Proceedings' Fred Rainbow and Brendan Greeley interviewed Vice Admiral D. J. Shackleton, Australia's tie", Chief of Navy, while he was visiting Washington D.C., on 4 November 1999. Portions of the interview concerning Australian peacekeeping operation in East Timor appeared in last month's Proceedings, page 4.
Proceedings: Like Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations from 1968 to 1972, you were deep-selected to be chief of your service, a type of move that normally signals significant change. What changes have you instituted?
Admiral Shackleton: When I took over. I took on board some strong advice from the current Chief of the Defense Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, which was that I ought to hit the ground running. When I learned that I would become the Chief of the Navy, I was in San Diego, California, attending a conference. I had my computer there and I had been tapping out some ideas about what I would do, and I was invited to call the Minister for Defense, who happened to be in Beijing. So I called Beijing from San Diego and he said, "You've got a job. Come back to Australia. All is forgiven." So I then had a day-and-a-half to transcribe all the kinds of thoughts that I had in my computer. One of the beauties of the computer is you can take all these jumbled thoughts and then start to make some sense out of them. So I wrote a short book—about 40 pages—which contained my own thoughts about things that were issues for me, about the Navy in the future. They ranged from organizational arrangements through a lot of people issues through to what capabilities the Navy would need for the 21st century, For instance, what sort of age should our senior officers be in order to make sure that there was no bunching up of very old people at the top end of the scale, which would say to the junior people, -You don't have much of a chance to get promoted." I was quite keen to ensure that in the future our own senior officers very much understand that a master's degree would be important to them, in a way that is perhaps more explicit than has been said so in the past, and that I expected people to be very professional at their jobs.
I've published the book on the web. it tells people exactly what I'm thinking about in the Navy, but sometimes I've had to slow it down during the four months that I've been in the chair. People have taken my book as being authority to execute. That's good, because they clearly think it's a good idea, but the execution needs to be considered in the context of the whole Navy. I decided to publish because if folks in the Navy didn't understand what the Chief of the Navy was thinking about, then they couldn't find a way to help me, which is what I need.
I have been saying very strongly that this is not just my Navy or your Navy, this is our Navy. I have found that people ranging from junior sailors to senior officers are comfortable that I'm giving people a chance to say what kind of Navy they want. as opposed to one that I might impose from the top.
On the first day I took command, which was 3 July 1999, 1 brought about 100 people together to one of our shore establishments in Sydney. We spent two days working through the issues that I saw were important for the Navy: Did we hang together as an organization? Had we adapted to the changing environment that the Australian Defense Force was now having to confront in terms of things after the Defense Efficiency Review? In my view, the Navy had not made much change, although a lot of work had been done on them. I felt it was important to ask people if this was kind of Navy we wanted to have.
It was interesting. Some people said we shouldn't change. because everything's okay, Then I asked a few leading questions about why were so many people leaving and why couldn't we recruit the numbers of people we wanted. These indicators said to me that we had some problems that we had to address. I asked about how well we were planning for the 21st century. and the answers I got led me to believe that we had a long way to go to improve what we were doing.
At the end of the two days, I put together a team of three captains, two commanders, a warrant officer, and a lieutenant commander. I gave them a charter to review the Navy from the top down, and I put all other major changes on hold pending the results. I deliberately put some urgency into this by giving them three months to finish. But I also gave them the freedom to talk to anybody they wanted to. be it the Navy, Army, Air Force, or private enterprise, and to come back with some design options for what the Royal Australian Navy of the 21st century ought to look like. I was not interested in a Ph.D. thesis. I wanted something that could be implemented that would demonstrate benefits to the Navy, its people, and at some time in the future to improve its bottom-line management of money. Fundamentally, I wanted something to help me focus all of our activities and energies on delivering combat power. There's really not much wrong with the folks at sea. The shore establishments—and all the people who work in the disparate parts of the whole defense organization—need to be connected to what I'm responsible for, which is delivering combat capability.
