12 September 2024
Chief of Army Symposium Keynote
‘The Human Face of Battle and the State of the Army Profession’
We gather here today in what are widely agreed to be the most uncertain times in several generations.
The ‘end of history’ has proven to be little more than a holiday, as once again we find ourselves in a world defined by great power competition.
Large-scale inter-state war again blights the world stage. For some, aggression clearly remains a viable tool of statecraft. The current bloody conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East demonstrate the grim verity of Clausewitz’s insight into war’s enduring nature.
As a professional soldier and a student of history, I spend much of my time focused on the tension between war’s enduring nature and it’s ever changing character.
It is plainly evident that the acceleration in technology is changing how warfare is prosecuted, just as it is in every other facet of life. Those with access to advanced technology can now see more, sense more, and strike faster … with more accuracy and greater lethality.
Some argue that these changes are so profound as to be revolutionary.
But amid the seductive tones and tints of the true chameleon we recognise the timeless challenges of land warfare, challenges that have not fundamentally changed in more than two millennia.
Thucydides himself would understand the nature of the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, despite its prosecution by novel weaponry.
Foch, Monash or Von Paulus might nod knowingly at the calculus that inspired the recent Ukrainian thrust into Kursk.
The armies fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East are finding that technology is anything but revolutionary, when set against a highly-motivated enemy fighting in complex terrain.
As the American scholar Stephen Biddle pithily observed, current warfare looks more like the trench impasse of the Great War than any fictional Star Wars.
For this reason, and so many others, I am especially delighted to welcome Doctor Jack Watling and General David Berger as our keynote speakers.
Doctor Watling's work in providing scholarly, yet accessible, analysis of the war in Ukraine has only enhanced his global reputation as one of the foremost contemporary thinkers and writers about land warfare.
General Berger brings a lifetime of dedicated service that encapsulates warfare and military adaptation at the very highest levels. His personal experience and applied scholarship are second to none.
Theirs are the voices we would do well to heed if we are to understand the nature and character of war in our time.
Our theme today is “The Human Face of Battle”.
I chose this difficult topic for the Symposium very deliberately.
It is easy in this modern age to become fascinated by the allure of technology. Allure, however, becomes a siren’s song when these technologies offer to sanitise war: to make political violence remote, risk-free, quick and clean.
Of course such images are appealing. Who wouldn’t seek a future where we are untouched by the brutality of war? But the evidence to support such a proposition is absent.
One need only glance at Aleppo, Mariupol, Mosul or Marawi to conclude that Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature … a life that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ … remains the reality for many and is, uncomfortably, far closer than we might wish.
In the Guns of August, her seminal study of the start of the First World War, Barbara Tuchman reminds us that ‘the human heart is the starting point of all matters pertaining to war’.
So, our focus today is about whether warfare remains an intrinsically human activity, and what that means for those of us who are accountable to build and steward armies.
How do we best weave together the human elements of fighting power – the intellectual and the moral – with the physical elements, to become more than the sum of their parts?
My opening view is that we should approach this topic with a great deal of humility, and respect for war’s unpredictable nature.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship before he allowed himself to listen to the siren’s song, lest he lead his ship off course. We ought to take similar measures.
It is a genuine privilege to engage with this audience, and one should always seek to use such an opportunity with clear purpose and intention.
I therefore intend to focus my remarks on one aspect of the ‘human face of battle’ that I believe to be of fundamental importance if we are to successfully meet the challenges of our time.
And that is the state of the army profession.
Less than 18 months ago, the Australian Government received the Defence Strategic Review: an articulation of policy that will be as generationally impactful for the ADF as the 1987 Defence of Australia white paper that has shaped the last four decades … and the service of all of us in this room today.
The DSR – and the National Defence Strategy that emanated from it – rightly concluded that Australia’s current strategic circumstances are significantly changed, that great power competition increases the risk of conflict, and that the ADF is not fully fit to meet these challenges.
