The Edge

ADFA Presentation 2019 – General Sir Peter Cosgrove, AK, MC

The Governor-General of Australia, General Sir Peter Cosgrove, AK, MC, addresses ADFA staff and trainees

US Defense Implications of Expanding China

This U.S. DoD report assesses China’s global expansion efforts and the implications for the U.S. in terms of military access, logistics, force posture and training. The report has generated discussion and various assessments can be found online across the national security community.

Thoughts from The Edge

Mick Ryan is the Commander of the Australian Defence College. This column from Ryan and his contributors focusses on intellectually preparing members of the profession of arms for strategic competition and future conflict.

Future of Logistics Systems in Defence

Logistics! Its not something we usually think about. Not many people understand the concept, or its impact on the progress of society. It is the lifeblood of economy – of any home, organisation, city or country.

Queryable Earth: A Searchable database of Earth

What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses and everything else on Earth searchable, the same way you search Google. He shares a vision for how this database can become a living record of the immense physical changes happening across the globe. "You can't fix what you can't see," Marshall says. "We want to give people the tools to see change and take action."

How the Military Fights Climate Change

Military leaders have known for millennia that the time to prepare for a challenge is before it hits you, says scientist and retired US Navy officer David Titley. He takes us from the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria to the icy shores of Svalbard to show how the military approaches the threat of climate change, in a refreshingly practical, nonpartisan take on climate preparedness. "The ice doesn't care who's in the White House. It doesn't care which party controls your congress. It doesn't care which party controls your parliament," Titley says. "It just melts."

Leading Together

Leading Together is a collection of practical advice from experienced leaders in international disaster and conflict response. It is a call to reflect and invest time in ensuring that we are prepared to respond when it falls upon us to do so; because, it will be too late to develop the skills, the knowledge and the understanding, when they are needed in the field.

Delivering ‘joined-up’ government: achieving the integrated approach to offshore crisis management

Offshore crisis response requires a higher level of multi-agency interconnectedness than ever before. However, the data overload that we all face in the Information Age inhibits networking as much as it facilitates it. To achieve the necessary level of interconnectedness, individuals and organisations need to adopt a completely new way of doing government business.

Optimization of Condition-Based Maintenance Using Soft Computing

Due to high costs associated with conventional maintenance strategies, application of soft computing in monitoring the condition of equipment to predict the health of various components of machine tools in manufacturing processes has attracted the attention of researchers.

CDLE Leadership Paper 2 - 2018

The CDLE Leadership Paper 2-2018 is Anne Goyne and the CDLE team addressing issues around negative leadership. The paper is couched in terms of a range of events including the JEDI Council, the ADFA skype incident, the F111 deseal/reseal, the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce (DART) and the associated findings, which relate to many negative experiences of ADF personnel. The paper goes on to explore why the ADF culture has such negative leadership experiences and what to do about it.

Workplace Flexibility in the ADF: anathema or panacea?

Discussions about ‘flexible work’ in Defence have brought with it questions about what ‘work’, rather than ‘service’, looks like within the organisation. Yet what ‘flexibility’ means for Navy, Army and Air Force members, what ‘flexible work’ looks like, and what its implications are for capability remain contested.

Australian Defence Logistics - The Need to Enable and Equip Logistics Transformation

This report aims to highlight to the wider Defence community the challenges faced by Defence Logisticians and the lack of priority that Defence leaders have placed on Logistics in the past. Defence needs to place greater emphasis on the Defence Logistic function if it is to meet the challenges of a more complex and challenging operating environment in the future.