Courtesy of Surface Navy Association Surface SITREP (www.navysna.org))

 

Tell me about your job.

I’m the Deputy Fleet Commander. We only have one fleet, the fleet’s role is really in capability management. We don’t fight the ships at sea. We are all about the fleet-in being part of the capability life cycle.

 

Are you involved in the requirements and the acquisition strategy?

No, that’s all done through navy headquarters. Our day-to-day job is to deliver an agreed level of capability and preparedness.

For example, on any given day, we have to provide let’s say five patrol boats to the Border Force — we sustain them; we maintain them; we crew them; and we do the individual training and collective training, which we don’t actually deliver, but we’re responsible for.

Then we deem that vessel to be seaworthy, which is an interesting concept because to most mariners, “seaworthy” means it can float, it’s not sinking, but for us it means the holistic view of capability preparedness.

In the U.S., we have type commanders and their responsibility is to man, train, and equip the force. Then, in the process of getting those ships ready to deploy, they go through a certification process.

That’s exactly what we do. We do that through Forces. We have the Surface Force, which are the big ships — destroyers, frigates and amphibious ships; we have the minor war vessels, which are comprised of the mine warfare vessels, patrol boats, hydrographic survey vessels and diving teams; the Aviation Force; Submarine Force; and Shore Force, which includes our bases; and then the newest one is the Information Warfare Force, which is only about three years old.

The Force Commanders are responsible to the Fleet Commander, and then the Fleet Commander has the authority to say these ships are now ready for the Chief of Joint Operations to deploy as needed.

 

How is the operations side of the house set up?

We have one Joint Operations Command, headed by a 3-star Chief of Joint Operations. He is the operator; he is the theater commander.

Although the theater is broadly defined, so ships that are now on deployment up in Northeast Asia or the Middle East are ostensibly under his command.

 

He gets a demand signal to provide that ship up into the Gulf or whatever.

Yes, he gets his demand signal from the government. In the Navy, we also generate demands, such as for training. The Chief of Joint Operations puts together a schedule of which a subset is the Fleet Activity Schedule.

Once we have certified all the forces, they are “force assigned” to him and then he commands them to satisfy those demands.

We’re taking delivery of our third DDG, and we have nine frigates on the way. Once those nine frigates have arrived, all the current frigates will be retired. The DDGs replace ships that were retired some time ago, our Perth class DDGs. The frigates will replace our Oliver Hazard Perry and ANZAC frigates.

I would imagine then, that it’s very important to have a feedback loop from the Joint Operational Commander about how your forces are performing so that you can ensure that you’re training them and preparing them and certifying them to meet the need today and tomorrow.

There are a number of feedback loops to do that, but the biggest one is actually more an informal feedback loop. As I said, technically we don’t command ships at sea. But there is an element of fleet command which is located in the headquarters of the Chief Joint of Operations called Maritime Operations, with a one-star in charge. They’re the operating authority — the OpCon — for our ships whenever and wherever they are operating.

When the ships are around Australia working up and being certified, he’s working for the Fleet Commander. When we force assign that ship, he’s working for the Chief of Joint Operations. So he’s got a couple of bosses depending on where the ship is, but he acts something like a component commander.

 

He’s in the ideal position to advise the Operational Commander and inform the Fleet Commander.

Yes. He’s getting feedback constantly because he’s operating the ships to achieve the outcome, and then he’s feeding back into the Force Commander.

 

I understand that Australia is going through the largest recapitalization of its fleet since the end of World War II. How would you characterize that for someone that may not know just how significant that is?

We’re taking delivery of our third DDG, and we have nine frigates on the way. Once those nine frigates have arrived, all the current frigates will be retired. The DDGs replace ships that were retired some time ago, our Perth class DDGs. The frigates will replace our Oliver Hazard Perry and ANZAC frigates.

We have the new offshore patrol vessels, and of course, 12 submarines. HMAS Melbourne is the last of our Perry class ships. When she decommissions on the 26th of October, there will not be a ship in the Royal Australian Navy that I’ve served in during my 35-year career.

We’ve previously been in those boom-and-bust shipbuilding cycles, where we want a type of ship and we want 15 of them, and we hurry them along over a six-year period, and then we have to lay off shipyard workers. With our current shipbuilding strategy, we are taking the long view.

The paradigm shift for us is that the 12th submarine will be delivered in 2055. I hope I’m around to see it. But that means we can have the conversations about what our ships will need, and we can spiral develop as we go along to make sure they’re relevant.

