Tag Archive for: military technology

Australia’s lack of defence primes isn’t a problem; it’s an opportunity

Australia is uniquely suited to help solve the greatest defence acquisition challenge of our time. While the world is innovating at an unmatched pace, the old scions of the defence industry are not.

Western armed forces need equipment that is developed and built not just more cheaply and quickly but with evolution built in. They cannot keep waiting for superb systems that take many years, even decades, to get into service and cost so much that few units can be bought—and are then improved only on achingly slow schedules, if at all.

General Jim Rainey, the commander of the US Army Futures Command, had sharp comments when he visited ASPI this spring: ‘We need to change and adapt how we acquire. We are either going to do it now or we are going to do it when we go to war.’

Australia’s chief of army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, was equally sanguine: ‘As one of my predecessors, Sir Henry Wells, adroitly put it in 1957, we must “avoid the situation where soldiers have to be killed to learn”.’

And at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue in September, Abraham M Denmark, a senior associate from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had a blunt call to action: ‘Adapt or die.’

By all appearances, US and British primes contractors have chosen ‘die’. Despite increasing calls to change the way they develop defence technologies, they keep podding along with their old processes. At Land Forces 2024, while discussing how the Australian Army relied on space, Northrop Grumman offered to lend its ‘experience and primacy in space’ to help up-and-coming firms—but seemed to have no direct answer to Starlink, a cost-effective commercial service that militaries across Europe and the Indo-Pacific are looking to.

Pillar 2, the part of AUKUS that is not about nuclear submarines, has not enjoyed the detailed attention of Pillar 1, which is. It has been dismissed occasionally as a grab bag of disparate technologies, but a common thread runs through them. Not only will they be critical in a future fight; they are all innovations that primes have failed to deliver over the past decade. China is investing heavily in these technologies and, according to ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker, is now outpacing the AUKUS partners.

At Land Forces, the US and British prime contractors at least acknowledged the problem, conceding they needed to reduce historical seven- to 10-year production timelines down to 18 to 24 months. It’s unclear how the prime contractors, widely known for cost overruns and delayed delivery, can cut their development times by 80 percent. Regardless, the processes need to be not just faster but fundamentally different.

The US and British defence industries are accustomed to a waterfall process, in which development progresses slowly ‘from requirements definition through to testing, deployment, and field use.’ The process is linear and often irreversible. ‘Information flows in one direction only, regardless of the downstream consequences for the system …’. What is needed, instead, is ‘an iterative fashion where requirements and design solutions can evolve as the technology is developed.’

Take drone technology, for example. In recent research, the Royal United Services Institute’s Justin Bronk and Jack Watling outline findings that Ukraine’s drone industry is constantly tweaking designs, adapting to a fiercely competitive battlefield. Everything from sensors, radios, software and weapons are getting updated every six to 12 weeks, they find.

At Land Forces, Anduril, a disrupting entrant to the US defence industry, demonstrated an understanding of current defence technology challenges: ‘It’s not about getting the tech faster to the warfighter. It’s about getting tech that can evolve,’ stated a spokesman, retired Lieutenant General Neil Thurgood.

Each Pillar 2 technology will require integrating systems of systems. Countering drones can require seamless integration of well over a dozen technologies, which react faster than a human can. The primes, however, continue to try and capture sole source vendor contracts.

While Australia doesn’t have the established defence primes the US and Britain have, it also doesn’t have their bad habits. And Pillar 2 technologies aren’t solely for the benefit of defence, with plenty of opportunity for dual use. Dean Rosenfield, the chief executive of defence-focused engineering company Nova, cites the example of Australia’s mining and farming industries. ‘Australia should be an autonomous systems superpower,’ he says.

Sixty years ago in The Lucky Country, Donald Horne was pessimistic about his compatriots. ‘Australia has not been a country of great innovation or originality,’ he wrote. ‘It has exploited the innovations and originality of others and much of its boasting is that of a parasite’. Half a century later, it is the US and British defence industries that have shown a persistent lack of cleverness. Pillar 2 represents an unmatched opportunity for Australia’s firms, if they wish to take it.

The US Air Force is redesigning itself

The Resolute Force Pacific (Reforpac) exercise will be the largest US Air Force non-combat deployment in many years, with more than 300 aircraft involved. The two-week exercise in mid-2025 will coincide with the multinational, biennial, all-domain Talisman Sabre training event.

But it is also an important step in a radical redesign of the force, USAF Chief of Staff General David W Allvin told the Air Force Association Mitchell Institute’s first forum on future airpower on 13 November—one that includes new definitions that remove familiar terms like ‘contested’ and ‘permissive’ from the service’s vocabulary and may change its acquisition goals.

