Consistent Path

Operation Okra, says Brown, is the best example of the current state of RAAF capabilities, not only the aircraft themselves but the trained personnel that could deploy to the Middle East and begin combat operations against Islamic State (or Daesh, to use the government’s preferred term) in a matter of weeks.

“When you look at the package itself, it was the latest and greatest AEW&C in the world, probably the best tanker, or will soon be once we get the boomINTERVIEWfully operational, and certainly the Super Hornet is as good as any [fighter] that’s around, a four and a half generation capability.

“I don’t think the Air Force has ever been in that position before to be right at the leading edge of capability, which is where we’re at, at the moment. ” It is a far cry from the under-funded Air Force of the 1980s and early 1990s that couldn’t, for example, deploy Hornet or F-111 fast jets to the 1991 Gulf War because of a lack of electronic warfare self-protection capabilities. And it is a turnaround that has not happened by accident.

“It’s nice to sit back and take the credit, but every chief builds on the legacy of previous ones,” says Brown. “I think it says a lot for the foresight of the Department of Defence and Air Force from the late 1990s onwards, really. What we’re seeing is the bearing of that fruit, largely, because that’s when those programs were put into the capability development process. ” It has certainly helped that since the 1999 East Timor deployment the ADF has been well-funded by successive governments. But it seems, more than the other services,the RAAF has had a vision of the capabilities it needed and was best able to take advantage of increased government investment in Defence.

“I think Air Force has had a plan for a long time, on what it has wanted and how it’s going to be used, the sort of training that is needed and that’s been consistent,” observes Brown.

“If you look at my strategic intent versus Air Marshal Binskin’s (Brown’s predecessor as CAF and current CDF), I don’t think there was much change. There might have been some slight emphasis and I haven’t seen (new CAF) Leo (Davies)’s yet, but I imagine we’ll still be pointing in the same direction. He will have some different emphasis on what he wants to achieve, but fundamentally, as far as the big building blocks of capability are concerned we’ve been on a pretty consistent path. ” Consistency of leadership and vision have long been the hallmarks of successful organisations, but where has that consistency come from? Brown says it dates to then CAF Errol McCormick’s establishment of the Air Force Senior Leadership Team concept in 2000.

“He realised that we probably had some diversity of direction in Air Force and started an adaptive culture, primarily where the Senior Leadership Team worked as a team, rather than as a bunch of individuals. ” Subsequent chiefs and deputy chiefs, including Brown’s predecessor as DCAF, John Blackburn, “were all critical figures in setting that up, to the point now that it is a very unified Air Force leadership. So it’s not hard to set a direction because everybody’s involved in setting that direction. It’s not just whoever is Chief of Air Force. There’s a commitment throughout the senior leadership too as to what’s required. ” Brown says the forum of the Senior Leadership Team – which comprises all Air Force officers of one-star (air commodore) rank and above plus equivalent Defence public servants working in Air Force – does allow for a “contestability” of ideas. But, “largely from an equipment standpoint, I think everybody in Air Force knows in their DNA what the requirements are for air control, strike, ISR and airlift. So everybody’s worked towards having the most modern platforms and systems that we can have to execute those core ‘products’ of Air Force, if you want to talk from that point of view.

Air Force has had a plan for a long time, on what it has wanted.

“We’ve had clear doctrine.

We’ve had a very clear idea of what we’ve needed to execute Air Force operations, and how to make them better. ” Certainly not just vision but also execution are key legacies of Brown’s term as CAF. As chief he has conceived of and launched Plan Jericho, overseen the Okra deployment of Hornet/Super Hornet, Wedgetail and KC-30 aircraft to the Middle East for combat operations over Iraq, guided through significant acquisitions from the federal government’s commitment to order 72 F-35A Joint Strike Fighters, to the acquisition of EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft and C-27J Spartan tactical transports as well as additional C-17 transports and KC-30 tankers, has led the implementation of Air Force’s ‘New Horizons’ cultural change program to develop a more inclusive, diverse workforce, and has driven new investment in the Australian Air Force Cadets.

