UK AOC Newsletter - September 2010

  NOMINATIONS COMMITEE

The Chair of the Nominations Committee oversees the periodic election of UK members to the UK Board of Directors. That person is an independent UK member of the AOC and is not a member of the UK Board.

For many, many years this task has been undertaken admirably and successfully by Peter Nunn for whose significant contribution to the efficient management of the UK Chapter we are very grateful.  Peter has recently retired and has expressed a wish to relinquish this role. We are therefore urgently seeking a volunteer from among our UK membership to take over the task. If you are interested, please contact Peter at thenunnery@waitrose.com or at:

1 The Cottages, High Street, Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, HP18 9DS. For your reference, a current list of the AOC UK Chapter Board of Directors is attached to this Newsletter.  The next election will be for President of the UK Chapter and this will be held later this year, to be effective from the 2011 Annual General Meeting.

RAF AEROSYSTEMS COURSE AWARD

Many congratulations to Flighty Lieutenant Jim McKie RAF for winning the AOC UK Chapter prize for the best EW-related Personal Project during this year’s RAF Aerosystems Course. His thesis was entitled ‘Defensive Aids Suites for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ and our Secretary, Wing Commander Roger Hannaford, presented the award to him during a ceremony held at RAF College Cranwell on 9 July.

Thus far, Jim has had a somewhat unusual and varied career! After graduating from Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1997 he completed the Joint Air Traffic Controllers’ course at RAF Shawbury and was posted to RNAS Culdrose in 1998.  However, his subsequent request for reselection as Royal Naval aircrew was refused and so, to achieve his ambition of flying in the military, Jim left the Royal Navy and joined the Royal Air Force in 2000.

After aircrew and aircraft role training, he graduated as a Weapon Systems Officer on the air defence Tornado F3 and then flew with Nos 11, 25 and 111 Squadrons, including three deployments to the Falkland Islands. Having completed the Aerosystems Course, Jim is now posted to MoD Boscombe Down to become a Fast Jet Missions Systems Trials Officer.

 VISIT TO DISC CHICKSANDS

The planned visit to DISC Chicksands in August had unfortunately to be postponed. The rescheduled date for the visit is now Wednesday 10 November.   Kindly note that the list to attend and a reserve list are both full.

I hope you have all had a great summer despite the vagaries of the British weather. I have just returned from working in Hawaii, but I guess you don’t want to hear about that. OK, maybe you do. Here goes.  I was out with the ABCA-Armies Sense EW project group.  You can find out more about ABCA here: http://www.abca-armies.org/ . In the event there were about half a dozen of us and we worked on a framework for EW operations. So, why work for ABCA? Well, I think a significant part of the future of EW lies in the land (and maybe littoral) domain. Several ABCA groups have recently become interested in EW and related areas like EM spectrum issues. This is partly because of operational experience over the past decade and partly due to some inspired leadership, particularly in the United States, from senior commanders and army EW chiefs. Besides, ABCA occasionally meet in interesting places and I was getting paid!

To put this ABCA work in context, it is occurring at the same time as major work in NATO, led by the Joint EW Core Staff at Yeovilton, on NATO EW doctrine at the operational level and the Land and Air tactical levels.  The NATO work draws on recently updated NATO EW policy and a Military Committee memorandum signed by all the NATO national military chiefs in 2007, on a concept for the transformation of NATO EW.  This document in turn includes some of the ideas in the UK’s restricted Future EM Operational Concept - a Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre document that sits alongside sister pamphlets for Maritime, Land and Air/Space, and which was mandated by the UK COS and CINCs in 2006 in UK Joint EW policy.

This process has relatively quickly resulted in an upsurge of thinking about EW and what the EM environment or domain actually means to operators and warfighters and is influencing all the related defence lines of development (TEPIDOIL in the UK or DOTMLPF(I) in the US/NATO) in EW capability development.  In the UK during land operations in Afghanistan and Iraq we were able to deploy true electronic attack and electronic surveillance equipment very quickly and easily because the high level conceptual underpinnings at the heart of the EC process were already in place. What was missing though was the doctrine, conops and TTPs to use the newly deployed kit. Rather than this becoming an obstacle, the recipients in Y Sqn RM and 14 Sig Regt (EW) saw it as an opportunity and achieved some great successes, often devastating, employing the new capability (on a small scale initially) and working with Air on land/air EW tactical and operational level missions (some of the liaison connectivity arose through earlier NATO experimentation work, like the Trial HAMMER series).  So, to square the circle, the lessons of recent EW live operations are now feeding into doctrine and helping refine concepts. 

This is where the ABCA EW Operations Framework and spectrum work (from an ABCA Command project group that met in July in Toronto on EM Spectrum Operations) come together with the equivalent NATO doctrine work.  Moreover, both had material injected from various white papers, presentations and even from operational briefings given in May at the 2010 Shephard/AOC Berlin EW conference, courtesy of an on-line briefing facility. The end result of all this activity should be a much better understanding of the possibilities of land and cross domain EW operations and the doctrine, language, training and procedures to successfully employ them, together with an uplift in basic concepts to underpin procurement. You will also have seen similar thinking about EW and all things EM in JED, in the AOC in the US and maybe elsewhere.

 So, there you have it. That was what the ABCA meeting for a few days in Hawaii was all about.

 
Aloha and Mahalo!

John Clifford OBE

While I was working in Waikiki I also wrote the submission for the Chapter of the Year for 2009-2010 with the help of several of the Chapter Board.  We were awarded the title of Distinguished Chapter in the Large Chapter category once again. This attracts a cash award of $200 for our coffers, which equates to about $4 per hour spent on the submission. Still, it is not about the money, obviously, but about recognising the work of the Chapter. It goes without saying that we had a pretty successful year despite a couple of cancelled visits and the Board has worked very hard to achieve success. Without the members though, this would all be pretty pointless. It seems to me that a relatively small number of the 400 or so members are active, so I encourage you all to get more involved, offer visits to your organization, attend visits, conferences and meetings and join in the social activities we hold. Most important, please encourage new members to join by using the new Chapter flyer or point potential members at the website (where the flyer can be downloaded), and where they can see what we do. Perhaps show them a copy of JED, which is a great magazine especially now that members can search all the past editions online.

Thanks also to all those on the Board and from the membership who made this last year such a good one – you know who you are! I think the recent AOC election results bode well for both the UK Chapter and the AOC at large with some great new Directors, including Bob Andrews as International Director, and a new President-Elect. If you voted give yourself a pat on the back!

As we had a nearly perfect score in the Chapter of the Year submission but lost out again to a large but geographically small US Chapter, I intend following the report up with the US AOC Board and HQ AOC to determine where it states in the Operations manual that only US Chapters can win the top prize! Watch this space!

 Mahalo, sorry! Cheers, John

VISITS AND EVENTS

AOC UK CHAPTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS AT 2 FEBRUARY 2010