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Land Power Key for Multidomain Success

Australian Chief of Army Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart shares his insights on regional security

FORUM Staff  |  Photos by AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE DEPARTMENT

Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart

Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart assumed command of the Australian Army on July 2, 2022, about 35 years after he enlisted as a Soldier. The Chief of Army sat down for an interview with FORUM on the sidelines of the Land Forces Pacific (LANPAC) conference sponsored by the Association of the United States Army in May 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His experience includes a range of leadership, operations, training and program management appointments in Australia and overseas. He has extensive regimental leadership experience and has commanded operations at the company, joint task force, brigade and force levels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel and Timor-Leste.

He primarily has worked in joint, whole-of-government, international and multinational environments for the past 20 years. Before becoming Army chief, he was the Head of Land Capability in Army Headquarters after commanding the Multinational Force and Observers from 2017 to 2019.

He is a graduate of the Royal Military College in Duntroon, the United Kingdom’s Joint Services Command and Staff College, the U.S. Army War College, and the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of New England, and master’s degrees in project management, defense studies and strategy.

 His honors and awards include his appointment as Member of the Order of Australia in 2011, the Distinguished Service Cross in 2014 and advancement to Officer of the Order of Australia in 2020. He has also received awards from Colombia, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Japan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay and the U.S.

Why did you pursue a military career?

As a curious 18 year old, I had a good friend who joined the Army before me. I thought it sounded like a good thing to do, so I initially joined as a Soldier for three years, and here I am nearly four decades later and it’s a great privilege to be leading our Army today.

Australian Soldiers use a recovery vehicle to load an M1A1 Abrams tank on a landing craft during a drill off North Queensland in June 2024.

What are some highlights of your career?

Very early during my basic training, I thought this is the place for me. These are the people for me. For me, the two most compelling things about service are purpose — being part of something that is bigger than oneself, something that matters — and then people. Ultimately, all my best friends in life are people I served with in our Army or in other people’s armies.

I think what is different is the experience you go through together. Particularly in adversity, there is a level of trust because ultimately you need to be able to trust others with your life. That’s not something you find in too many other walks of life or parts of society.

Tell us about the importance of Australia’s new defense strategy.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government came to power in May 2022, it commissioned a comprehensive strategic review of defense and security. The outcomes of that have led the transformation of the ADF [Australian Defence Force] from a joint force to an integrated force and from a balanced force to a focused force. The report that characterized that review also made some fundamental changes to our national approach to defense.

One of them was to move from an episodic development of policy through white papers, which were done irregularly or infrequently, to a steady drumbeat of a net assessment-informed, update or adaptation of our NDS [National Defence Strategy] every two years. The idea behind that is the environment that we live and operate in is changing quite rapidly, and from a policy perspective we needed to be more agile and able to adapt, and that influences the resources required as well.

Accompanying that NDS was a recommendation from the strategic review for a recast, integrated investment program, that is, the capital acquisition budget realigned to deliver on the strategy in our prioritization of the integrated force by domain.

An Australian Soldier provides cover fire during exercise Predators Walk at Mount Bundey Training Area in May 2024.

What do you believe will be the most important change to come from the new strategy?

Overall, the idea of an integrated force as opposed to a joint force is probably one of the key ideas. As a joint force, we are quite a long way down the road in terms of a joint approach to operations. A joint force comes together in effect; you bring it together on the mission, on the objective. The idea of an integrated force is that we design it from the get-go to work together, then develop it and then deploy it as a coherent force.

The basic idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As a modest force, it’s really important that we make the most of our investment. The integrated force is a way of ensuring that we can deliver multidomain effects in the most efficient and effective way.

My mission is to deliver an Army that is optimized for littoral maneuver and has the capacity to conduct long-range strike. The key idea behind that is understanding what is the Army’s contribution into that integrated force and how can I better support our Navy and our Air Force, as well as our cyber and space components, and deliver a modernized, special operations capability as well. The idea of optimizing our Army for littoral maneuver is about using the littorals that dominate our region, as maneuver space, accessing more of the maneuver space, particularly on the sea side of the littorals.