They presented an outstanding report, on time, on 15 October. I got together with my admirals and the team and had difficulty, frankly, synthesizing all the information that they wanted to present and packaging it in a way that all of us could sign up to. Of course, I could have said, "This is what we're going to do," but frankly. I wanted everyone on board so that they could all own it, and would want to make it work. I wouldn't say that was easy. It was hard, because some folks felt that they were going to win and some folks felt that they were going to lose—and I was looking for a win-win solution.
The net effect was to create some organizations that have the responsibility that, in U.S. terms, would be a mixture of a type commander and a program executive at the one-star level. They'd all have responsibilities to me for capability planning and have responsibilities to the operational command for capability delivery. The Royal Australian Navy, of course, is a lot smaller than the U.S. Navy, so in some respects they have more freedom to move. On the other hand, the implications of what you get right and wrong become very obvious very quickly.
Proceedings: Are you organizing by ship type?
Admiral Shackleton: No, I'm going to organize into seven force element groups: major fleet units, submarines, aviation, minor war vessels, hydrographic, mine warfare, and amphibious elements. And I'm going to put a one-star in charge of a whole bunch of things that cross-connect. My intent also is to form a separate systems command that will be responsible for horizontal integration of the Navy. It's my view that submariners have a lot to offer to the surface warfare community and vice versa, as do the aviators. What we've not done yet is to make that crossflow of information work. so a very explicit intention of mine is to build intellectual capital by having people exchange information and knowledge across boundaries that are not naturally crossed. I intend to force people to cross them. because their promotion prospects will depend on how well they share information.
Proceedings: Do you mean putting submariners on frigates, for example?
Admiral Shackleton: We already do that.
Proceedings: Are you going to expand on that practice?
Admiral Shackleton: Within my organization, I do plan to move people around. Our submariners, aviators, and surfacewarfare types already are trained through a common warfare training system, although it is not as close together as we'd like to see it. This is going to help us lean toward tighter integration of the whole Navy, and give us internal consistency, which I don't think we've got right now. The Minister for Defense has agreed to the changes I have proposed.
By the first quarter of 2000, I intend to implement this, and then start to manage it. I don't plan to give these guys 10,000 pages of rules, full stops, and commas. I intend to let them have a fair degree of flexibility in learning how their own organization should be designed and how they ought to make it work. That will require me to spend a lot of time talking to them. So my big activity for next year is to spend a lot of time talking to these folks who are going to be helping me redesign the Navy, so I can focus very much on delivering capability.
Proceedings: You mentioned recruiting and retention—and certainly the U.S. armed forces have experienced some difficulty. What's your situation in Australia?
Admiral Shackleton: We have got 25% of our shore positions vacant, because we post people to ships; the ships get the priority. That is having implications for us because people are coming ashore but they are not staying ashore long enough; they're having to go back to sea again. I believe that people are frustrated. That's not to say that we're not sending them to sea for the proper reasons, in terms of professional development training and operational requirements, but we need to find a way to re-balance sea time and shore duty.
Proceedings: Are you meeting initial entry recruiting goals?
Admiral Shackleton: No.
Proceedings: Missing by how much? Admiral Shackleton: In some areas we're 50% down. I think there's a real issue in Australia about who wants to spend a lot of time away from home. We need to improve our approach to recruiting. I might say that we're looking at the U.S. Marines' methods of recruiting.
Proceedings: Can you do a short-service enlistment—enlist for two years?
Admiral Shackleton: Four years is the minimum. As these people come in, they go through a three-month honeymoon period. During that, they can decide whether they want to go or not—after that, they stay. What we find is that quite a lot of people really enjoy it, but this constant sea-shore interruption problem is causing me some grief. So I'm asking the question, "What would it mean, in operational terms, if I were to start to reduce the shortage ashore?" In other words, pay more attention to how much time these people have ashore.
Proceedings: How about retention?
Admiral Shackleton: Retention is not as good as it should be. We have an attrition rate of about 12% to 14% right now. In part, that's caused by the national economy being in reasonably good shape. Our people are well trained, well educated. By and large, they don't have too much difficulty getting jobs. But part of it also is being caused by spending a lot of time at sea, and not a lot of time ashore; they're starting to feel as if they're wearing themselves out. I need to find a way to break the cycle.
