The fact is the military will struggle to come to terms with an aerial fire fighting role as opposed to a relief or evacuation role in support of the local services.
Military aircrew (generally speaking) do not posses the skills and corporate knowledge to operate anywhere near the efficiency and effectively as the guys and girls currently doing the job. After speaking to the crews directly has I have been left with no doubt that this job requires a great deal of experience and corporate knowledge. The required finesse and awareness for this has been developed over years of constant operations. The close supervision of the newer crews by the older hands is quite impressive. This seems to be a job not to be tackled by “part timer’s”
The corporate governance that would come with this new role would be breathtaking. There would be Training Management Plans to be written, SOP’s and DI’s to write, aircrew to train, then new aircrew currencies to maintain and expend hours on. All of which would eat into an already lean flight hours allocation. The self-appointed subject matter experts would “corner the market” and then make themselves indispensable, stifling capability and building their own little empire.
Then there is the equipment, which the ADF would no doubt raise a SOR which would take years to fulfil through the DMO and be very costly. Then would modify it to meet ADF needs, then integrate it to the fleet(s) with another costly “Australian” mod. It would require constant (read more than required) maintenance with no guarantee it will be available when we need it.
The ADF is very good at warfighting ops, with command structures that have evolved to do just that. I suspect the only way to deal with the dynamic and high tempo nature of fire ops would be to have a permanent C2 node ready to go, tailored for that function, creating another burden on the system. For civilian emergency management, its bread and butter stuff.
The risk assessments alone would restrain effectiveness. ADF image would sustain a massive hit if it were to lose a strategic asset (fixed wing or rotary) in local fire fighting ops. I suspect ADF members would gladly join the fight, sadly the truckload of considerations that go with it leads me to believe that this will not happen anytime soon without a major re-think.