In practical terms that means the Army owns and operates watercraft, a capability that we haven’t had since 1946. That means that we can independently deploy or we can aggregate with our joint amphibious system, and that provides more options in terms of force projection. The ability to have multiple, low signature, Army-operated watercraft also helps with distribution, with survivability and more. But it also gives us greater access to more of the region because we can actually operate and maneuver in the littorals and also into the inland waterways — so just much better access to the terrain in the region, the population centers, the key terrain, decisive terrain and the chokepoints including across northern Australia.

Will you expand on the importance of land power?

My mantra is “and” not “or.” We are part of the multidomain, part of the combined and joint fight. That’s going to take everybody on the team to be successful. In terms of what armies can offer, our contribution to support our teammates, there are five key characteristics. The first is presence, the people-to-people relationships on the ground among populations, the military-to-military relationship. And, of course, one of the things we do as armies is we protect populations.

The second is persistence. Again, it’s one of the advantages of the domain — the people aspect of armies — regardless of the season, the weather, the terrain, the conditions, the level of the threat, Soldiers and armies persist; they are there, they can stay there. That plays a huge advantage in terms of key terrain, in terms of reassuring or protecting populations that are under threat.

The third is that there are a number of asymmetrical advantages to the land power network. The vast majority of militaries in the region have large armies or are dominated by armies. So that’s quite an influential regional network that we provide and a relationship that we can really leverage. The ability to be present and persistent means any potential aggressor has a much greater burden if they want to use force because they are facing forces that are incumbent and their defenses are going to be stronger, particularly given challenges in our region where there is the tyranny of distance. Having that network already present among our Allies and Partners creates asymmetry as well.

Fourth, land forces are really versatile. You can take pretty much any kind of Army unit and it can do pretty much any mission, whether it’s HADR [humanitarian assistance and disaster relief] or combat operations.

Fifth is value for money. We have to be very good stewards of our resources because there are so many demands on where taxpayer dollars are spent. I think you get a lot of bang for your buck, return on investment, relative to other domains.

Australian Soldiers drill on the helicopter landing dock of the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Adelaide in June 2024.

How is multilateralism increasing in response to the changing environment?

I’ve noticed just in the two years that I’ve been in command the exponential growth in multilateral cooperation. We’ve had long-standing relationships with almost all of our neighbors in the region, whether that’s in the Southwest Pacific, Southeast Asia, North Asia, the subcontinent and beyond. And we have a long-standing series of bilateral exercises and activities. We’ve been involved in working beside and assisting the Philippines during their long-running insurgency for more than the last decade. But what’s different today is that almost every one of the key regional exercises and activities is now multilateral.

A great example is Super Garuda Shield, which was previously an Indonesia-U.S. bilateral exercise. In 2022, Super Garuda Shield involved 14 countries, six who participated in rehearsed joint forcible entry operations from the air and the sea. We give great credit to Indonesia and our partners in the TNI [Indonesian Armed Forces] for bringing us all together. That really set the standard for what those kinds of activities could achieve. It was a really strong demonstration of the collective capacity of armies working together, and indeed our country teams working together … to be an expression of our respective governments’ collective will.

If you look around the region, [the Australia-U.S. exercise] Talisman Sabre [2023] is another great example, with more than 20 countries and more than 30,000 participants, and the combined and joint exercise Balikatan in the Philippines. There are other activities, like Yama Sakura in Japan and Cobra Gold in Thailand.

And then in the South Pacific, there’s a lot of working together in terms of supporting those nations and those communities through some pretty significant natural disasters and providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Vanuatu was hit by two cyclones [in 2023] and there was a really significant multilateral effort to support them and mostly through their own government’s disaster response architecture, where we all fell in behind and supported their national coordination center. 

When we look around the region, there’s an enhanced level of cooperation. And it’s becoming more and more sophisticated as we better integrate technically and procedurally and in terms of person-to-person relationships.

How important are Allies and Partners for deterrence?

