It’s disturbing to see $18–27 billion of Australian government money about to be spent on more than 400 heavily armoured ‘infantry fighting vehicles’ when we’re busily watching yet another conflict in which military vehicles like these are being destroyed in numbers by cheap and readily available anti-armour missiles and armed drones.

The Russian ‘combined arms’ military machine depends on its armoured vehicles—tanks, mobile artillery and infantry fighting vehicles, and is doing so now in Putin’s war in Ukraine.

This military machine is capable of devasting destruction of civilian infrastructure and urban settlements. It might also perform well if it were faced with a similarly equipped military that chose to fight it the same way it fights. But it is proving highly vulnerable to a Ukrainian military that learned how the Russians equip themselves and fight from its experience of defeat in 2014, and is targeting the vulnerabilities that the Russian combined-arms approach involves—notably, the simple fact that big metal boxes with people in them can be destroyed by effective but cheap human- and drone-launched missiles.

The Ukrainians are using NATO-supplied stocks of weapons like Javelin and NLAW (next-generation light anti-tank weapon) missiles, loitering munitions and small numbers of drones, including the Turkish armed drones. World media is awash with images of destroyed Russian armoured vehicles. Bloomberg reports that ‘St Javelin’ is destroying even the most modern Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. US officials and others are noting that ‘Ukraine has made “terrific” use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles, which can loiter over tanks and artillery and destroy them with devastatingly accurate missile fire’.

This isn’t new news. The small Azerbaijani military, funded by a country with a GDP that’s about 3% of Australia’s, won its 2020 war with its neighbour, Armenia, with a similarly devastating set of attacks on Armenian armoured vehicles and other military targets like brigade headquarters and logistics functions. It did so, just like the Ukrainians, with large volumes of cheap, consumable armed drones, missiles and multiple launch rocket systems, not with the type of heavy armoured formations and all the enabling and supporting systems that make up the Australian Army’s planned approach.

And the Israeli military too has shifted it approach from pushing armoured forces supported by infantry and missiles into dangerous environments—in places like Lebanon and Gaza—to an approach of ‘manouevre warfare’ where the manouevring forces operating against its adversaries are missiles, loitering munitions and drones, armed and unarmed, all laced together with intelligence collection and targeting systems. Israeli armour is a defensive asset to help withstand attacks against Israeli soil, and now this armour is getting burdened with ever-increasing and expensive self-protection systems—because of its vulnerability.

So, what are the Azerbaijanis, the Ukrainians and the Israelis missing about the value of heavy armour in war that makes Australia’s planned $27 billion investment make sense, despite the evidence in our world?

Well, it seems that we’ll just do things better than the Armenians, Russians and Israelis, meaning that our use of armour will be successful when theirs wasn’t. Australia’s infantry fighting vehicles will have self-protection that includes ‘counter unmanned aerial systems’ weapons and other systems, perhaps even future ‘directed energy’ systems.

The problem here is that this is exactly the approach that US and other analysts already told us the Russians were using.

In Ukraine, anti-tank weapons are being fired by soldiers on foot, not from armoured vehicles. We hear that:

The missiles have succeeded despite efforts to defeat them. The Russian military had said, and Pentagon leadership believed, that a defensive system on the newest T-90 tanks was capable of sensing and destroying anti-tank missiles like Javelins and NLAWs in flight. In an apparently new countermeasure, Russian troops are welding improvised cages of parallel steel bars atop tank turrets. Video evidence shows that both defenses, however, have failed.

So, how is now the moment for the Australian government to accept Defence’s advice that the future of our army must lie in equipping it with over 400 armoured infantry fighting vehicles? How is it that there is apparently no Australian Army champion of an alternative force structure that learns the lessons of the victors, not the vanquished, in the most recent conflicts involving armour and precision anti-armour weapons?