Proceedings: Rear Admiral Jack Natter [U.S. Navy] interviewed 688 junior officers in the U.S, Navy, on a non-attribution basis, and discovered that more than 80% of the junior officers did not aspire to command. Part of the reason for that was because of the sense of the more junior people that there was a real zero-defects, risk-avoidance, no-fun-in-command environment. Are you getting that kind of feedback in Your Navy?
Admiral Shackleton: No. I'd like to think that the Australian Navy has never been what I would call a zero-tolerance organization. We've had our share of difficulties with men and women fraternization/harassment issues. but I wouldn't say that we've ever adopted the idea that you make one mistake and that's the end of your career.
We've always been hard on people who have displayed errors of judgment and have consistently done that or those who have been negligent or in some way unprofessional. But our view has been that if you make a mistake and you learn from it, then that's okay. But if you continue to make mistakes and you don't learn from them, then that's not okay and you will not proceed further than that.
I guess some junior officers may feel that senior officers are difficult people to talk to, in the sense that a lot of our jobs are sitting around desks and fighting the fight inside the headquarters. This means that I probably don't interact enough with junior people, which is something that I have to deal with, just as my admirals and commodores do. And there's always this tricky balance of how much time behind the desk is right, versus talking to the people who are doing things for you. My own view is that a navy, to be a healthy navy, has to be prepared to criticize itself. And I think people who write for your magazine, for instance—to use your words—are people who are prepared to stand up and have a say and not be frightened of having that say. I think the fact that they do that is courageous. It doesn't matter what they say, the fact that they do it is what matters, and my own view is that I'm willing to encourage criticism of ourselves, internally in the Navy, so that we can learn from that.
Proceedings: What has been your experience with women serving on submarines?
Admiral Shackleton: Both good and bad. We learned early on that when you put women into ships, and submarines for that matter—submarines are a particularly difficult set of circumstances—in small numbers, that creates a problem. So in our frigates, we're running between 30 and 40 out of a ship's company of 200. So it's a significant proportion. Fifty percent of the officers who want to join the Navy are females. And their education standards are better than the males in many cases. One of the issues for the Australian Navy is, having made that investment in females, how do you retain them? Now, this is not simply about recognizing that they may want to have families at some point, if they want to have families, how do you let them do that in a time frame that makes sense to them and their partners, and then come back into the navy and continue to do good things?
Proceedings: Could we go back to the submarines for a minute—because, of course, that may he an issue in the U.S. Navy.
Admiral Shackleton: It might well be.
Proceedings: How many women typically are on a submarine and what have you had to do to accommodate women on submarines?
Admiral Shackleton: We have to make some minor changes to the accommodations, in terms of heads and things like that. We've had to make some berthing spaces—as much as you have a berthing space in a submarine, particularly small ones like ours—all female or all male. So you don't mix genders. And we've had to train people to realize that this is not abnormal, and this is doable. We've had to spend time talking to the families of the male submariners, to have the wives of the male submariners understand that this is not unreasonable: this is not something that's unhealthy, this is not something that threatens them. Because some wives were conscious of the fact that their husbands are going to be under water with these females. So you have to go through a process that helps, educate people that working in close confines with men and women is possible.
Proceedings: Are the requirements the same for the male and female submariners?
Admiral Shackleton: Yes, they are. We don't make any exceptions in terms of education training, and we do that with men and women, by and large, in every field that we've got. The only areas that we will make differences in are upperbody strength for people who serve in frigates and destroyers. but the women have to be able to do the same jobs as the men.
Proceedings: We noticed that your web site had a chat session. How did that work?
Admiral Shackleton: It was hard work, I've got to tell you. [Laughter] More than 200 people registered. There were about a 120 or so on line at any one time. I needed some people to assist me with the keyboards. But, up came the question and I gave the answer. There were some answers that I gave that folks found they didn't like. If they asked me a direct question, I gave them a direct answer. And I'm trying to avoid having people in the Navy think that I'm going to prevaricate about the hard issues. There are some tough issues and we've got to deal with them as they stand, and you can't pretend that they don't exist. So you have to be prepared to confront them. Now, part of that might mean that the people who think there's a problem are in fact part of the problem themselves, and I'm trying to get away from this notion that you keep on shoving the problem up to the Chief of Navy. So, my question is: What are you doing about this to fix it yourself? If you genuinely can't fix it, then pass it up the chain of command. But don't do it in a way that just keeps passing the buck upwards. I mean, this has got to stop somewhere. Ultimately, of course, it stops with me, but I sure as hell expect everybody at every level to try and work this thing through wherever they can.