“Organisations don’t run on autopilot and the success of Air Force is it’s a fairly highly decentralised organisation and its strength is that it’s got leadership at all levels,” says Brown. “And Jericho, in my mind, is a good showpiece of that leadership coming through. We recognise that we need to transform, there’s an ability to transform and how we execute that is the new aim, seeing that we’ve got most of the platform sort of squared away for the next 20-plus years in the Air Force. So if you look at Air Force even over the last four years, we’ve changed a lot in many respects, from cultural aspects right through to techniques and procedures. ” Brown draws the analogy between airliner flying and flying fighters.

“I think Air Force acts a little bit more like a fighter that isn’t on autopilot. It’s continually adjusting to what it sees out in front and manoeuvres around it and moves quickly to adjust the organisation so that it’s ready for whatever that future holds. ” Plan Jericho is probably the greatest opportunity for Air Force to manoeuvre like a fighter to adjust to a changing environment – that of the information-rich modern battlefield, seeking to extract maximum benefit of networking aircraft and systems across the Air Force, from the F-35 and Wedgetail to tankers and transports, and breaking down cultural and organisational barriers to achieving a more integrated and networked RAAF. On his last visit to the Middle East as Chief, Brown flew on a KC-30 tanker mission “which to me embodied Jericho without these guys even thinking that they were doing it to a large extent.

“So we took off, it was about an eight-hour mission and we were supporting two Marine F-18s and they came out of Kuwait. We got up there. We went into normal air-to-air refuelling box, but after about one turn, they requested ‘ad hoc’ in the air space. In that four hours, I never saw those F-18s travel more than 20 miles to the tanker because the tanker with [the] Link 16 [datalink] could follow what was going on in the fight.

“They actually had the hoses out before the Marines had actually decided that they needed fuel and I think we were eight miles away when they asked for vectors to the tanker. The Marines had calculated they needed 102,000 pounds of offload. Because of the way the tanker positioned itself, they only took 84,000 pounds. So there’s an incredible efficiency in the operation because they had the equipment, they could be more involved in the fight than any previous tanker. ”Says Brown: “To me, that’s the Jericho mindset that we’re actually after in the organisation as we go forward. ” One of the keys to implementing Jericho is “empowering” Air Force personnel to take risks and suggest ideas. But how does “empowerment” become a reality rather than a corporate buzzword in a glossy brochure? “You allow it by having a pretty lean organisation. If you compare us to Army and Navy, we’ve got about half the headquarters structure that they do. Air Force has got two two-stars and I think you’ll find the other two headquarters have got four two-stars. If you look at the way we’re organised, we’re organised along what are our prime role lines in air combat, airlift, ISR, combat support.

“So I find that everybody in the Air Force can identify with the end product, and I think in a lot of organisational constructs people have trouble with that because they’re very functionally aligned. ” Brown cites the recent Jericho Dawn demonstrations – where video imagery from a Heron UAV was streamed via SATCOM to large screens on an airborne C-17, which could provide troops onboard with real-time information on enemy positions, or allow an AME team to video conference with an advance team on the ground at a natural disaster zone.

“The original Jericho Dawn wasn’t actually envisaged at the headquarters,” Brown explains. “It was envisaged by Air Mobility Group crews and they did the majority of the heavy lifting to get it in in 63 days. So you celebrate that as an achievement, which I think encourages further innovation. ” Jericho also envisions change and innovation at the squadron maintenance level.

“I always say this about Air Force, an Air Force at its heart is engineering, logistics and support… If we empower those squadron level engineering and logistics guys to be more efficient, find more effective ways of doing it, how we can use information technology better, I’m sure they’ll come up with new, innovative practices. ” In this area Air Force is looking at its technical airworthiness regulations.

“We’re trying to make them best practice, they’ve been too prescriptive. We’re moving forward across a broad front across Air Force to try to unlock previous obstacles to change and innovation. ” On a personal level, where does Brown, in his 34-year career which saw him command a squadron, a wing and Air Combat Group, as well as serve as Deputy Chief, feel he was empowered with the most ability to effect change?“In the end, people do things. Organisational structures and strategies don’t do things. Strategies can either help or hinder. The structures can either help or hinder people. I think in Air Force, we’ve got not bad structures from that point of view. In Defence, I still think we could do some more work to help people do what they need to do.

“But where do you have the most influence? “I’ve always felt I’ve had influence wherever I’ve sat in the Air Force, from squadron leader up, most of the time. ” Brown observes too that Air Force’s squadron structure does have inherent efficiencies.