The DSR concluded that, for the first time in nearly 80 years, we must go back to fundamentals … to take a ‘first principles’ approach. Our Army has fully embraced and applied this approach – setting us on a transformational path.
There is not a soldier, a team or a formation in the Australian Army that is untouched as we optimise for littoral manoeuver and deliver a long-range fires capability.
In less than a year and a half we have achieved much. We have re-written our capstone concepts and TTPs to reflect our littoral future, and have re-orientated our command and control to reflect how we would fight.
We have transformed the Army Training Enterprise to ensure we can generate resilient, well-trained soldiers and cohesive teams.
We have re-focused the roles of our combat brigades, and began consolidating them in northern Australia.
We have re-defined the Division as our unit of action, and have reorganised the Army accordingly.
And perhaps most notably for many in this audience, the Government has moved out to lay the capital foundations for our transformation. Recent decisions on long-range fires, watercraft, the combined arms fighting system, land C4, and battlefield aviation mean that the physical component of our fighting power is increasingly assured.
I am immensely proud of what our soldiers have achieved, and my confidence is buoyed daily by their energy, spirit of innovation, and sheer determination.
As we swiftly traverse the foothills and early summits it is clear that genuine transformation implies, indeed demands, that we consider all aspects and dimensions of our Army: to go beyond the physical component of fighting power, and to address the fundamentals that the DSR challenges us to consider.
We must examine in breadth, width and depth our intellectual and moral foundations. For history tells us it is here that the margin between victory and defeat will be found.
So, I intend to lay the foundations today for an assessment of the state of the Army profession.
But where to start? As ever, we must understand where we have come from in order to imagine our future.
The Australian Army is a comparatively young army, and the strength of our professional foundations have waxed and waned throughout the course of our history.
The Great War broke out only 13 years after Federation, and represented a rite of passage for the newly-formed Commonwealth of Australia into the global community of nations.
The Australian Army was at the centre of this baptism of fire. It was due in no small part to Australia’s military commitment that the Commonwealth was party to the Versailles Peace Talks, and was established as a founding member of the League of Nations.
Our Army’s status as a national institution was secured by the soldiers of the First Australian Imperial Force, and ‘Anzac’ became part of the foundation story of modern Australia.
The cost was very high. Over 60 thousand Australians were killed in that war from a population of less than 5 million.
Rapid mobilisation was followed by rapid demobilisation, and exacerbated by the financial challenges of the Great Depression.
The period between the two World Wars was a difficult time for those drawn to soldiering.
Opportunities for service were few, so much so that many of Australia’s best and brightest Duntroon graduates pursued the call of their profession elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
Money was tight, our geography seemed impregnable, and the Royal Navy was supreme on the global commons. Australia’s apparent need for a professional army declined accordingly.
But the war to end all wars, did not. Just twenty years later a second world war darkened the horizon. Initially the fight was, once again, distant, but by 1942 it reached our shores.
For the first and only time in our history, so far, our homeland was directly attacked by the conventional forces of a hostile nation state.
The need for an Army became urgent, even existential.
History tells us that we were ill-prepared for the brutal three-year fight that followed in the Pacific. It is a testament to the small cadre of professional Australian soldiers, the flexibility of the Citizen Militia Forces, and sheer national will that we were able to build the amphibious and littoral Army needed to fight and win on a battlefront that at one stage stretched from Bougainville to Borneo.
The Army not only survived in the Pacific, but was victorious, and its standing as a national institution and a fighting force were enhanced.
Bonds were formed with our American ally, indelibly sealed in battle and blood, that have stood the test for over eighty years.
It was only in the aftermath of the trauma of the Second World War that the need for a standing, professional Army became self-evident to our Nation.
And so in 1947 the Australian Regular Army was formed. This is where service in our Army achieved the status of the profession that we recognise today. A profession provides a service to society that society cannot provide for itself; maintains and advances a distinctive body of knowledge; and is expected and trusted by the society it serves, to self-regulate.
