Talisman Sabre’s theatre of war

This year’s Talisman Sabre exercise brought together forces of seven nations.

An Australian light armoured vehicle rolls off HMS Canberra’s landing craft on to Forrest Beach, near Ingham in north Queensland.

On the upper vehicle deck inside HMAS Canberra, 33 Japanese soldiers wearing black face masks check their weapons, surrounded by a larger group of British Royal Marine Commandos.

The Japan Self-Defence Force troops are part of an elite marine unit, the Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, established three years ago to counter Chinese threats to the country’s island territories in the East China Sea.

The platoon of Japanese soldiers is the smallest of the combined forces aboard HMAS Canberra for the amphibious assault exercise. But its presence is significant.

The Australian has been invited aboard HMAS Canberra for the final week of Talisman Sabre 2021 – Australia’s biggest defence exercise with the US, which has grown into a significant multinational training event.

This year the exercise tests the interoperability of seven nations’ militaries – those of Australia, the US, Britain, Japan, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand. All share democratic values and a deep desire to protect the international rules-based order.

Crucially, of the participants in Talisman Sabre this year, Japan is closest to the frontline of strategic geopolitical tensions with China; facing regular incursions by Chinese military, coast guard and maritime militia into its territorial waters. As a fellow member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, with Australia, the US and India, Japan is also a vital partner in the combined Indo-Pacific pushback against Chinese attempts to flout international norms.

The presence of two Chinese spy ships monitoring Talisman Sabre from international waters for the duration of the exercise provides a constant reminder of its strategic backdrop.

The landing of 650 Australian, US, British and Japanese personnel from HMAS Canberra, and the subsequent “battle” for the north Queensland town of Ingham last Friday, is the culmination of a month of combined exercises involving 17,000 personnel, 18 ships, 70 fixed wing aircraft and 50 helicopters.

The Australian hitches a ride to HMAS Canberra with Peter Dutton on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. The Defence Minister lauds Japan’s contribution and flags the future participation of India – the only absent Quad partner – in the next Talisman Sabre in 2023.

“It would be great to see India here,” Dutton says. “Obviously the Quad has been quite remarkable.

“Our Five Eyes partnerships obviously, historically, have been the underpinning of our training model and our intelligence gathering and sharing. But as we see here, with Japan and with many other partners, there really is a very significant collaboration with countries within the Indo-Pacific, and Japan has really stepped up and is an important partner.”

For the purposes of the amphibious exercise, Ingham and its surrounds are cast as an island that had been occupied by a large force of “North Torbians” – a fictional “near peer” enemy with comparable air, ground, maritime, space, and cyber capabilities.

For Australia, an isolated, three-ocean nation with friends and partners scattered throughout the region, it’s a potentially realistic scenario.

The landing at Forrest Beach, near Ingham, on Friday is uncontested, amid deception, sabotage and cyber operations to throw the “enemy” off guard.

But the coalition forces face strong resistance later in the day at the town’s airport. The landing force seizes key terrain, including bridges, intersections, and power infrastructure, creating multiple problems for the “enemy” to deal with at once.

Earlier, navy clearance divers search the ocean floor for “mines”, and a navy survey team has mapped the undersea terrain.

US Marine Corps Captain Jeremiah Dennis, a tanned, broad-shouldered Texan, says technology and tactics have transformed amphibious warfare.

Dennis’s rifle company, from the 7th Marines, is typically inserted by helicopter to engage the enemy ahead of seaborne landing forces.

“You’ve seen Saving Private Ryan with Tom Hanks where they take that beach? That’s the worst case scenario,” he says.

“So how do you solve that problem? Deception is a big one – making you think where you are going is not where you are going so you can slide in the back door. It’s not checkers, it’s chess.”

Striking from the naval platforms is core business for the US Marines and the British Royal Marine Commandos, each of which has a company of 120 personnel operating from HMAS Canberra, together with 350 Australian soldiers from 3 Royal Australian Regiment, and the platoon of Japanese.

