Australia’s new chief defence scientist says she has taken on the role at a time when the Australian Defence Force is becoming increasingly receptive to game-changing capabilities.

‘That, to me, is really critical’, Professor Tanya Monro says.

A physicist, Monro was working in Britain 15 years ago when she was asked by what is now Defence Science and Technology (DST) to return to Australia to set up a photonics research facility in Adelaide. Photonics is the science of light—how it can be generated, detected and made use of—and it’s a key research area for Defence in the development of sensors, lasers and new optical materials.

Now she is in charge of DST, having taken over from Alex Zelinsky, who has become vice-chancellor of Newcastle University.

Monro will oversee the investment in key projects of the $730 million Next Generation Technologies Fund. ‘The whole intent of Next Gen is to put the focus on things that will disrupt and support and create capability edge for the ADF. That includes identifying things that adversaries would potentially put into the mix that could disrupt our current approach to safeguarding Australia’, she says.

So are there more ideas out there as good as the Australian-designed CEAFAR phased-array radar and the Nulka ship defence system?

‘I absolutely think there are, but we can’t do all of them. We’ve got to have the conversation to decide on the really big things we can do on a national scale. Ideally they’ll be in areas where we’ve already got an edge’, Monro says.

One such area is in space technologies, in using and harnessing small satellites and constellations of small satellites. Others are in quantum computing and hypersonics. ‘It’s everything from new materials that will change how we protect our serving personnel, right through to new ways of integrating information that comes from multiple elements of a conflict in a way that can allow you to make better decisions.’

Autonomy is a big area of focus for DST, along with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

‘There’s no question we’re moving into a world where data is becoming more complex, rich and ubiquitous. And where understanding, processing and turning data into information to support decision-making is becoming more and more critical. This is absolutely key for us. One thing that strikes me in this place is you lift the lid and you look, and just the range and number of things being worked on is mind-blowing. And in most of those, we’re closely partnered with the ADF’, Monro says.

‘The game is to try to think big and work on some of these really challenging longer-term areas because there’s no point having the best solution to today’s problems if something new comes and knocks that over.’

No other such institution is so deeply enmeshed with its partners than DST is with the ADF’s combat personnel, Monro says. ‘That means our people, whether they’re an early career researcher coming straight from the university system or someone who’s been here for decades, get that intimate understanding of the problems the fighters face.

‘The Next Gen program will allow DST and the ADF to harness the amazing capacity in the Australian research system across the 40-odd universities and other publicly funded agencies and see where we can align and shape the direction of some of the work that’s happening out there.

‘Together we can have bigger teams of really strong researchers tackling a smaller number of bigger problems. It’s more in the concept of expanding some national missions that are inspiring, exciting’, she says.

That will shape what’s happening not only within DST but more broadly across the universities and other institutions to build Australia’s future capability and mould some of the industry development that’s got to happen for the nation’s economic growth.

DST can’t do that by itself, Monro says, because it’s an organisation of just over 2,000 people and by itself it couldn’t provide the scale of effort and investment needed to develop some of these really big ideas.

‘You then need to have the mechanisms, the funding support to bring the best people together’, she says. ‘We’ve started to do that, and we’ll continue to develop that.’

The next step, she says, is to create an environment in which broad priority areas are narrowed down into specific big challenges, missions or questions that begin to shape what people do.

‘DST has a special role in that because we’re so meshed with the ADF we have an understanding of what might be some of the threats into the future, what we should worry about, not just today but in 10 years-plus’, says Munro.

‘And then we can help shape that conversation and narrow down to the problems we want to work on. Sometimes I think in Australia we lack that willingness to make a call, set priorities and tie them to funding.’

Monro says the goal is to harness the nation’s intellectual capital. ‘If you bring together the best people in the nation in a field, and you resource that conversation, you can create a roadmap for ideas on what might be possible.’

This is the ninth in our series ‘Australia in Space’ leading up to ASPI’s Building Australia’s Strategy for Space conference in June.

The most important skill, which underlies all creativity and all scientific discovery, is the ability to find links between ideas that are seemingly unconnected. — Theodore Zeldin

While at first glance space technology, cybersecurity, and robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) may seem to be focused, individual disciplines, they’re in fact inextricably linked and interdependent. This tapestry of systems is sewn together with a shared technological thread. The common thread is a network or, in communications engineering terms, the channel.

Each discipline is at a different stage of maturity and all feature growth trajectories with a myriad of latent technical pathways whose limits are bounded only by physics, imagination and the paradigm’s nature. The paradigm in this case is in relation to the future autonomous modernisation of the Australian Army, which was raised at recent public forums.

