin xxx military airspace they get trapped right through. Probably the most contentious xxx Williamtown and again we have actually if you do the percentage times with people getting knocked back through that airspace i think it’s only been 4 or 5 percent of the time it adds 63 miles over the Los Angeles to Sydney leg xxx around that airspace and i think on a 12 or 13 hour flight that’s a pretty small field bird. I’m not sure it’s as big a deal as people make out when you actually do the analysis.

True but again you have to look at one 747 doing an extra somewhere between 30 and 60 frag miles or I hold 8 F-18s on the ground at Williamtown all while this one transits through the airspace which is using the most greenhouse gases then. You can argue it purely from their line of economic model but you have to have a look at the economics of our operation xxx that’s something we concentrate on, our fuel burn and how we go back and most efficient way to operate the jets . I find that this is sometimes a singular line argument be it from the airlines on their fuel burn yet they fail to take into account what our fuel burn is if we are delayed or whatever.

Look probably the same there is just a limit to how much we can put there, six an hour, again they don’t use six in every hour again because of business traffic they tend to concentrate on early morning and late in the afternoon at the level of operations that Williamtown is actually at its quite comfortable at the moment but any thought of it being a second Sydney airport to me just means that that xxx military operations.

You can’t without damaging what Williamtown is actually about and the reality is we do need more airport infrastructure around the country. You can have a level of civilian traffic xx but it can’t be unrestrained.

You could do that but again you have to look at how you track in and how you track out. Development around Williamtown, there isn’t a lot of room there from here on in so.

We don’t charge the way Sydney airport does for landing fees and things like that so that makes places like Williamtown an xx or attractive xx we have had to ramp up the amount of traffic, weekends we have had to increase the fire fighting services. The original deed of agreement really meant that the civilian airliners were not supposed to cause us to spend any more resources so at the moment we are fundamentally subsidising the airline operations out there. We need to have a look at xxxx well we have with the additional ones with cost recovery so that’s not the case but really for expansion in the Newcastle base we should look at another airport.

The thing is Williamtown puts a million and a half into the Newcastle economy each year so it is a fairly big economic boost.

I don’t think anything has changed there to be honest with you so and really since the global financial crisis the pressure has come off a fair bit, there has actually been a decrease in the number of airline operations in Williamtown in the last twelve months.
The funny thing is the Jetstar A320s and 737 are better than when it was when we first introduced civilian traffic which was Beech 1900s because they were smaller, they were slower, they got in the way, whereas a 737 comes down the slot at about the same speeds so there is actually less interference there now then when it was originally introduced.

You know busses cost money to run they also need renewal of their infrastructure if you are on less bases it is less expensive, but movement is no trivial matter and Richmond is a classic case point to actually move the C-130s, it means that you actually have to move all the infrastructure. The cost of doing that could be around three hundred million dollars plus to move the infrastructure. When you look at the cost of operating the base that is substantially less, you really need to do the base consolidations as you bring in new equipment so I think what you will see in that will be a very much longer term plan. But answer on both issues is fairly complex to work through. There’s factors in there and business cases are not simple in the short term and you really need to look at a 50 year plan.

There is a fair bit of work going on at the moment and again that has to go across to government to have a look at, its probably not my place to comment on where we are at with that, but there are other proposals but they are longer term proposals, other people and other airlines. And it’s probably not so much around air force bases either.

Yeah Tindal isn’t one of our most family friendly place I suppose would be the way to describe it. People enjoy a two year posting up there but it is a long way away from family friends. But it does have a lot of advantages when you’re operating aeroplanes out of there. The noise is a factor the availability of airspace down near Bradshaw Rangers I think we will probably be there i the longer term xx

Again it gets to the infrastructure available to do that and I think the airlines just see it as a cheap option other than Adelaide, i don’t think Adelaide has any particular infrastructure concerns or limitations at the moment. So i have to question what the motivation is Edinburgh.

But from our point of view it comes with a lot of additional costs to us in terms of air traffic control, fire fighting which we have structured a certain number of fire fighters of air traffickers at the moment and it actually meets the needs of the P3 and ALSG operations out of Edinburgh any sort of increase with the commercial operations would put pressure on those resources.

I think the airlines now look at it as a cheap option, if you put in a full cost recover to support the airline operation im not sure that the economics would add up. When they look at the additional infrastructure that they would have to put in to support the operations.

I think there will be a decision taken this year on JSF i think, the white papers are committed to it. I don’t think there is much change in commitment on the government side to xxx from.
I think it is fully understood to actually have the most efficient transition period you need to make these decisions at a time when timing point???? The classic F-18s have a certain life left in them, 25 years this year so they are starting to have an aging aircraft profile and that comes with challenges with it. I think from an air force point of view we are pretty happy with the plans for the air combat force, JSF seems to be progressing pretty well at the moment. It now really is the only fifth generation aeroplane out there.

The 5th one rolls off the line next month so March we get the first lot in, we’ve pretty much got the first xxx most of the way through its training so that is all working particularly well. I think the aeroplanes are through the text program and they have got to go through and the jet looks really good. The ability to have the jet and the whole bridging air combat is really starting to look like a better decision as each day passes. If you had looked to the situation we had been in with two aging airframes where now we have got a new one and an aging one xxx on the JSF . I think it is a much more secure way of doing it.