I don’t know. My experience inside the Australian defence organisation makes me wonder if the issue is that the force design and then tendering, contracting and evaluation processes for this big investment program, called Land 400 Phase 3, are such a long-running, internally complex endeavour that it’s largely unaffected by changes in the external environment. So it is proceeding as originally conceived and without re-evaluation of some central assumptions that now seem at best questionable.

You know some of them because you’ve heard them from advocates of tanks and armoured vehicles: ‘Tanks save lives’, ‘In the last 50 metres, you need a tank’, ‘To take and hold ground, you need tanks and boots on the ground’. Apart from these slogans, however, there seems little answer for the destruction of armour we’ve seen in recent conflicts—and that physical destruction is more compelling than the slogans.

I can see that possessing large numbers of tanks and self-propelled artillery and multiple rocket launchers can give a military the ability to conduct indiscriminate destruction against civilian and military targets, as the Russians are doing in Ukraine. But I cannot make a case for the Australian military fighting that way.

I can also accept that fighting a large, modernised combined-arms military like the Russians on their own terms with a counterpart modernised combined-arms military (a small version of which seems to be the desire motivating Land 400) would be best done with the most capable and well-equipped armoured vehicles you can buy.

But I can’t see why Australia planning to fight an adversary like that on those terms makes any sense, particularly when we have the examples of much more successful alternative concepts and tactics from the Israelis, the Azerbaijanis and now the Ukrainians.

It’s also hard to see where in our region it would happen and how the Australian Defence Force would get there in the numbers necessary. Given Australia’s geography, any plan to use even 100 of these armoured vehicles anywhere in our region would need an entirely different amphibious force to lift and support such operations. The navy’s two large amphibious ships can each deploy about 20 armoured vehicles, and will struggle to put ashore the logistics and sustainment tail they need, let alone wrapping them up in the larger force and systems needed for a combined-arms mission. Combat losses will whittle this small number down fast.

On a narrower issue, one of the two final bidders for this army project is Germany’s Rheinmetall and the other is Korea’s Hanwha. I wonder if the evaluation process is assessing the implications for the project of the radical change in Germany’s defence policy and investment announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz three days into Russia’s war. He launched an urgent effort to reverse the decline in the German military’s capabilities, starting with an injection of €100 billion into the defence budget.

It may be that the Bundeswehr, unlike the Australian Army, understands that investing large amounts in large numbers of armoured vehicles now makes far less sense than it might have in earlier decades. But it’s equally likely that pro-armour advocates and German industry will convince Germany’s government to spend some of this new money on German-built armoured vehicles—at least a major land war in Europe has credibility as a scenario.

It’s very likely that Germany’s design and production capacity and all of Rheinmetall’s supply chains will have to meet their home government’s needs as the first priority, with other customers being important but less critical. We know that supply-chain pressures and disruption are real in our disrupted world. So, while the Land 400 evaluation team might have thought its work was complete, it must now do a detailed assessment of the implications of this radical shift in German policy and security for at least one of the possible providers. Not to do so will affect both the credibility and the viability of any result.

None of this seems likely to get in the way of this long-gestated Defence project that is apparently almost at the end of its years-long tendering and evaluation process. Even at this late point, though, it’s still worth asking if this emperor has any clothes.

It can be hard to grasp the fundamental concepts of evolution because of the vast timeframes involved. But there are dedicated scientists who, after years of study in the Galapagos Islands, have actually observed evolution in action through the emergence of new species of finches. On the battlefield, evolution occurs even faster and we don’t even have to travel to the Galapagos to see it. There was plenty of evidence of evolution in action at Land Forces 2018 last week in Adelaide, both on the floor of the industry expo and in the Australian Army’s presentations.

Evolution both in the natural world and in the army are driven by adaption to a constantly changing environment. Of course, evolution in nature occurs through natural selection of randomly generated variations, while the army’s evolution is the result of conscious development and testing of new concepts and capabilities—that is, innovation.

As Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Rick Burr continues the cerebral legacy of Angus Campbell, and there are many encouraging signs that the army is creating the intellectual ecosystem it needs to think through how it responds to a changing world. Adelaide was full of examples of innovation and creative thinking.