“They’re most efficient because… they’ve got objective measures on their capability. They can compare themselves to another squadron on a number of benchmarks, whereas when you create a big silo organisation – and that’s probably one of the different ways the DMO has suffered from being a centralised organisation – it has no competition. So it’s difficult for it to benchmark itself internally or externally. So the true litmus test of performance is always competition. ” Interestingly, Brown rates a change made as DCAF to how commanding officers were selected, which now sees the selection board, comprising seniors officers like the Air Commander, chaired by the Deputy Chief, to select unit commanders, as his proudest achievement during his long Air Force career. “There’s much more discussion over a position audit of the unit, what it needs, what sort of leadership it needs, and matching peoples’ skills to that. We’d never done that before,” he says.

“We used to allow people to express interest in a particular command and I think there was this view that command was something that you moved through on your way up, whereas in my view, command’s the core of the performance of the organisation. Good leadership at unit level will make an incredible difference to the performance of any unit. ” Indeed, while Brown will be remembered for acquisitions like the Growler and P-8, a genuine commitment to people and diversity in the Air Force may be just as far-reaching a legacy.

“A good thing over the last few years is that Air Force has taken a decision that a mono-cultural Air Force is probably not the best thing for us. And we’ve seen it time and time again in examples. I had a liaison officer at one stage who was actually born in Aleppo in Syria at Al Minhad [the RAAF’s Middle East operating base] . And the fact that he could speak the language and understood the culture made an incredible difference. So having a multicultural Air Force, in my view, gives enormous advantages. ” Brown says the Air Force is also enjoying the benefits of increased gender diversity “because you get adifference of ideas, you get a difference of approaches”.

“I’ve seen it just in meetings where just even one female in the room can change the tone of the meeting. ” Remarks Brown: “Diversity gives you strength and that’s the way we look at it now, as a strength. ” Currently women make up around 18. 5 per cent of Air Force personnel, but make up 25 per cent of recruit intakes and 25 per cent of the Air Force Reserve.

“That tells me the difference in that seven per cent is flexible work arrangements, probably. So our goal is 25 per cent and I think that’s quite an achievable goal by 2023, but we need to fix up our flexible work arrangements. ” But under-representation of women in aircrew and engineering is a significant impediment to seeing more women in senior leadership roles. Just three per cent of RAAF pilots are women, and they comprise six or seven per cent of engineers.

“So in a couple of our core roles, warfighting and that core sustainment role, there are very low percentages of women. ” One measure to address this, says Brown, is to adjust training methods.

“We’ve had a couple of times where we’ve examined a course and said, ‘it’s not them, but it’s us’,” Brown says.

“So if we need to change the way we teach, guess what, we change the way we teach, and by going tomore performance coaching in training, we should get a better result from both women and men than we do under our current system. ” In recent years Air Force has also introduced ‘Flight Camps’ for girls aged 16 to 18 to experience Air Force life and to learn about Air Force career options. Other initiatives include Chief of Air Force scholarships for woman pilots, and increased investment in the Australian Air Force Cadets, where just under 40 per cent of its members are female.

Brown says the Air Force should start to see the results of these initiatives in the coming three to four years.

After himself being in the CAF role for four years, what advice does Brown have for new Chief Leo Davies? “It’s a privilege to be in these jobs and sometimes there’s a difference between having your nose in and fingers out. So you need to know exactly what’s going on in the frontline of the organisation,” says Brown.

So regrets? Probably not a lot.

“Know and understand what’s going on at the frontline of Air Force because Air Force’s success will continue to be determined by the enthusiasm, determination and focus of the people in front of the organisation. ” Finally, with days to go as Chief, did Brown have any regrets? “There’s a few things on the list, but I’m not sure that I’ll give you the entire list!” Brown says.

“But from a capability point of view, I think I’ve been happy with what we’ve got in place. I’m happy with where we got to with New Horizons, the culture piece in Air Force, as we did a lot of good work on bystander behaviour and there were a lot of good lessons that came out of Pathways to Change, which I think improved Air Force. And Jericho is an exciting opportunity.

“Once you start these things, you just wish, well, it would have been better if we started a bit earlier. But when you look at the organisation we have to get all the big blocks in place before we can actually enable on that. So regrets? Probably not a lot. ”