The Royal Australian Air Force experienced a very busy 2010 with the introduction of massive amounts of new capability. 2011 sees the 90th anniversary of the service and more action to come. Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Binskin spoke to ADM Editor Katherine Ziesing about the year that was and what lies ahead for the RAAF.
ADM: And so how do you do that in a joint environment like Afghanistan?
Binskin: We are operating Heron as a National asset in Afghanistan and have procedures in place to pass information in a timely manner to Australian ground forces, predominantly using Rover as the main medium for full motion video, but reverting to voice communications when required.
ADM: And what about in a coalition sense?
Binskin: In a coalition sense, it will depend and will be determined in the tasking and planning for the specific mission. Again though, the standard in Afghanistan for passing timely information direct to coalition ground forces is the Rover system, with voice communications as the fall-back. The real trap is if everyone is not on the same communication medium – and it’s more of a problem in future high-end coalition operations where incompatibilities exist between the standard US type of link systems and the comparable European systems. At the end of the day, you can have the most sophisticated network system available, but if not all of the coalition forces are capable of operating on it, you end up having to revert back to more basic systems and lose the advantage that the modern system should provide.
ADM: What is the context for RAAF in 2010 coming into 2011?
Binskin: In the last 12 months, five new weapons systems have arrived. Now that’s pretty significant for Air Force because we’ve done it without impacting operational tempo, without any major hiccups, and without reduction in the delivery of airpower for operations. We’ve brought in Super Hornet, started to operate the Wedgetail, finished introducing King Airs, the Heron RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) - introduced into Afghanistan without us ever operating one in Australia, which has been quite a challenge - and the Vigilare Command & Control System is operational at NORTHROC at Tindal and we’re now fitting out EASTROC which should be operational in the middle of this year. And early this year we should be going for the sixth new capability, which will be acceptance of the KC-30 MRTT in the first couple of months. Individual announcements have made a bit about each new capability but we’ve never actually tied them all together at once and said ‘That’s a fairly big achievement for an organisation that’s relatively small, with only 14,500 people.’
On top of that, on any given day we have somewhere between 500 and 700 people deployed globally on either operations or exercises, and all the Force Element Groups (FEGs) have adapted to that - that’s just the way we do business now - and they’ve adapted very well. Personnel from every FEG has been deployed during the last 12 months. Air Force people within the DMO, the Defence Support Group and other areas have deployed as well.
ADM: In terms of those new capabilities which have come into service, can you speak about the transition from the old platform to the new platform, and how that’s affected your people and your processes?
Binskin: The one thing we don’t want to do is fight or operate the new platform the way we operated the old platform because that wouldn’t see the new capability maturing as quickly as we’d like it to. So as a philosophy, we tend to stand up a transition team, usually after Second Pass.
We’ve put a lot of effort into transition teams and traditionally we will try and put people in that transition team, or keep people in these transition teams, that will be the eventual operator of the system. For a couple of reasons: one is we learn a lot about the system before it even comes into service, which means we hit the ground running; we don’t start learning it when we get it and that allows us to go operational a lot quicker than we would traditionally have achieved. And I guess on the other side of it is that transition team won’t make decisions that they’re not willing to wear themselves as they usually form the first team of people operating the capability!
It’s a good way of doing business and we started with Wedgetail, where we had No 2 Squadron as part of the project team. We’ve transferred that philosophy across to the KC-30 where there’s been operators in a transition team working closely with the DMO. With the Super Hornet, the minute Government made the decision, we were already standing up the transition team because of the very quick introduction into service – in the end we went operational within nine months of the aeroplane arriving in Australia, which is pretty good for a frontline fighter-strike squadron.
So it works across the board and we’ll continue to do that with the new capabilities as they come in down the track - with P-8 and with the Battlefield Air Lifter; we’ll stand up transition teams a number of years before we get the platforms. That makes a big difference; and it’s not just air crew, it’s the maintainers as well and the support mechanisms that go with each system.
ADM: Is the RAAF concerned about the schedule for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)? What kind of risk mitigation measures have been put in place to deal with the people aspect?
Binskin: No, the current schedule for the JSF is about right for where we are at the moment and, in regard to the discussions that are going on in the US at the moment, any potential scheduled change won’t impact us. There’s enough buffer between us and the US Air Force going operational that we shouldn’t be adversely impacted.
ADM: So when would that transition team be stood up?
Binskin: We get our first couple of jets in 2014 and that’s in a training role, but the squadron doesn’t go operational until the 2017/2018 timeframe when we’ll bring the aircraft back to Australia. IOC will be in 2018 so we’ve got time. With the slow ramp up we’ll start with a small transition team, and in fact in some ways it’s in position now; it’s called the NACC (New Air Combat Capability). There are operators as well as the acquisition people in the NACC, but we’ll reconstitute the Air Combat Transition Office (ACTO) again in the next 12-18 months and they will start doing what we need to in order to introduce the JSF, initially training in the US and then ramping up to be able to stand up to the first operational squadron in 2017/2018.
ADM: Given the increasing lethality and multiplicity of low and medium-level air defences, how viable is the RAAF’s close air support role into the future?