I do have an e-mail line that is open to anybody to communicate with me. Nobody filters this: I get to all the e-mails that people have sent to me. I've had e-mails from the junior people, some from wives. some from girl friends, some from husbands. And I reckon just about all of them have been helpful and constructive. All have been seeking information that they can't get through their own chain of command.
Now, some people say to me, "Well, you're bypassing the chain of command. And aren't you, in some way, threatening your own leaders in all of this?"
Proceedings: Admiral Zumwalt was criticized for that when he was CNO.
Admiral Shackleton: Yes, I can say there are two ways of looking at this. One is, if people send an e-mail to me because they can't get an answer out of your command, then you ought to be thinking about what it is in your command that needs fixing—that says that these people have got to refer to me. On the other hand, wherever I can, I will have the commanders understand that people are communicating to me on issues which will help my own commanders go back and deal with these things. So, I guess what I'm trying to do is make the head of the organization available to all the people in the organization in a way that's constructive for the Navy, rather than a way that undermines my own leaders and commanders. No one understands better than I that the admirals need to be on the same wavelength as I am. I accept that's one of the things I've got to keep talking to my senior leadership about how I'm doing it.
Proceedings: The retired community is another group that can affect whether you are able to sell change and get it to stick. There is a natural resistance to change. How do You bring them on board?
Admiral Shackleton: So far, I have sent all the Chiefs of Naval Staff, as they used to be called, a copy of my leadership summary book. I've sent all a personal copy, and written them asking for any advice they might have. I've had a couple of letters back from folks saying. "Thank you. This is interesting. I like what you're doing." As we speak, I've had nobody tell me that what I'm doing is wrong. Each year, or every second year, we have a Naval Symposium. In the past, we have had a separate session for the retired community, where the Chief of Navy and serving admirals have a dialogue with the retirees. This year, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have the retired folks in with the active members so that everybody gets to hear what everybody else has got to say, and the retired folks get to feel as if they're part of the serving community. And you can take advantage of their wisdom, because they can really ask you some hard questions when they're on the outside looking in. [Laughter]
Proceedings: Shifting to hardware, how are the Collins-class submarines doing?
Admiral Shackleton: Sometimes I wonder about this. We didn't build a prototype, and we went from design to construction. I've just been out at Carderock today talking about submarines. First of class, guess what happens? You always have a problem. We do have some problems. They're too noisy, in terms of hull, machinery, and propeller noise. And the combat system needs some work. We had a major review in Australia recently, which was titled the McIntosh/ Prescott Report [Report to the Minister for Defence on the Collins Class Submarine and Related Matters by M. McIntosh, AC, and J. Prescott, AC] which lays out the errors of the ways that we've had in the past.
Proceedings: Well, are they fixable?
Admiral Shackleton: Oh, yes. They're fixable. We know that the combat system has a problem that needs some serious surgery on it. But we know what to do.
We know what the issues with the hull are. We know what the issues with the propeller are. With time and money, we can fix it.
Proceedings: Are you continuing to operate with other navies throughout the region?
Admiral Shackleton: It's important for us to be able to be interoperable with just about everybody. We have bilateral arrangements with Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, We work with the Philippines and Thailand. We conduct port visits, exchange of people, exercises, schoolhouse stuff alongside. We take people to sea with us and they take our folks to sea with them. We are a member of the Five Power Defense Agreement still and we'll stay that way. And every year there's an exercise, Flying Fish/Starfish that does often integrate the air force. And every third year, I think it is. the Brits bring a carrier group as part of their world deployment. They time that to coincide with this exercise. and it runs from the northern end of the South China Sea through to the Singapore Straits. It's a pretty interesting exercise at times.
Proceedings: One thing that you touched on is the U.S. Navy focus on information technology and network-centric warfare. It is really pushing the high-technology end. How do you stay plugged in for combined operations with the U.S. Navy?