It would be hard for even the most cynical not to be impressed by the Aussie innovations that were on show, such as the integration of a phased-array radar designed and built by Canberra’s own CEA Technologies onto Bendigo’s Hawkei protected vehicle as part of the Department of Defence’s short-range air defence project. It’s encouraging to see the enthusiasm with which the army is embracing uninhabited systems, or drawing on its entire workforce to get ideas about how to meet the challenges of the future.

But the army, like its sister services and Defence as a whole, is facing fundamental challenges. Just as in the natural world, evolution on the battlefield drives greater complexity. There are more and more species. And each species is itself becoming more complex. The army developed the Bushmaster protected vehicle, a creature that it never had before, to meet a particular niche. And because there is a specialised niche that is better met by a smaller vehicle, it now has Hawkei, a smaller protected vehicle.

In order to adapt to the changing environment, the Bushmaster is itself evolving and becoming more complex—for example, with the addition of counter–improvised explosive device systems, remote weapons systems and battle management systems. Subspecies of the Bushmaster, such as an electronic warfare variant, are also evolving.

With the proliferation of unmanned aerial systems, it was inevitable that there would be a large number of counter-UAS technologies in Adelaide, both sensors and ‘shooters’ (noting that many of the shooters don’t use old-fashioned kinetic energy). So it wasn’t surprising to see the launch of a prototype integrating a counter-UAS system into a Bushmaster.

Innovation and adaption are signs of a healthy army. But evolution into increasingly specialised niches also means that the army is getting stretched wider and wider as it acquires more and more capabilities, each of which is increasingly complex. While the Bushmaster (and then Hawkei) were developed to fill a niche between trucks and armoured fighting vehicles, the army still has trucks (in many variants, with scores of different trailers and modules to adapt the trucks to different niches) and AFVs, along with Bushmaster and Hawkei in all of their blossoming variations.

This increase in complexity results in increasing costs (chapter 7), generally at a much higher rate than inflation. Even with the growth of the defence budget to 2% of GDP, keeping up with increasingly broad capability requirements without sacrificing depth (or mass) will be difficult. Similarly, the 2016 defence white paper gives the army only a modest increase in manpower to operate that broader range of capabilities. Regardless of the total number of people in the army, the increase in niche roles means more specialised but potentially fragile trades (as the navy has experienced in its submarine workforce). And I haven’t mentioned capabilities promised in the white paper which the army has never operated, such as anti-ship missiles and long-range strike weapons. That will draw it into habitats traditionally populated by the navy and the air force.

Interestingly, one area in which the army is bucking the trend and reinforcing (or restoring) its depth is in AFVs. As tempting as it is to force the analogy and make gratuitous dinosaur jibes about the LAND 400 Phase 3 infantry fighting vehicle candidates, I’ll refrain. There’s a niche for almost every species in the complex ecosystem of the modern battlefield, even AFVs, but it’s becoming harder for me to see them as the apex predator in the food chain.

Marcus Hellyer’s article ‘Army must adapt to evolution in its military purchases’, published in The Australian earlier this month, reveals a number of serious problems with the prevailing wisdom about Australia’s defence. Invoking the obsolescence of knights in the late Middle Ages, Hellyer criticises the Defence Department’s moves to acquire 450 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) under the LAND 400 project. Noting that knights were eventually rendered obsolete by technological and organisational changes, he questions the case for the ADF to acquire large numbers of IFVs that could be of little use in future operations.

Hellyer argues that IFVs are ‘ill-suited to tasks that feature heavily in modern counterinsurgency operations, such as route clearance and patrolling’ and could be vulnerable on the conventional battlefield. He suggests that they ‘may not be survivable in a future conventional war’ and could be of ‘poor value for the likely [counterinsurgency] tasks the ADF will have to perform in the future’. The ADF, he suggests, could limit its ‘operational and investment flexibility’ by committing to the full complement of 450 IFVs.