In an era of great power competition, unless you’re a great power — and Australia is not — then the only way to protect and promote national interest is to work together with others. You’ve heard the phrase here many times at LANPAC that ‘we are more together’ and that’s a great kind of bumper sticker, but it’s also representative of the way we are working together. We are doing that in support of the cooperation at the government-to-government level. At the military-to military level, we’re doing really well to make sure we can play our part in the whole-of-government efforts. We form part of the bigger picture — the diplomatic, the informational, the economic — and our job is to make sure we are supporting and aligned with that whole-of-government and government-to-government decision to work together on our common objective, which is a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific. Our job, our part of that, is to do everything in our power to prevent conflict.

How do you plan to enhance interoperability among services and countries?

I use three lenses of integration. From a human standpoint, we’re in really good shape in terms of the leader-to-leader relationships. We hear from Soldiers and junior NCOs [noncommissioned officers] and warrant and junior officers to field grades that they are starting to build habitual relationships because they are working together again and again, and they are the leaders of tomorrow. People-to-people integration is in a good place. We just need to keep that steady drumbeat of engagement. Procedurally, as we bring our teams together on these various activities, we’re practicing and rehearsing our headquarters at echelon. That is the practical way of figuring exactly how we are going to work together, how we are going to deliver the functions of command and control, communication, and deliver the combat service support, how are we going to coordinate effects, how are we going to maneuver and to fire together at echelon in our region, whether it’s in Australia or working together in other parts. And then there’s technical integration. I think the ability to share data at machine speed matters. We can do that technically in some areas. But we are working on some of the policy areas to make sure we are protecting data and protecting information so that we can also share in a way that is going to be relevant and meaningful in terms of delivering a combined operational effect.

What are some of Australia’s contributions to Pacific Island nations?

We have very long-standing relationships with our teammates, whether that’s Papua New Guinea (PNG), Fiji, Vanuatu or New Zealand. They are terrific partners and they have fantastic relationships across Southeast Asia as well. We have been working together for years. My own experience in Timor-Leste was alongside our partners in Fiji, for example. There has been an enhancement in our bilateral relations at the individual training and education levels. Another great example is the Fijian Peace Operations Training Institute at Blackrock Camp, which Australia was very proud to partner with. That’s a regional peace operations training center. You can well appreciate that countries like Fiji make a huge contribution to United Nations peacekeeping and other operations around the world. That’s about building our capacity together. We do a lot of training with PNG. For example, the deputy commander of the Australian Army’s 3rd Brigade in Townsville, Col. Boniface Aruma, is from the PNG Defence Force, and we are well integrated. It’s a really respectful and mutually beneficial relationship. Many of those countries have significant challenges when it comes to development, and the impacts of climate change on their economy and on their people and on their cultures.

What is technology’s role in security and how is the partnership among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., known as AUKUS, expanding technological capabilities?

The way we can speak about the role of the military, certainly from an Army perspective, is the continuities and the discontinuities, the enduring human nature of warfare. The human impact, the human cost, and the nature of conflict and how conflicts are decided, which is generally by politicians, among populations, and on the land. But that is balanced with war’s ever-changing character.

It’s fair to say that its changing character is dominated by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and [emerging] technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and the proliferation of remote and robotic and autonomous systems. Quantum [technology] will be really important. Such technologies are changing the character of warfare and we are seeing that play out in different theaters, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East. Another key development is the proliferation of sensors and sensing technology, which is leading to what some describe as transparency in some domains. I think that is really concerning. In the land domain, the undersea domain and the cyber domain, there are opportunities in the clutter of those environments and also risks, and [we’re] trying to work out how we address the risks and how we exploit the opportunities.

We all have a heavy focus on understanding technology, but not just technology for technology’s sake. How is it best applied? We know from a long study of military history that there’s an ongoing cycle of the rise of a technology and then the rise of its counter and then sort of a reciprocal arrangement over time: action, reaction, counteraction. So, we can understand where and at what time do we best apply our resources to those technological advances, taking into account that inevitable cycle.

AUKUS is about leveraging mutually beneficial efforts in some of those emerging technology areas that have the potential for operational advantage.  

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