Since the end of the 1990s geopolitical unipolar moment, when the United States faced no real adversary, Allvin notes, the air force has ‘crowdsourced the fight’ to support prolonged operations in low-threat environments, pulling small units from 93 locations ‘because we didn’t want to break the bases.’

Reforpac will draw large forces from fewer units, to provide more intensive and realistic training. It’s a concept, he said, that was battle-tested in part when the USAF reinforced its Middle East strength after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

As air force leadership and the new Integrated Capabilities Command carry forward a process called Force Design, Reforpac is designed generate real-world experience. To keep Force Design focused on results, Allvin says, every question ends with ‘in order to do what?’

One lesson is already emerging: the US Air Force may not be able to afford to structure itself entirely around high-end (read: stealthy) aircraft and systems—and it may not need to. ‘If there are systems there that are less lethal,’ Allvin says, ‘they are there so that we don’t grind the others down facing a cost-imposition strategy.’

An air force can use mass, with uncrewed systems, to impose cost, Allvin adds. ‘Mass may be about having assets that must be addressed, to deplete the adversary’s inventory.’ That’s the theory behind one new effort, a low-cost long-range missile named Project Franklin (because it must be respected) based on an Defense Innovation Unit platform design.

This means big changes in future force structure and equipment plans: for 30 years, since the Desert Storm campaign against Iraq, the end of the Cold War, and the inception of the Joint Strike Fighter program, the USAF’s destination has been an all-stealth force—yet that is still decades away, the last F-35 delivery having slipped into the late 2040s.

No conclusions have been reached—for an Air Force futures conference, the discussion was astonishingly NGAD-free—but Allvin set down some principles for force design. ‘This is a design for the changing character of war. New geostrategic patterns or a new national defense strategy can emerge, and I don’t want people to leave here thinking this is an Indo-Pacific force design.’

Allvin’s principles include:

‘Take back the offensive. You can’t retreat to long range. You have to be able to fight close in, where the partners are.

‘Speed is imperative. The adversary will put effects in immediately. There will not be an iron mountain’—the informal term for massive, centralised supply dumps—‘and we need to disrupt and deny early.

‘Solve for agility. We’ve shown too much hubris about our ability to predict the future, even in our own technology base.’

Terms like ‘denied’, ‘contested’ and ‘permissive’ get lost in arguments over their meaning, and, Allvin says, ‘when you add fractional orbital bombardment systems and cyber, everything is contested.’

In the new force design lexicon, detailed in a document released on 15 November, the air force defines ‘mission area’ capabilities needed to respond to three threat bands, according to density, complexity and distance as mission areas.

—Mission Area 1 (MA1) capabilities can ‘live within and generate combat power from the dense threat area which will be under constant attack’ from missiles or drones.

—MA2 capabilities ‘operate from the defendable area of relative sanctuary beyond the umbrella of most adversary ballistic and cruise missiles … and project fires into highly contested environments.’

—MA3 capabilities ‘create the flexibility and mass to span a range of potential future crises … with positions resilient to limited adversary attack.’

‘It would be great to have all-MA1 forces,’ Allvin said, ‘but it costs too much.’  That point was underscored by Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Future MG Joseph Kunkel, whose portfolio includes Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) efforts: ‘If you plan for anything below MA1 as a lesser, included case, you have overkill in MA2 and MA3.’

The new concept is clearly aligned with CCA, but has implications in other areas. High-end platforms can be made more versatile. Doug Young, Northrop Grumman vice president of strike systems, noted that the open systems architecture of the B-21 bomber will support a wide variety of weapon loads, including mixed load-outs, and that the same capability is being retrofitted to the B-2.

The B-2, Young noted, could physically accommodate 240 GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs, but that was ‘a mission management problem’ when the aircraft was initially developed. We can, he suggested, look at ‘different choices’ now. (Think of eight cruise missiles coming out of one bay and 120 Franklins from the other.)

That capability could be part of a ‘joint long-range kill chain’ concept revealed by Lieutenant General David Harris, deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures. ‘We talked to the navy and realised we were both investing in the same stuff’ for long-range attack, Harris said, ‘and then we brought the Space Force in.’

Big ambitions. But Allvin’s immediate concern is that Reforpac can be funded, given the post-election turmoil in Washington. ‘I hope that we’re not on a continuing resolution next summer’—which occurs if no budget can be agreed on—‘so we can fund it properly.’