ADF accelerates drone tech contracts

A host of mini- and micro-drones aren’t going to cut it.

In the Top End, Australia has a vast arc of remote and thinly populated landmass and sea approaches, reconnaissance and surveillance of which requires long-range, persistent capabilities. Within that area, we have a wide range of economically, strategically and militarily important targets from the VLF sub comms station at Exmouth, to gas projects, mines, ports, army, navy and air force bases, Jindalee installations and so on, which are virtually defenceless, and vulnerable to seaborne infiltrators. Most of our international air and sea trade passes through this area and its air and sea approaches, through narrow and/or shallow waterways in the Indonesian archipelago.

We have the pull factor of being an affluent nation in a region surrounded by developing and conflict-riven nations, which attracts illegal immigrants, illegal fishers and smugglers.

We have a highly capable potential adversary – China – which has been growing defence spending on average 8% p.a. (which we have utterly failed to keep up with, and we’re stripping other defence capabilities to fund AUKUS subs which we may or may not ever get). China has a strong focus on armed drones, drone swarm tech and threat projection via air and sea power. China has the capability to knock out the aircraft carriers of our major allies USA and UK with hypersonics and probably nuclear torpedoes like Russia possesses, and evidently has been practising air strikes on carrier groups in the western Chinese deserts. US and UK carrier groups are major force projection assets which would be essential to our allies aiding our defence.

China has extended its defensive perimeter, control and influence over the South and East China Seas with island bases, and are courting influence and presence in the Southwest Pacific including the Solomons and Vanuatu. China has pioneered a new class of warship, a drone carrier capable of carrying hundreds of air and sea drones.

We are a maritime nation – between us and NZ – responsible for about 1/4 of the southern hemisphere’s oceanic area, with only 11 multi-billion dollar major surface warships, which are incidentally virtually defenceless against drone swarms. We have 6 almost end-of-life subs, all but one or two of which are drydocked for either maintenance or upgrade for the foreseeable future. We have surface mine hunters, but no mine sweepers capable of sweeping large areas. And only a couple of Ghost Shark extra-large multi-mission drone subs, which could be tasked with mine-hunting in those narrow and shallow waterways. (For the price of one AUKUS sub, we could buy 100 Ghost Sharks.)

Since retirement of F-111 long range strategic bombers, and despite a defence strategic review calling for long range strike to defend Australia at distance, we have no long range aerial strike. USA offered us B-21 Raider stealth bombers and we said no. (For the price of one AUKUS sub, we could buy over 40 B-21’s.)

So aside from one or two submarines, we have no deterrent effect of being able to neutralise or penetrate China’s air and sea defences in depth to make strategic strikes against China proper.

We have an onshore strategic fuel reserve of three weeks, despite being signatories to IEA treaty requiring us to hold 60 days. The rest is leased from the US strategic fuel reserve, about three weeks sail away. This renders us extremely vulnerable to a naval blockade. Our entire economy grinds to a halt without that strategic fuelk reserve.

Yet we can’t even spot or track a modest flotilla of three Chinese warships that all but circumnavigated Australia, three ships which between them carried more missiles than the entire Royal Australian Navy.

History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. The parallels with WW2 are almost uncanny. Japan – a major trading partner of Australia’s – in response to oil and other strategic material embargoes that threatened to shut down their economy, launched a pre-emptive attack on US, UK and Dutch interests in Malaya, Indonesia, Philippines and Pearl Harbour. If the Japanese destroyed the oil storage at Pearl Harbour, the US Navy would have been forced back to the US west coast, giving Japan a free hand in the western Pacific. If the Japanese had successfully defended Henderson Field in the Solomons, successfully captured Milne Bay and Port Moresby, and blockaded our eastern ports with subs, the Australian east coast would have been cut off from US west coast.

China’s Xi has expressed that the Taiwan question will not be left to future generations. Only the China of today is vastly more capable of cutting us off from our allies and trade partners than the Japan of WW2 was over 80 years ago. And you can be assured that the Chinese are avid students of military history. You can be assured that they will have learned the lessons of WW2, and any attempt to blockade or seize Taiwan may be pre-empted with attacks on US and allied military capabilities in South Korea, Japan, Guam, Philippines, the missile tracking station at Kwajalein, Hawaii… And Australia.

You’d think given our geostrategic circumstances, that not just intelligence, surveillance and electronic warfare but force projection with armed mid- to long-range UAV’s, would be an absolute must. Perfect for detecting and potentially interdicting a wide range of threats over vast areas of our remote north.

I still can’t reconcile the apparent lack of any urgency from Defence and our political leadership regarding armed aerial and sea drones and anti-drone defences over the last more than two decades, despite the lessons of the War on Terror and subsequent related conflicts – where intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, EW, and precision strike from armed UAVs have proven to be essential enablers, deterrents and force projection assets.

Nor seemingly have we grasped the urgency and importance of lessons from recent asymmetric conflicts like the Azeri-Armenian conflict, the conflict in Yemen and the Ukraine War, where smaller powers or groups were able to inflict severe damage on fixed installations, and either defeat or hold off enemies that at least on paper were superior, by employing large numbers of cheap armed drones.

The cancellation of MQ-9B SkyGuardian procurement in 2022 – after having received US State Dept export approval – is almost unfathomable. SkyGuardians were to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, EW and precision strike, filling gaps between various existing capabilities.

Australia remains the only country among about two dozen allies without Medium Altitude Long Endurance armed UAV’s like the battle-tested and proven lineage of MQ-3 Predator, MQ-9A Reaper, MQ-9B SkyGuardian. USA has had Predators so long they’re now retiring them.

And we STILL have no armed aerial drones. Switchblade-300 was hailed by some in the mainstream media as “Australia’s first armed aerial drone”. It is NOT an armed drone, it is a loitering munition, with an endurance of 15 minutes and less than 10km range.

And now of course, we have an unreliable major ally that is clearly “America First”, that may well deny us access to “our” strategic fuel reserve, particularly in circumstances where they face the same threat that we do, a rampant China attempting to deny interference in Taiwan with pre-emptive strikes and blockades across the Indo-Pacific. An ally that has told us in no uncertain terms that our defence spending is inadequate, as per our obligations under the ANZUS treaty to be able to participate in our own rescue; and has placed a figure on what they expect from us, to which we’ve responded with the middle finger; and therefore in their minds perhaps within their rights to fail to come to our aid as per ANZUS, in part because they’ve made the decision that we’re either not worth saving, or we’re unable to persist long enough for help to arrive. A transactional ally that may hang us out to try in return for concessions from China.

The threat is real. The threat is now. In recent years military analysts suggested China would be ready to blockade and/or invade Taiwan and fight off intervention by western allies as early mid-2025. Pentagon wargamers have revealed that in 70% of scenarios they’ve run, China wins a conflict over Taiwan.

We could never hope to persist against the might of China for any length of time. But we DO need to be able to detect not just threats from China but a host of smaller scale threats to our interests. We DO need to be able to defend ourselves and strike back, to provide a credible deterrent to attack in the first place. We can’t do that with some micro- and mini-drones. We urgently need mid- and long-range armed air, sea surface and submerged drones.