Binskin: Very viable. If you go away from what close air support was in Vietnam where you had to get over the top, you had to be talked on to the target and you had to see the smoke; and compare that to the networked approach that we have today where people are running around on the ground with designators and systems where they can see the picture you’re seeing in the cockpit from your sensors.
Whether it be a forward looking infrared or some other system onboard the aircraft; the troops on the ground can see what the aircrew are seeing, they can tell you ‘No, it’s not that building, it’s this building. No, it’s not that window, it’s this window’ with a high degree of accuracy. With accurate targeting systems, you can be standing off a fair few miles and then you don’t even have to overfly the target to engage with the standoff weapons – with a precision weapon like a JDAM or one of the other precision weapons that are coming down the track; you can engage a target without being over the top and without ever having to go low to do it.
Also, what we want in the future is to make sure we’ve got a selectability of weapons so that they’re not all large weapons; we need a small weapon as well, one that doesn’t have a large kinetic charge, especially in a close support environment where, by definition, you’ve got your own troops nearby, so you want to make sure you only have a weapon big enough to do the job that you need without putting your own troops in danger.
ADM: What kind of presence does the RAAF have in flying the Herons in Afghanistan? Is Heron simply focussed on current needs, or is it designed to explore the wider utility of UAVs and RPAs?
Binskin: Both. The Heron was developed out of an operational user requirement that came from Chief of Joint Operations, Lieutenant General Mark Evans where we needed more focused intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in support of the Australian troops on the ground; both the Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) and the Mentoring and Training Force (MTF).
We looked around at a number of options and we went with the Heron because we could leverage off the Canadian operation already at Kandahar. We could train with them and then work ourselves into it to be able to get up to speed quite quickly and then operate with them. So it allowed us to step up very quickly to meet a requirement for our troops on the ground - and that’s we’ve done, but in doing so we’re also now learning a lot of skills and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that we can put into future use for the Air 7000 platform as well. We’re getting a lot of good background knowledge for sure out of this, not just the current operational utility.
ADM: Apart from the guys flying the Heron, what else is the RAAF doing in that context?
Binskin: We have imagery analysts, intelligence officers and other areas, so it’s not just the small cadre of aircrew flying the platform, it’s the whole analytical backbone that goes with it. There’s a couple of Navy personnel involved and one or two Army, but 90 per cent of the workforce is Air Force.
ADM: There’s been a proliferation of UAVs, RPAs and sensors and sources of data in theatre. How are you going at turning all that data into usable intelligence?
Binskin: That’s the art and that’s where, again, if you asked me how many people are in the Heron detachment, there’s very few who do pure flying. Predominantly it’s the larger group that sit in the support cell as the mission is being flown that are doing real time analysis of the data and then turn it into usable knowledge right there. Then there are other tiers that sit behind them, that take all the information and do longer term analysis.
The important thing though is it’s only useful if you get it to the ground commander in a timely fashion and that’s what we’ve been working on as well. We send video to Rover units where the ground commander can be sitting in the field with the troops and can see what the Heron sensor is seeing. Then you’ve got the communications through the RPA back to the control station to be able to be reactive right there, right then. That’s the real important part of it all and then if there’s any other critical information collected and analysed in the shorter term it’s turned around and spun back to the ground commander as quickly as possible.
ADM: Industry is expecting the first tenders for Project Air 5428 in the coming year or so – what does this project need to deliver which the RAAF’s current pilot training programs can’t?
Binskin: The big issue for the current pilot training system is the time that it takes from when we get people in off the street to the time that we train them through the pilot’s course and onto their operational conversion, whether that be fighters, transport or maritime etc. What we’re looking for is a pilot training system that is efficient and delivers pilots from off the street into those units in less than two years, and even less if we can do that.
We’re also after a system that prepares pilots – and I’ll talk predominantly pilots; however, it’s a similar issue with Air Combat Officers (ACOs) - for the modern systems coming down the track. And if you look at every aeroplane that we fly now, they have fairly complex systems in the cockpit, even the King Air with its flight management system. As you move through into the other transport aircraft, the C-17, the C-130 and into other systems like the P-3 and the P-8 in the future, and Hornets and Super Hornets and then JSF, they’re all becoming far more system centric, and we need to train for this.
Right now, the PC-9 doesn’t give us what we need to step into this space, so we’re looking for a 5428 solution; something that is not overly complex but where you can develop pilot skills through that system. We’re looking for not only a solid training platform but a very good synthetic environment along with it.
ADM: Is the process far enough along to comment on whether a PPP or a PFI is being considered?
Binskin: I wouldn’t want to comment on that at the moment but it will be very clear when it comes out in the tender documentation what we’re after.
ADM: In terms of Airlift: you’re about to rationalise the C-130 fleet and acquire a new Battlefield Airlifter. When is this going to happen, and how will you manage the workforce transition from C-130H to whatever you choose?