Hellyer draws an analogy between the armoured knight and the IFV, which has little bearing on what we have learned about practical military operations in the 21st century. Those who have fought in modern war zones recognise a simple truth that Hellyer appears to overlook: that at the tactical level, IFVs continue to win battles and save the lives of soldiers.

I have often said in this forum that I value the offerings of those without military or combat experience, but that they should always think twice before publishing on issues that are essentially tactical. What troubles me most about Hellyer’s article is that he apparently thinks that the major likely future task determining land force equipment acquisitions could be counterinsurgency, perhaps of the Malayan Emergency type. But we are now in a period of immense strategic uncertainty, when the intent of our major ally is becoming increasing clouded and the capability of the US armed forces has been severely diminished, especially in comparison to likely world opponents.

Scepticism about the utility of armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs), and particularly what have been called ‘tanks’, in the Australian armed forces has a long pedigree, even among military personnel. During and since the end of the World War II, Australian leaders have been reluctant to deploy AFVs in military operations. It was hard enough to get military commanders to accept tanks into the Buna–Gona fighting, but they won battles and saved lives.

In the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Australian Army resisted deploying AFVs to the warzone. In Korea, we happily accepted US and British armoured support, which was decisive in many engagements. In Vietnam, our tanks and armoured personnel carriers, once they were sneaked in, were critical. Tanks and other armoured vehicles proved their worth in the modern counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and in Iraq, yet there was a deep reluctance to deploy Australian tanks to Afghanistan and we had no appropriate armoured vehicles heavier than the ASLAV. There are good practical reasons to be sceptical of AFV scepticism.

The continued importance of AFVs in tactical warfighting was demonstrated in our recent experience of coalition forces in Iraq. Hundreds of M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley IFVs provided vital protection against IEDs and other weapons in counterinsurgency activities, winning battles large and small, and saving lives, until more appropriate armoured vehicles were developed and deployed.

Many coalition soldiers are still alive today because of the armoured protection and fire support provided by AFVs. Practical experience demonstrates that the long-anticipated obsolescence of the AFV has yet to come to pass. Ignoring these hard-won lessons could lead us to make the wrong decisions about acquisitions, and imperil Australian soldiers in future operations by depriving them of the equipment that will be most effective.

At a higher level, Hellyer’s article may be indicative of what has been a serious underlying problem with Australian defence thinking over many years: a lack of integration in our approaches to the tactical and strategic levels of defence. There can be no sound defence policy or strategy without sound tactics. Any strategic policy, including the question of acquisitions, must take tactical realities into consideration. To jettison AFVs from our force structure in the face of the hard-won practical experience of recent years would be foolish.

The government, Defence and the ADF are only now starting to move away from the kind of advice that this represents. The government has embarked on the largest peacetime rearmament program in our history, spending $200 billion in 10 years. The air force stands near perfect (except for sustainability); the navy has priority for re-equipping in the short to medium term; and, in a joint force, the army must match air and maritime forces at some stage for any kind of warfighting, including counterinsurgency.

Even if counterinsurgency happened to be the main future task of the land forces, 75 years of post–World War II experience tells us that the army is likely to go to war two or three times before the last frigate or sub hits the water. In the current circumstances, we will be ‘the lucky ADF’ if that’s all we have to do. The army must be equipped to fight the same kind of wars as the air force and the navy.

The Australian Army has been engaged in more than 15 years of continuous operations. Yet the challenges for Army do not rest. Today’s environment sees the pace of change accelerating, yet the fundamental nature of warfare remains the same. Conflict involves people, whether over resources, territory or ideology. Lasting results hinge on understanding and influencing populations. The Australian Army, as a member of the Joint Force, must be able to deploy, fight and win our nations wars: it is the force enabled by sea control and air control.