It is this moment that defines the Army that I have the privilege to lead today, an Army built not just on the Dardanelles Campaign, but also on the foundations of victory in the Pacific.
Throughout our history, our Nation’s demand signal for a professional Army has ebbed and peaked. A simple pattern is discernible. In times of regional or global conflict, the demand has risen, be it in the World Wars, in Korea, or in Vietnam.
But in times of peace … in what we might call the ‘inter-war’ periods … the need has ebbed.
The health of our profession has perhaps followed a similar pattern. Our professional foundations have been strongest in times of war, and especially when our Nation and its interests have been directly threatened.
This is reflected in the names of those great Australians who continue to personify our Army’s profession, in names like Bridges, Blamey, Monash, Vivian Bullwinkel, Charlie Green, and Harry Smith.
But in the inter-war periods our Army has routinely contracted, reducing to a small professional cadre that has striven to maintain the foundations of soldiering.
This cadre have done well throughout our history but this contraction has invariably incurred a debt that had to be paid in the early stages of the next conflict. It has taken time to focus the profession, to adapt it to the character of warfare it was about to face. To steel it once more for the rigors of combat.
This debt was paid in raising and expanding the 2nd AIF, in the re-training of the 6th and 7th Divisions for the war in the Pacific, and in the adaptation of the profession for Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today we do not enjoy the luxury of time. To quote the Defence Strategic Review, ‘in the contemporary strategic era, we cannot rely on geography or warning time’. A conflict in our region would constitute an immediate threat to Australia and its interests.
So, we must ensure our profession is fit for today’s purpose … that we are ready to ‘fight tonight’. This is our responsibility … indeed our obligation.
As one of my predecessors, Sir Henry Wells, adroitly put it in 1957, we must ‘avoid the situation where soldiers have to be killed to learn’.
But where do we begin in assessing the state of our profession? Fortunately, there is a solid foundation of theory upon which we may rely.
In 1957 the American theorist Samuel Huntington codified the foundations of the profession of arms in his timeless work The Soldier and the State.
He was joined in 1962 by the British soldier-scholar General Sir John Hackett, whose Trinity College lectures captured the soul and the art of the profession better than any practitioner since.
There are others, but Huntington and Hackett are foundational. It is from their work that I draw the three pillars of the profession that will form the basis of our review.
The first and most important pillar is that we provide a service to society that society cannot provide for itself. In particular, in Huntington’s terms, the Army specialises in the mastery of violence on the land for socially determined ends.
This is a responsibility enshrined in the very foundations of our Nation, articulated in the text of our Constitution and instruments pursuant to it.
But it is an authority that we must never take for granted. Our permission to apply violence on behalf of society relies on trust as much as it relies on legislation, if not more.
This is one of many reasons why I have selected ‘trust’ as the central strategic priority for our Army today.
Trust and social license are explicitly linked: lose one, and we lose the other.
Hackett captures the essence of this first pillar in his artful articulation of the ‘contract of unlimited liability’. The professional soldier accepts that they may be required to forfeit their life at the behest of the nation. Their liability is unlimited. This is a solemn commitment indeed.
But all contracts have reciprocal obligations. If soldiers are to accept a contract of unlimited liability, then it is both our Army and our Nation’s obligation to honour that commitment. The final report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, published not three days ago, should give us pause to reflect on how well we are meeting that obligation for all whom serve.
It is clear to me that strengthening the Army profession must be at the centre of our response to the Royal Commission.
The second pillar is our professional body of knowledge, our ability to teach it, and the sufficiency of both to meet the demands of the future.
Here we are quite well postured. The Australian Army has developed over generations a genuinely world-class training and education system. We are one of the foremost leadership training institutions in the Nation, with over 25,000 leaders amongst our ranks, from Lance Corporal to Lieutenant General.