Admiral Shackleton: We do have a lot of communications which are fully compatible with the United States: full Link 11, Mode 4, our satellite system. We use the same fleet satellite communications as the U.S. Navy does. And in about two-years' time, we will have an Australian communications satellite up in our area of operations with a similar capacity in most of the areas of operations as what the U.S. Navy now enjoys. It is an issue for us to deal with some of this very high-capacity capability that the U.S. Navy has, because we can't receive the downlink or, indeed, participate in the uplink. That problem ought to be remedied in a couple of years' time. But we do participate in the various command nets. We obviously have a very close intelligence relationship, so intelligence is not an issue to be moved around. But I guess, as always, the United States has, as we do, rules about what you can pass into other peoples' national systems. So I think, inevitably, there's always going to be a gateway, The United States, quite clearly, would understandably want to protect its gateways so people don't get access inside there. And we'll do the same. But there's that bridging bit that we work hard at.
Proceedings: You mentioned [author] Wayne Hughes and Fleet Tactics [published by the Naval Institute Press]. Everybody wants to know what's over the horizon. How's your airborne early-warning capability? Is the new Boeing Wedgetail going to provide your airborne early warning?
Admiral Shackleton: Yes, it is. We're now moving into this in a serious way. Our expectation is that we are talking about it in the very same way that the United States does; this is an airborne command-and-control thing. For us it's operated by the Air Force, but the Navy, Army, and Air Force will make use of it. Our construct is that it will operate for our Navy a bit like the Hawkeye does for the U.S. Navy. It will support Air Force operations, and I expect to see it over the sea supporting Navy operations.
Proceedings: Is there any move on the part of the Royal Australian Navy to acquire an organic capability, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) such as a Global Hawk, or helicopter-borne Searchwater radars as used by the Royal Navy?
Admiral Shackleton: The Australian Defence Force is interested in the Global Hawk program. And we do research and development with the United States on UAVs. We're interested in all the things that the Global Hawk program, for instance, might possibly deliver from our perspective. We tend to make a lot of that surveillance stuff a joint capability. It might be operated by Air Force, but it's operated by them on behalf of the rest of us. So we're not about to build a unique Air Force surveillance system that only the Air Force can use. All that surveillance stuff has to be capable of being used by everybody.
Proceedings: How about an airship?
Admiral Shackleton: They take pictures Of US winning at cricket. [Laughter].
Proceedings: What is the status of the program to replace the ex-U.S. Navv Charles F. Adams (DDG-2)-class guided-missile destroyers?
Admiral Shackleton: We are concerned with the air warfare and command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities that they have represented for us, rather than the platforms themselves. We are looking at options for the future—not only within the Navy, but in the context of the work that is going on within our Defense Headquarters—toward producing a new major policy paper on our force structure. We need to ensure that our forces are capable of operating in a hostile environment -and that is not only a matter of being able to defend themselves, Our ships and aircraft must be capable of seizing the initiative and ensuring that they are the ones in control of the situation. In air warfare terms, that means that we have to have something more than short- or medium-range missiles, but a system that is capable of dealing with the shadower and the missile platform. I see a Standard Missile (SM equation. It also is vital that we get value for money. Our capabilities have to be worthwhile in terms of what they contribute to the Australian Defense Force's joint concepts for operations. Here I see a seaborne air warfare capability as being an important complement to the Royal Australian Air Force's airborne early warning and control assets which Australia will secure in the newly approved Project Wedgetail. Well-armed and equipped ships will not only help protect these aircraft, but contribute to their offensive power and their development of the battlespace picture in ways that no other assets can.
It is important, here, I think, that we recognize that surface ships in high-threat situations operate in combination, not isolation. Navies need to explain the reality that naval warfare is an "all arms" function in the same way that land warfare is. We must stop thinking of ships and think of the total capability which a well balanced naval force represents. This "systems" approach is one of the most encouraging aspects of network-centric warfare because it forces us all to take a much more sophisticated approach to how we think about naval warfare. Of course, the "system" does not include only ships and aircraft, but remote sensors and intelligence systems. We need to get a lot better at explaining these ideas to out own people and to others.