As we move along, more and more systems will be common, and the personnel assignments and training will be seamless. All the DDGs and frigates will eventually have AEGIS, all the gas turbines will be the same, so some of the training will be common. But we will for a long time be running two training systems, two sustainment systems, and it’s a challenge.

Hasn’t that always been an issue, with different classes of ships?

Not really, because we generally transitioned to the new class, and then it’s all about that class. So, for the frigates, we will be maintaining an FFH capability management system, hopefully the new frigate system will be similar, but the training is going to be different, so we’ll have two systems.

 

But your Perry class FFGs and your FFH, the ANZAC helicopter frigates, they were quite different, with different systems?

Yes, that’s right. But that’s why commonality of systems within the ships is going to be extremely important to us.

 

With your long-term shipbuilding plan, you’ll have stability and predictability in your shipbuilding industry, and with that commonality I would imagine you would be able to plan for stability and predictability in the maintenance and the modernization as well.

It should be a lot steadier.

 

What’s the biggest challenge that you have in your job?

The biggest challenge is people.

We have key seagoing ranks where we have shortages. I think the latest number is around 900 people short out of about 8,000. That’s a large percentage. And unfortunately, it’s also a concentrated percentage. We’ve got enough Commodores, but we don’t have enough Leading Seamen.

Not enough of them?

We have key seagoing ranks where we have shortages. I think the latest number is around 900 people short out of about 8,000. That’s a large percentage. And unfortunately, it’s also a concentrated percentage. We’ve got enough Commodores, but we don’t have enough Leading Seamen. To get seaworthy capability to sea, we need qualified and trained people. Doing that with a hollow work force means that we have a lot of temporary people that we bring in to fill holes.

When a ship comes alongside after deployment, everybody’s looking forward to some time off. But some don’t get it, because they have to jump across into another ship that’s heading north.

 

That has cascading effects.

Our people get worn out and they leave. That’s the challenge, it’s trying to make sure that we don’t burn too many people while we wait for this bow wave of new recruits to come through.

For us, being in that AEGIS community is very important because it means that we can be truly interoperable. When we show up, we can plug into the net and be part of that task group. And that really does get you power.

Do you have a plan to attract the right kind of young person to apply for and go through the training and fill those critical positions?

Yes. We’ve outsourced our recruiting to a company, but there is still a one-star in charge of Defence Force recruiting, and we have strategic workforce conversations about what type of people and what type of capabilities we need.

The population base that we draw from is smaller than the entire population. There are a lot of sections of the Australian population who are just either not interested in the military, or don’t know anything about it. We don’t have a huge veteran population, so very few people have somebody in their family or in their close circle that has served.

The key for us is to retain them once we’ve got them, and make it easier to come and go, and provide some flexibility in their career planning. If you came into the Navy 20 years ago, and decided you wanted to leave, you basically had to burn all your bridges — we made you feel like you were a quitter.

Now it’s a case of trying to create pathways that allow people to go, and when they come back, not penalize them unnecessarily.

We want to help people have a better family life. With things like family and paternity leave for both men and women. The challenging part is trying to accommodate this in a career that has been traditionally quite linear. If you want to be a commanding officer of a ship, then there are a whole bunch of gates you need to walk through before you get there. You can go out, but when you come in, your cohort may have gone through the next gate, and you have to accept that.

For example, you may be an engineer with your charge qualification — which is the highest level you can earn as a lieutenant commander. You can leave and get a good job in industry, since you have a whole bunch of skills. You might come back however, and get promoted, because we need your knowledge and expertise.

We have to communicate that with those people who may take time away. We also have to communicate that with those who stayed and felt like they didn’t get rewarded for their loyalty.

Our two navies have been very close, operating alongside for a long, long time. Now you’ve got these new ships, with the AEGIS capability, our surface combatants are going to be even more interoperable than before. How important is it to be able to be almost seamless in terms of being a member of a carrier or expeditionary strike group? 

It is very important to us. We don’t envision being in a high-end fight on our own. If we are, then everything’s gone really bad everywhere else.

We’ve always considered that we would be part of a coalition, and especially with our alliance with the U.S. The friendship and the cooperation between the U.S. Navy and the Australian Navy has been there through my entire career. We always loved going to work with the U.S. We always get great value out of it.

For us, being in that AEGIS community is very important because it means that we can be truly interoperable. When we show up, we can plug into the net and be part of that task group. And that really does get you power.

 

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you, mate.