Royal Marines commander Major Kris Dawson’s 40 Commando unit has joined Talisman Sabre after being re-tasked to the Indo-Pacific under Britain’s new force posture.

“Our presence in the area is certainly going to increase over the coming years,” he tells The Australian.

“What we are looking at doing in the future is having a strike company forward deployed in the area of operation, anywhere east of the Suez Canal, all the way through to the Indo-Pacific.”

Dawson’s commando force specialises in amphibious warfare and reconnaissance.

“As a commando force, we offer something slightly different. We are used to working in small teams over large areas,” Dawson says.

“We’ve done a bit of work with 2 Royal Australian Regiment and we’re doing work now with 3RAR. It takes years and years to become familiar with.”

The Australian Defence Force has been steadily ramping up its amphibious capabilities during the past decade, accelerating its readiness for marine operations since the arrival of the navy’s landing helicopter dock ships HMAS Canberra in 2014 and HMAS Adelaide in 2015.

The 27,000-tonne LHDs can deposit up to 1000 armed soldiers by air and water, together with their weapons and vehicles, anywhere in the Indo-Pacific or further abroad if needed.

The vessels have landing space for eight medium-sized helicopters or four of the army’s heavier Chinooks and can accommodate 110 vehicles below deck.

During Talisman Sabre, HMAS Canberra operates command and control platforms for its accompanying naval taskforces and a floating headquarters for the amphibious landing force.

“It is important we do have a capability such as this which, let’s face it, is designed for combat but can just as easily be re-tasked to conduct a peacetime operation which is really important,” the ship’s Captain Jace Hutchison says.

Two submarines – Australian Collins-class boats – are participating in the exercise on the enemy “Red Team”, testing the ships’ anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Earlier, one of the US ships was “hit” in a mock torpedo attack.

Australia’s LHDs, Canberra and Adelaide, and Landing Ship Dock HMAS Choules are key to Australia’s ability to deploy land forces anywhere in the region, in war or peacetime.

Colonel Kim Gilfillan, a co-commander at the ADFs Amphibious Force Headquarters in Sydney, is head of the landing force. When he talks to The Australian after lunch, he has just finished his 10th meeting of the day.

He says the ADF’s amphibious capabilities have grown significantly during the past four to five years. Refining them with key international partners is now a top priority to ensure Australia can work with any of its allies and friends in combined regional operations.

“To use a sporting analogy, when we generate a State of Origin team, or the Wallabies, they come from other teams and they don’t work well together until they’ve been given time to understand the game plan and the communications necessary,” Gilfillan says.

“Once they’ve worked together for a while, it becomes seamless. That is the same for our profession – practice, practice, practice gets us better.”

The pandemic has constrained the number of participants in Talisman Sabre this year and confined many to their ships, but it helps to test the exercise’s planners by adding another layer of complexity to the training.

Australian Army Major General Jake Ellwood is commander of the exercise for the second time in as many years.

He says the aim is to develop “micro interoperability” between the ADF and its international partners, allowing them to operate as one.

“We’re testing that connective tissue,” Ellwood tells The Australian. “We want to make it as realistic as we can. We like to make sure the adversary we are facing is near-peer. That’s important for us to test and stretch our capabilities as far as we can.”

The opposing force, made up of forces drawn from the Five Eyes nations – Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand – is given access to the tactics and technology available to the fictional enemy.

The amphibious assault exercise – the second of Talisman Sabre and fourth for the ADF since June – is one of three major actions during the multinational war games.

Earlier, at Charters Towers, 140 US Army paratroopers conducted an airborne assault, while a “multi-domain strike” at the Shoalwater Bay training area featured the first firing of a US Patriot missile on Australian soil, together with US HiMARS artillery rockets.

The results of each engagement are not a foregone conclusion.

“We use our intelligence architecture to try and anticipate what they are going to throw at us and to outmanoeuvre them,” the landing force’s chief of plans, Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Barrow, tells The Australian.

“Having previously been an enemy force on these exercises, they absolutely want to attempt to beat the blue force because that is a feather in your cap if you can win the scenario.”