A fifth-gen force

It’s a future that also calls for a workplace culture of innovative, adaptability and ‘jointness’.

And it is a future that is here, now.

The Avalon Airshow should see the public debut of the RAAF’s first F-35 Lightning IIs, heralding the start of that fifth gen future.

The term ‘fifth gen’ was coined to describe meant the fifth generation of jet fighters, such as the F-35, which feature stealth, advanced radars and sensors, and sensor fusion. But for the RAAF it is a term that has evolved to encompass all aircraft and systems designed to operate in an information-rich battlespace, and the workforce that operates them. And so a “fifth generation Air Force will provide the joint and networked effects necessary to prevail against the increasingly complex and lethal threats of the information age”, says the strategy.

Those joint and networked effects will come from a range of platforms from the F-35A to the EA-18G Growler (which will also make its public debut in RAAF colours at Avalon) to the P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft (which entered service in November), to the current Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft to the forthcoming MQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance unmanned aircraft system.

Bar the Triton all of those aircraft are in service today. The RAAF’s future is here, now. And hence the need for a new strategy.

For an ambitious document it has a pretty modest title. ‘Air Force Strategy 2017-2027’ is Chief of Air Force Air Marhal Leo Davies’ newly-released strategy document which sets out five key principles, or ‘vectors’, for reshaping the Air Force. The strategy aims to drive the transition to an Air Force that fully embraces and takes advantage of warfare in the information age.

That is a process that had already started with Plan Jericho, which was launched by previous Chief of Air Force Geoff Brown at the 2015 Avalon Airshow and that aimed “to develop a future force that is agile and adaptive, fully immersed in the information age, and truly joint”.

Since then a small Jericho team within Air Force headquarters has coordinated a serious of demonstrations and experiments that have shown the value of networking, from providing live video feeds of a target area to an special forces team onboard an airborne C-17 to using ‘airborne gateway’ technology, carried on a Gulfstream II demonstrator aircraft, to allow data to be shared between various ADF platforms including F/A-18F Super Hornets, Tiger ARH helicopters and the Wedgetail AEW&C platform.

“I’m not sure we could have written this strategy without Jericho. But more importantly, I don’t know that we’d start to be able to implement the strategy as well as we’re able to now without Jericho,” Air Marshal Davies tells Australian Aviation in an interview in early February.

“And why I say that is most big policy changes and cultural changes work best when you have a practical, realisable, tangible piece to them. And it’s why this strategy has a prioritisation matrix, which provides a way to think about what Air Force would choose to do next.”

Jericho has, CAF explains, already led to cultural change within the Air Force.

“Jericho is Air Force’s language for innovation, for development and for driving to fifth generation. It’s a practical piece, initially, but as I’ve begun to describe it for a year now, it’s a way for our airmen to say yes.”

Jericho is Air Force’s language for innovation.

Only five years ago, CAF, explained, Air Force had more of a “big stick” mentality, which “grew a risk aversion to change” where if you tried something new, “and you failed, it was your fault.”

“I think Jericho has allowed our young airmen to say; ‘I’ve got a better way of doing this’. And it gives the senior NCOs and the officers a reason to say ‘yes, let’s have a look at that’.

Indeed Plan Jericho is succeeding where earlier reform efforts aimed at cultural change, such as the Air Force Improvement program, have not, CAF says.

“It didn’t work. It helped us, and we opened a few doors, we had a few outcomes from that,” CAF said of the Air Force Improvement program.

“They helped along the way. But they were not as successful in a cultural change sense as we had wanted them to be.”

Jericho has different aims to the old Air Force Improvement program, and in effect succeeded it as the Air Force’s key mechanism to bring about cultural change.

“Very early in the Jericho journey, a number of very competent and professional outfits came to us to say; ‘give us some money, we’ll solve Jericho for you’. But that was never going to happen. Not because those organisations didn’t have relevant skills and capabilities, but because we had to take ourselves on the journey.

“We had to do the work, we had to plough the field, we had to plant the seed, we had to water it, and watch it grow. If someone else did it for us, then we’d only get one crop. We need to know how to do that again.”

If someone else did it for us, then we’d only get one crop.

Already Jericho has “changed our risk profile,” notes CAF.

“I think we are more accepting of different ways of doing business. We are certainly more open to the concept that an answer to a problem might not lie within Air Force. Instead it might lie within Defence, within another government agency, or indeed, with industry. That’s been a really big shift.”

And Jericho has also served a role in making Air Force better prepared to adopt the finding of Defence’s First Principles review and ‘One Defence’ reform program.

“As First Principles began to influence the way Defence does business, Air Force was already culturally at that point of being able to adapt to change. We could say well, let’s have a go at that, yes, we’ll try that.”

Of course constant, and near constant change programs, can lead to change fatigue, a point the Chief acknowledges.

“We got to that point at the end of Air Force Improvement that there was a bit of fatigue around change, and a little bit of fatigue around trying to measure the change. We end up with survey fatigue; I think we’re still there.”

“You change, check, hold, trim [?] to fly an aircraft. We’ve done a lot of changing. We haven’t done much holding or checking.”

Jericho, then has taken a more staged approach, with a focus on demonstrably results that validate the case for making particular changes.