After Afghanistan, Army needs to be re-centred. Army must embrace Australia’s Maritime Strategy – Joint, Amphibious, Expeditionary in culture and structure. We want the Army to be comprised of combined-arms teams able to undertake combat in our littoral environment and territory, offshore territories & facilities; to defeat incursions onto Australian territory, deny adversaries access to staging posts from which to attack us; to undertake amphibious manoeuvre as well as stabilisation operations like INTERFET and RAMSI.

But as I discussed at last week’s ASPI-hosted Army’s Future Force Structure Options Conference, there are a few issues that require careful reflection.

The first is our future amphibious force. The designation of 2RAR as ‘marines’—and I use that term deliberately and provocatively—is an important beginning. However, it is only a beginning. It is not sustainable that such a force sit ‘alone and aside’ in 3 Brigade as a single-shot capability, unable to be sustained in terms of readiness or size by the BEERSHEBA RTS cycle. This is a signal that Army has not yet gripped up ‘amphibiosity’. That must end. Having made that declaration, I am confident that our new Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, together with Major General Rick Burr as Deputy Chief of Army are well placed and superbly experienced to take our Army forward in its evolution towards becoming an amphibious force (as indeed is its heritage, in the Pacific by 1945).

If, in the Australian Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), we aspire to field a Marine Expeditionary Unit-equivalent force—and I do—then our ‘marines’ need to be a force that is specialised in amphibious operations, and the specialised doctrine and equipment that it requires. The 2,200 Army people that an ARG requires, suggest to me a brigade organisation rather than a single battalion.

And while I’m engaging in heresy, let me touch upon Army Airborne Forces. The removal of a requirement for an Airborne Combat Team from Army was a mistake. The transfer of this responsibility from 3RAR to 2 Cdo actually represented a decision to retain and nurture our capability for AFO, but to discard the requirement for conventional airborne infantry forces.

Airborne forces have an enduring relevance to Australia because of the unique demands of our Primary Operational Environment (POE); it is vast (20% of the Earth’s surface), peopled by PICs that don’t possess any air-to-air or ground-to-air threat; it is a dispersed and maritime terrain. In larger, more high-intensity contingencies, such as against hybrid threats in anti-access environments, operating in support of an ARG, the Airborne Battle Group could be decisive.

Turning to vehicles, the Australian Army does not need replacement armoured vehicles that conform to the LAND400 requirements matrix because we envisage undertaking large-scale land campaigns against continental great powers. Rather, we need new vehicles because our existing ones (M113s, ASLAV) are obsolete, or are approaching obsolescence. More capable vehicles are needed by the Australian Army so that it has the force protection, mobility, lethality and is the networked force that can undertake the whole range of missions asked of it—whether that be peacekeeping, stability operations, or high intensity operations, such as amphibious operations and close combat.

Combat Reconnaissance Vehicles (CRVs) and Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs), supported by Main Battle Tanks (MBTs), Manoeuvre Support Vehicles (MSVs), Bushmasters and Hawkei (PMVs), are the suite of vehicles that will enable the Australian Army to be the mobile, lethal, networked Land Force that both sides of politics ask and require it to be. Anything less would mean exposing Australian light infantry to threats such as IEDs, hybrid forces and even near-peer adversaries without the protection and capabilities the Australian people expect.

In an INTERFET-type mission in the future, or even a RAMSI-like mission, I understand the requirement for a capable CRV or IFV to dominate the ‘Three Block War’ and protect our people.

The investment in new vehicles and technologies is intended to enhance Army capabilities, and in this endeavour the Battle Management System (BMS) (a digital command control support system) and speeding the Army’s ‘action, reaction’ cycle is a critical component. The BMS isn’t ‘sexy’, but it’s transformational and powerful. The BMS connects soldiers, vehicles, and leaders all the way up to joint headquarters, enables near real-time situational awareness with a common operating picture.

There are other areas of Army modernisation that merit greater consideration.

It is my sincere hope that the Government plans to include a replacement for Army’s Saab RBS-70 very-short-range air-defence missile system in its planning. The current RBS-70 system, along with the Lockheed Martin PSTAR-ER radar, is not adequate to fulfill Army’s ground-based air defence (GBAD) requirements to defeat future threats.