When it comes to acquiring smart military drones and robots in an era  of machine-learning–enabled hacking and ‘Turing-like’ quantum code-breaking risks, proceeding carefully to avoid pernicious outcomes is warranted.

Much has been said about the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence–fuelled hyperwar, but the magnitude of the capability implications is only just being recognised. Therefore the temptation for an organisation with finite resources to generate mass with machines is compelling. The foundations already exist given that unmanned aerial systems are already in service and, usefully, a cyber squadron is being established.

Moreover, in its 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian government recognised the continuing expansion of space-based and space-enabled capabilities over the next 20 years, so space surveillance projects are in the acquisition pipeline to strengthen Defence’s awareness of space. To that end, Australian Defence sovereign space capabilities are being progressively enhanced through access to allied and commercial space-based capabilities.

However, the following scenario illustrates why space, cyber and RAS should ideally feature as an integrated strategy in the context of a militarised autonomous future:

Troops emerge from a landing craft accompanied by humanoid robot avatars. These avatars are unarmed, but carry ballistic shields, mine detectors and first aid equipment. Soldiers in Australia employ ‘telexistence’ to digitally port themselves into the robot avatars (T-RAV). This enables connected soldiers in Australia to interact with human soldiers in the landing craft via their T-RAVs’ real-time audio-visual and haptic sensor data relay. The avatars are controlled via small satellite (smallsat) links from Australia. These strategic links are protected by machine intelligence cyber software, quantum computer processing and digital hologram keys to mitigate hacking threats.

T-RAVs conduct high-risk support tasks, such as mine clearance, casualty evacuation or building entry. They also protect humans under enemy fire by using their ballistic shields in ‘Greek phalanx’ or ‘Roman testudo’ formations. Then as the landing operation unfolds, high-altitude surveillance drones transmit imagery via satellite data links to Canberra. Furthermore, the smallsats were launched from the Northern Territory before the mission after multiple coalition satellites ceased functioning. It was later revealed that the coalition satellites were jammed by electro-disruption devices secretly placed in co‑linear orbits or were hacked with malicious cyber machine intelligence.

This potential futures narrative highlights several themes. Firstly, Defence is resolutely building expeditionary capability, so global reach supported by satellite networks for command and navigation, including joint drone coordination will be enduring.

Secondly, with increases in RAS operating at strategic distances and evolving threats to coalition space systems, Australia will benefit from an agile space capability to reliably support autonomous modernisation. Fortuitously, Australia is already working closely with allies and partners to ensure such capabilities underpin the Australian Defence Force’s operational effectiveness. This effort is well received by allies who recently invited military space partners to contribute more.

Finally, it illuminates the network as an enterprise-level vulnerability, which is why concurrent development of machine intelligence-optimised cybersecurity underpins resilient space capability and reduces autonomous modernisation risks.

The common theme with disrupted coalition satellites in the scenario is that they were in the same orbit for years and didn’t have current cyber-intrusion defences in their system code or hardware. But tactical satellite launch via commercial space facilities from Australia enabled rapid smallsat insertion into selected orbits to support human-machine teaming. Australia’s imagined space capability also permitted smallsat deployment with recent cryptographic security measures engineered into them.

Accordingly, smallsats with both low signatures and leading-edge cyber protection enabled a more resilient space system to support the mission. It’s noteworthy that constellations of smallsats are considered more resilient than large traditional satellites because smallsats are difficult to detect and target.

Thus robust space architectures could become increasingly important as the internet of military things will evolve with more complex network nodes when RAS capabilities are introduced.

So an ‘evolution of autonomy’ will require increasingly more bandwidth, including potent ‘antidotes to attenuation’ and network speed to overcome the ‘inevitability of latency’.

Therefore a growing inventory of military platforms, including autonomous systems with multipath propagation links, will require space communications engineering efforts to configure an enterprise channel. The value proposition is that enhanced space assets could create secure, scalable and high-speed networks—or a global digital cloud (GDC)—especially in areas without fixed or deployed terrestrial communications infrastructure. Moreover, an expeditionary space-enabled network may provide strategic spectrum for responsive drone control and navigation at scale.

GDC could also deliver technology growth pathways for high data-transfer rates among increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with a ‘big-data’ security challenge.

Hence acquisition of enhanced space systems, including access to allied and commercial capabilities, in parallel with cyber and RAS modernisation, will develop a holistic space capability system. This integrated capability approach might avoid high re‑engineering costs and mitigate potential RAS operating limitations in the future.

Consequently, systems design for a fifth-generation army must reconcile an emerging conflux of capability with space, cyber and autonomous modernisation. Optimal national security outcomes could depend on it.