“It’s been a case of questioning ‘how did that go?’ You don’t need to do something else again tomorrow, instead let’s just see how that one went, and then we’ll go with the next one. And that’s proven to be fruitful, I think.”

So will that be the approach for the Air Force strategy implementation, as well?

“It will be. But one significant part of that is we don’t own all parts of the strategy. We own the vectors, we own the ability to begin to influence, but this will involve considerable work with international policy, with ANIG [?], with CASG, with VCDF Group, with our international, and regional, and coalition partners. We’ll influence and say what we want, but it won’t always be yes.”

Those five vectors the strategy outlines are ‘joint warfighting’, ‘people capability’, communications and information systems’, ‘infrastructure’ and ‘international engagement’. Plan Jericho has provided the foundation for, and touches on all five vectors, but the strategy is broader, and arguably more ambitious than Jericho.

The ‘joint warfighting vector’ seeks to: “integrate Air Force’s new and existing capabilities to ensure Air Force operates effectively with other services, groups and relevant government agencies; forms a coherent part of the ADF’s joint order of battle; and is organisationally prepared for future changes in the delivery or air power,” the strategy reads.

The people vector seeks to: “develop a fifth generation workforce that can quickly and effectively adapt to rapid technological and operational change and exploit the opportunities presented by Australia’s changing workforce demographics.

The communications and systems vector will “ensure Air Force’s current and future communications and information systems enable integrated operations with the ADF and our allies, and possess resilience and redundancy for operations in degraded and contested operational environments”.

The infrastructure vector primarily concerns Air Force’s bases and seeks to “upgrade Air Force infrastructure to ensure Air Force’s fixed and mobile based are hardened, resilient, flexible and readily adaptable for future air power capabilities and requirements.”

Finally, the international engagement vector’s objective is to focus on relationship building with international allies and partners while ensuring “Air Force’s personnel, exercises and exchanges shape and are informed by Defence’s international engagement agenda”.

CAF first flagged his Air Force strategy in a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in July last year.

“Despite having a range of classified and unclassified strategic level documents, an unprecedented capability modernisation program, and a strong record of operational success, the RAAF has lacked a coherent document that outlined where we are heading as an organisation,” CAF said in that speech.

Since that time, CAF explains, “we’ve taken the time to try and get the strategy right. Consequently it now has some real depth, but also has better linkage to our business plan, and to Jericho, to One Defence, and to a force design model.”

As such specific goals are attached to each vector in the plan, and specific “pathways” are outlined to meet those goals.

The 42-page strategy document itself is fairly high level, but accessible, document, while a subsequent Air Force Business Plan will outline in greater detail specific tasks to meet the objectives of the five vectors, and perhaps even more importantly, “their measures of effectiveness”.

The strategy’s 10-year timespan makes for an ambitious document.

“I’m not going to see a fully fifth generation Air Force in my time as Chief,” says AIRMSHL Davies, whose four-year term as CAF runs through to mid-2019.

“We’re looking about the middle of the 2020s for us to have what we currently envisage as a fifth generation Air Force. But that’s just the limit of my current fifth generation mindset. Two chiefs from now, my successors will have a totally different view.”

It might be new capabilities like the F-35 and P-8 that driven the need for change, but it will be Air Force personnel across all ranks who will drive the implementation of that change.

“Airmen that are joining us now, over the next 10 years they will be corporals and sergeants and they’re the ones that’ll make all the change.”

CAF readily acknowledges that people’s changing expectations of careers is both a challenge and an opportunity for Air Force.

“Having 10 moves for a 20 year career, where you sit and turn a spanner, or look at a chart, or watch a screen go round and round, the same thing every day, is not going to entice the people that we need,” said CAF.

“They want to be able to go and explore other ways of getting a job done, they’re looking for technology and flexibility in work design, and career choice.”

That flexibility and career choice will mean better mechanisms for Air Force personnel to leave the RAAF and join industry, and then to come back into uniform at a later stage in their career.

“If we’re going to have a technician who is the expert on low observable maintenance for our F-35 fleet, I can’t grow one, I don’t have a basis to grow one, but I certainly have a need. Where does that come from? Industry. So I’ve got to have a way to flow through the expertise, to get them back to be able to use them. There’s got to be a different model. The idea of our current job structure in Air Force has got to change.

There’s got to be a different model.

“We’ve had a tendency to value only specialised skills, and that’s the only way you can evolve. We’ve got to move away from that. We’ve got to value education. We’ve got to value diversity, not just gender and cultural diversity, but value diversity in the skill sets people bring.”

A less rigid idea of career path, progression and promotion is needed, says AIRMSHL Davies, particularly in specific areas.

“I’m talking about opening a career path for specialisations like cyber, low observable technology, comms and computing. Those specialisations that aren’t just specific to Air Force. We should grab them from Navy, grab them from the public service, grab them from industry.”

Bringing in people from outside Air Force to rank and pay levels commensurate with their skills above promoting an internal candidate is a potential point of tension CAF notes.

If blogs comes back after five years at company X or Y, and we make him a flight sergeant, that’s my flight sergeant spot. I stayed and got a haircut. I stayed and said yes, sir.

But, CAF stresses, “not the whole Air Force will do this. We’re 14,300 odd men and women, I’m talking maybe 1,000 would be in this moving mould, where we go to get specific skill sets. We’re still a really good training outfit. We still have a great career opportunity for the vast majority.”