Australia’s maritime strategy doesn’t preclude our development of anti-access and area-denial (A2AD) capabilities. One such land-based capability that may be potent and a comparatively inexpensive joint force multiplier (i.e. AirSea Battle) is the employment of Land-Based Anti-Ship Missiles. Ground based anti-ship missiles (ASMs) might be used in a host of ways to challenge an adversary’s maritime freedom of action.

If integrated into the Australian Army, the employment of land-based ASMs would require coalition and joint operational concepts, and support from joint assets, such as sensors, intelligence and C2 systems. But the capabilities they would bring could critically assist the Navy and Air Force for missions critical to the success of our maritime strategy.

For those of us who care deeply about Defence policy the next period will be critical. For Army, LAND400 is a crucial test for this Government. It is the exemplar of how the Government comprehends the role and the mission of Army. And Jointness. And amphibiosity.

It will set the scene for how our defence industry is to be meaningfully engaged by Government in our great national joint project—the modernisation of our military forces.

And as our ever worsening strategic environment informs us, the stakes could not be higher.

Like many capability debates, LAND 400 runs the risk of becoming a multipolar web of false dichotomies and choices. The systems proposed for acquisition under LAND 400 are too large and heavy, and they come with significant opportunity cost. On the other hand, anti-armour weapons are becoming more prevalent and more capable, while casualty and risk phobia in Canberra seems unlikely to abate. In other words, Hugh White and Michael Clifford are both right, which doesn’t solve the problems either raised, but does help frame the problem.

At its heart, this is a discussion about risk transfer. Lighter vehicles place risk on crewmen and decisionmakers in the court of public opinion. Heavier vehicles place risk on the entire defence force being unable to achieve appropriate, timely deployment and then conduct operations at a feasible tempo. Neither of these risks can be responsibly carried forward, and debate can’t be allowed to hinge on the assumption that one must be.

If we accept that doubling the combat weight of our Army’s armoured vehicle fleet is necessary to make them deployable for anything more that constabulary work, and we accept that this will make them too heavy to be supported by the infrastructure where we’re most likely to send them, as well as over burdening our strategic deployment platforms and logistics forces, what should we do?

The answer is that LAND 400 needs to be supported by significant boosts to combat engineering mobility enablers, strategic deployment enablers and logistic throughput. In other words, we need to be able to field the force elements required to move and support the heavier vehicles.

Combat engineering mobility has been allowed to wither in proportion to the forces it needs to support, which is no secret in Army circles. This trend must first be arrested and corrected before the total capability to make LAND 400 a truly flexible operational tool can be put in place. This means far more bridging and breaching capability than the Army had when it fielded the Leopard tank, the ASLAV and M113 armoured personnel carrier, which means that correcting the capability gaps left by Abrams isn’t itself adequate.

Likewise Army logistics isn’t likely to be able to meaningfully support the Army as it sits now, let alone the heavier Army LAND 400 proposes. The hollowing and withering of Army logistics needs to be arrested and corrected, then built to meet the needs of the LAND 400 Army. Fundamentally, this means fleshing out from 17 Combat Service Support Brigade all the way forward to the integral logistics of the Combat Brigades, rather than moving personnel and equipment from one part of the logistic system to another in an endlessly repeating cycle of Soviet-style five year plans to ‘fix’ logistics.

Finally, while the ADF’s strategic mobility has improved immensely in the past decade, LAND 400 will require more of it. Expecting the LHDs to provide robust response options on their own is optimistic at best given the increased demands LAND 400 will place on strategic transport, both during and after initial deployment. Redundancy and flexibility needs to be built into the system with further expansion to strategic airlift to provide the government of the day with meaningful options to a variety of problems.

Failure to address any one of these four areas (combat vehicle capability, operational mobility, strategic mobility and logistic sustainability) will result in an Army that will fail to provide meaningful options to the government.