But even these foundations will be insufficient for the scale of the challenges we face. Professor Sir Michael Howard once wrote that ‘no matter how clearly one thinks, it is impossible to anticipate precisely the character of future conflict. The key is to not be so far off the mark that it becomes impossible to adjust once that character is revealed’.
I am not assured that we yet have the doctrine and learning systems in place to hard-wire adaptation into our profession.
The war in Ukraine reminds us that most conflicts are in fact a battle to adapt … an action, reaction, counter-action fight for a decisive edge. Speed is vital … the side that can adapt fastest gains the advantage.
Would we win the battle for adaptation in our region? My view is that this is by no means certain, and that we must do more.
Experience tells me that the study of the liberal arts is vital to our profession. In his excellent book ‘The Face of Battle’, for which this Symposium is named, John Keegan explains (and I paraphrase) that ‘what battles have in common is human: the behaviour of people struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honour and the achievement of some aim over which others are ready to kill them.
The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear, of courage, of leadership and obedience.
Battle is an historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long, historical perspective’.
Are we doing enough to teach our young professionals about this perspective; about both the art and the science of war? The Australian Defence Force Academy, for example, provides an excellent education to our young officers, but the study of the classical theories and practise of warfare remains an elective choice.
Not many take up this choice. Only around 50 of the 900 annual graduates of that excellent institution study Australian military history: well less than 10%. Most leave having never heard the names of Clausewitz or Jomini, having never studied in depth an operation or campaign.
We might ask ourselves if this is the best foundation for them to flourish in our profession.
The third and final pillar rests on our capacity for professional self-regulation.
Militaries are routinely given the authority to regulate good order and discipline through military codes of justice and discipline acts in national legislation.
But this isn’t what I seek to examine. Rather I am focused on the intangible forces of self-regulation: the virtue-ethic of the Australian Army, our philosophy as a fighting force, and a culture that urges us to hold ourselves to the highest professional standards.
It should not surprise anyone in this audience when I observe that we must do more to reflect on the sufficiency of our professional standards in recent conflicts. What I refer to as the ‘Long Shadow of Afghanistan’ will continue to shape the context for our Army for years to come.
From mission command to command accountability, we need to understand what worked, what didn’t, and how we can add steel to our professional foundations to prevent them fracturing in the crucible of combat.
So, to draw these ideas together, the theories of Huntington, Hackett and their peers will be our guide. We will draw much from their wisdom. But equally we will not be dogmatic. It is already evident that there are some lessons of sixty years ago that are likely best consigned to history.
Huntington, for example, considered professionalism to be synonymous with ‘officership’. For the Australian Army in the 21st Century, such a restriction is unacceptable. Every soldier must be considered, and consider themselves, to be part of our profession. To accept anything less will be to risk failure from the outset.
In closing, I offer my sincere thanks for your patience. I do not underestimate the challenge I lay out for our Army today.
Throughout our history we have conducted many reviews of key elements of our profession: the Regular Officer Development Committee of 1978, the Project OPERA reviews of 1998, and the 2016 Ryan Review to name but a few.
But as far as I can ascertain, this will be the first time since 1947 that we have attempted a wholesale, holistic review of our profession. It will be a hard road, but it is a necessary one for us to traverse.
I contend that our profession must be fundamental to our Army: a ‘first principal’ that underpins and shapes all others. We must consider it, understand it, invest in it … but above all we must believe in it.
It is my obligation as the accountable steward of the Australian Army to set us on this path. Today is the first of these steps. I will return in the coming months to speak again on the state of the Army profession, and in the next year I will clarify our priorities, and what it is we need to do to realise the potential of the Army profession.
Today, however, I leave you to reflect on the words of General Douglas MacArthur to the graduating class of the US Military Academy, West Point in 1962 - the very same year that Hackett was lecturing at Trinity College.
‘Through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable.
It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but a corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment.
But you are the ones trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory. That if you lose, the nation will be destroyed … that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.’ Thank you.