Binskin: If I look at the Airlift transition, it has already started. It started last year when we retired the Caribou. And we retired the Caribou because it was an old aircraft - it was 45 years old when it was retired. It was manpower intensive and for the investment we were putting into it, it just wasn’t giving us the return; it was taking a lot of time for people to get an aeroplane serviceable on the day. And it wasn’t preparing our maintenance people or our air crew for the modern systems that we’re getting now.
We brought in the King Air as an interim. We’ve got a total of eight King Airs; the three ex-Army King Airs and five new King Airs on lease, so that we could do two things. One is we could free up the majority of the workforce to re-skill, re-train and put into other Air Force platforms to get skills that they needed in order to be able to bring in the new systems, whether they be Super Hornets, P-8s, or Battlefield Airlifter.
From an air crew perspective, the King Air provided the opportunity to put them in a modern cockpit with a relatively decent performance, in order to give them relatively quick captaincies and experience to be able to put to use on the other Airlift types that we currently have and then eventually to the Battlefield Airlifters.
The C-130 fleet, predominantly the H variant, is carrying the loads that the King Air can’t carry and will take us through to a point where we’ll retire the Hs and then start to roll into the Air 8000 Phase 1 and Phase 2 aircraft. Of the two, the big one for me is Phase 2, which is the Battlefield Airlifter. If I could have that today, I would. But the current DCP timings are what we are working towards. I see the Battlefield Airlifter as being an important part of our tiered approach to Airlift where you’ve got the C-17 at the high end, C-130 doing the middle loads and then the Battlefield Airlifter in there doing the smaller loads and the shorter runs around the place. I see that three tiered approach as being the best approach; it’s a very efficient way of doing the Airlift task.
ADM: Any regrets about losing the F-111?
Binskin: No.
ADM: Why?
Binskin: I wasn’t an F-111 pilot! All jokes aside though, that’s not the real reason. The aircraft had a presence, a real mystique, but it had gone beyond its time. And in fact, as I said at the farewell at Amberley, if you put it in contemporary terms, if we’d operated the Lancaster for as long, we would have retired the Lancaster in 1979. Now in 1979 no one would even have thought about taking a Lancaster to war. The F-111 is not quite the same comparison in contemporary capability, because the F-111 was still a capable aeroplane at its retirement, but again it was a manpower intensive system to keep going and in today’s environment its chances of mission success had degraded.
And for a similar reason as I spoke before, about upskilling the workforce, being able to go to the bridging fighter with the F-18Fs as the stepping stone to JSF really will allow us to ramp up the JSF a lot better. Importantly, we ended up retiring the F-111 at a time of our choosing, not a time of its choosing. With ageing aircraft, the longer you keep them the more chance you’ve got of something unforeseen popping up. So we retired it gracefully at a time that we could do it and by jumping into the bridging fighter now we maintain a very, very good strike capability.
ADM: What have operations in the Middle East taught you about airborne surveillance generally? What can Air 7000 apply from the lessons learned in that operational experience?
Binskin: There are many lessons to take out of the current experience in the Middle East. One of the big ones is that ground forces nowadays are very reluctant to move unless they’ve got some sort of overwatch coverage from an ISR platform - and I don’t blame them. I think when you’ve got that technology available you’ll want to use it. What we have learnt is that it’s not good enough just to have it there, it needs to be fully integrated into the scheme of manoeuvre of the ground forces.
So not only do we have the platforms operating over there but we have experienced air force liaison officers with the ground units. Not with all the individual units, but at least in the planning and execution phase at the command level we make sure that we get the best advice to the ground commander so that they can use what they have available to the best effect.
Other lessons though are harder to take away because the air space is not contested in Afghanistan. There is a proliferation of all these UAVs and RPAs, and that’s okay because there are times like the present where it is perfectly relevant.
However, if we start operating in contested air space that might not be the case, therefore, we need to take the current lessons for what they are, but also remember that there are other situations where we may not be able to have this level of ISR just sitting over the battlefield - day in, day out - without having gained air superiority beforehand. Over the recent couple of years many people tend to take air superiority as a given.
That’s good when you’ve got it, but it is something that you’re should be willing to fight for and maintain, and that’s why you see the force structure that we have in the RAAF. That’s the important lesson that is generally forgotten in the current operations, but needs to be at the back at everyone’s mind when looking to the future.
ADM: In the next two to five years, what issues do you think RAAF needs to address in terms of capabilities or platforms and people?
Binskin: I’d look at it in the next two-to-three year space. The big one we’ll be working on is making sure our workforce is shaped and skilled the best way we can to take the next jump in platform introduction. As I described before, we’ve done a fair few recently and now there’s a pause for a couple of years. We probably couldn’t keep the tempo of platform introduction going that we had in 2010, so that’s not a bad thing.
Shaping and skilling the workforce over the next few years will be the biggest, but will be happening in an environment of the Strategic Reform Program (SRP). We’ve had a lot of focus on SRP in the last two years and looking into the future SRP savings and reforms really start to ramp up.
We’re already seeing some benefits of that focus; we’re seeing not only just dollar benefits of our SRP programs but we’re really starting to see some good capability initiatives coming out as well. So that’ll be the big two for the next couple of years: our people and the SRP.