Chief of Navy’s cultural intent for the Royal Australian Navy is a Fighting Navy, a Thinking Navy, and an Australian Navy. For the past 15 years, our ship’s command teams have sought to refine, clarify and contemporise internal command and control processes and procedures such that by the mid-2000s we had developed a matrix of command priorities constructed to reflect equipment and capability the CO of a ship might need to achieve their aim or mission.
While the last 20 years has seen the costs of accessing GNSS dramatically drop and the services have become readily accessible and widespread, an emerging challenge is that it is also cheap and easy to jam or spoof the GNSS signals - either deliberately or inadvertently.
Military cyber operations take many guises and in the operational domain remain shrouded in extreme secrecy. As defined by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Law of War Manual (2015) cyber operations employ “cyberspace capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve objectives in or through cyberspace.
As the RAN increases its focus on operations in task groups and the ADF begins to conduct more joint training exercises in the complex littoral environment the use of Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) to restrict a ship or unit’s ability to manoeuvre or slow its advance can have dire consequences on the overall success of the operation.
The maritime domain is becoming increasingly complex; modern manufacturing techniques and rapid technological developments mean potential adversary nations have a wider access to cheap and highly capable weapons, platforms and systems.
The traditional RADAR system as we know it is transitioning to the next stage of technological development in the form of Quantum RADARs.
The strategic landscape continues to change in Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. The globe is becoming increasingly volatile and the rise of China is accelerating shifts in the balance of power.
This paper describes Australia’s current amphibious capability. The Australian Amphibious Force is able to employ a landing force of up to battalion-group strength over the spectrum of operations from the provision of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to high-end warfighting, the latter capability having been tested, in conjunction with allies, during Exercise TALISMAN SABRE 2019.
In a friendly port in the not-too-distant future a young frigate sailor scrolls through his smart-phone. He is about to get underway on a patrol in a sensitive and potentially hostile area and wants to hear from home before he loses connectivity for a month. On this occasion, however, instead of seeing updates from his friends back home, the sailor’s news feed is bombarded with dramatic images that he can scarcely believe.