Proceedings: How are the new ANZAC frigates working out?
Admiral Shackleton: This is a question that needs to be looked at not only in terms of the ships themselves, but what we want from surface forces. The ANZACs were conceived and constructed as surveillance and response frigates. The two Australian and two New Zealand ships so far completed have already proved themselves in those roles. The ships are well built and versatile, and I think that it has been a great effort by Australian industry. There are six more ships on the way and they'll be important additions to the fleet. Nevertheless, we've been concerned for some time that the warfighting capabilities of the ships need improvement and some additions—such as Harpoon—already have been approved. Enhanced Sea Sparrow (ESSM) is on the way. They will also embark the SH-2G Seasprite helicopter, equipped with the Penguin air-to-surface missile. But we need to do more than that.
We've been looking at more ambitious improvements for some time. It's clear now, however, that equipping the ANZACs with phased-array radar and a long range missile, while technically practicable, does not represent real value for money, so we won't go down that path. We need to recognize the ANZACs for what they are—highly versatile frigates, which should be capable of defending themselves against multiple threats, while conducting surface warfare and undersea warfare operations for escort, surveillance, and a host of other tasks. But they will never be destroyers and cannot carry the sensors, command-and-control capabilities, or the large number of long-range weapons that the force air warfare role requires.
What we will do with the ANZACs is to improve their antiship missile defense and a number of other key areas—including a second channel of fire—to make them capable and credible in the future battlespace. They are and will be very much the workhorses of the surface force.
Proceedings: What is the status of the ex-U.S. Navy Newport (LST-1179)-class LPAs Kanimbla and Manoora?
Admiral Shackleton: We have taken longer than we wanted for these ships to come on line, but I think that we are going to get a long and useful life from these ships to meet our unique needs. The Australian defense requirement is very much one of maritime mobility. Not only is Australia an island. much of which is undeveloped and difficult to cross by land, but we also need to operate within the region. Ours is essentially a littoral environment and a credible capability to move by sea is an essential part of our force structure. The Manoora is at sea conducting trials, and the Kanimbla is in dockyard hands in Newcastle, north of Sydney; she is expected to emerge from the dockyard by the middle of 2000.
They'll both undergo trials before they enter operational service. That trials program is extensive because we have done a lot of things to these ships to fit them for our needs. The bow horns and the over-the-beach capability have gone, but they now have the hangar capacity for four helicopters (these could be Black Hawks or Sea Kings and in future could include the new army attack helicopter). Troop accommodation has been improved and a Level 3 medical facility fitted. They have a 70-ton crane capable of lifting an LCM-8, which the LPAs will carry for ship-to-shore operations. Both ships also have much improved command-and-communications facilities, to the point where they should be capable of carrying a small joint task force headquarters. Together with the heavy landing ship Tobruk, which has recently been proving her worth supporting the East Timor operation, the LPAs will constitute for the first time in many years a substantial and balanced Australian Defense Force amphibious lift capability. In addition, both should prove very useful in their ancillary role of naval training vessels.
The LPA purchase and modernization have been difficult processes for us, and we have learned a lot on the way. I think that the key lesson has been—whether buying new or second hand—that it is essential to be absolutely clear within government and with the public about the resource implications of a project. Procurement authorities—and all those working to support their efforts—have got to work through every question of material, personnel, and funding until a clear and final answer, so far as that is ever possible, can be obtained. Again, it is a question of approaching these issues as systems. I'll also add that it is up to us in the military to leave those who pay the bills—the taxpayers—under no illusions about what they are getting for their money.
Proceedings: You sound busy.
Admiral Shackleton: Certainly. The year ahead for the Royal Australian Navy is set to be a very busy one. This is the most significant program of change that most of us can remember. I'm convinced that the restructuring process will work because I have the backing of my admirals and commodores and they are as determined as am I to lead in the new Navy structure. They can also be confident that the majority of their people are willing to accept the changes we propose, because to a very large extent they are the people who told us how and why and what things needed to be changed. You are right, it's going to be a very busy year, but if we continue to pursue this change with the same vigor that I've seen so far, we will be making great progress toward getting it right.