Australia has clear defence industry priorities including developing a local drone manufacturing sector. Here Dr Peter Layton examines Defence’s recent drone purchases, and asks why then, do we buy overseas made drones and not the best value or most advanced ones at that?
In late February the Minister for Defence Industry launched the Defence Industry Development Strategy.
Overall, this is an impressive piece of staff work by Defence’s bureaucrats.
To be successful though, the strategy needs to be implemented; verbiage is not enough.
A striking gap between words and actions has been exposed in the latest buys of drones for the Australian Army.
On 8 July, Defence announced the Switchblade drone would be bought from US company AeroVironment.
This surprised given Switchblade dates back to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is no longer being bought by the US Army.
The US supplied many to Ukraine but it proved expensive compared to other options and had operational shortcomings.
Then a week later, Defence announced spending $90m to buy drones from German company, Quantum-Systems.
More modern than Switchblade, this drone uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide autonomous target identification and tracking.
At odds with these foreign purchases, the Defence Industry Development Strategy stresses urgently developing an Australian small uncrewed air system manufacturing capability.
Indeed, as highlighted in the strategy (p.59), the new Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator programme’s first ‘big’ innovation challenge is for a Sovereign Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS).
Regrettably, this is a challenge most striking in its meagre funding – eleven companies received $1.21m to develop their drones.
To be fair, Defence has also provided $5.3m to Innovaero to make the Owl drone for Australia’s Special Forces and the Quantum-Systems drones will be supported from a small Brisbane facility.
Moreover, Defence will also acquire some small Sypaq Systems CorvoX drones (pictured).
That name may sound familiar as it was the Australian company that developed the famous cardboard drones that gained worldwide attention when used to attack Russian forces in the Ukraine War.
If Switchblade was found wanting, Corvo drones found accolades making buying Switchblade even more mysterious.
Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities
Both drone types have small warheads making them appropriate to two Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities (SDIP): SDIP 4: Domestic manufacture of guided weapons, explosive ordnance and munitions, and SDIP 5: Development and integration of autonomous systems.
SDIP 4 is famously slow to deliver, having effectively been commenced in 2020 under the previous government.
Corvo drones, possibly in improved form, may be suitable for beginning Australia’s sovereign production of lethal UASs.
Drone design is moving fast and today in Ukraine low cost, First Person View (FPV) drones are dominating the battlefield.
The Ukraine is making 3,000 a day while Russian production is of a similar magnitude.
Such huge demand highlights why having a sovereign production capability is important.
Each Switchblade is delivered through long vulnerable supply chains and costs some 20 times more than a Ukrainian FPV drone or a Corvo.
The Defence Industry Development Strategy correctly seeks Australian drone production but Defence purchases are needed to make this happen.
The Quantum-Systems buy is also unhelpful to building Australian defence industrial capabilities.
The drone itself has a conventional airframe performance that companies in Australia could doubtless easily match or even exceed.
For example, the Quantum-Systems drone has a 180km range and a three hour endurance – in 1998 the Australian-built Aerosonde crossed the Atlantic in an almost 27 hour flight.
Beyond the airframe, the AI incorporated in the sensor package is important.
AI has become an important part of AUKUS Pillar II not least because Australia brings much in terms of airborne AI.
Australia’s new Ghost Bat is an AI-flown, fast jet drone; Sentient Vision Systems specialises in imaging sensors employing AI; Athena AI is flying AI at the edge, while Nova Systems is trailing a drone-mounted landmine detecting AI system.
Buying foreign does not meet the objectives of SDIP 5: Development and integration of autonomous systems.
Highlighting the oddity inherent in the Switchblade and Quantum-Systems buys is Skyborne Technologies (a partner of Athena AI) being contracted to the US Department of Defense.
Their Cerberus drone uses AI to find and track targets while being able to attack by firing onboard weapons such as grenade launchers, shotguns and, in the future, the M-72 light anti-tank weapon.
The Cerberus has been recently live fire tested in the US by the US Marine Corps.
A critical but often overlooked feature of Cerberus is being designed to meet high explosive ordnance safety and fusing standards.
While in the Ukraine, combat needs can see live munitions duct taped to kamikaze lethal drones, in peacetime training much higher levels of safety and reliability are required.
Australian industry has the capabilities to deliver the sovereign uncrewed aerial system capabilities that Defence seeks, as demonstrated in combat in Ukraine and in numerous trials and evaluations in the US.
Defence’s current plans forecast spending some $4.3bn on uncrewed aerial system including $690m for Army drones.
These large sums could arguably be best spent realising Australia’s Defence Industry Development Strategy rather than sustaining US and German drone defence industries.
In peacetime having a sovereign drone manufacturing capability is important so as to have hot production lines, in-place supply chains and proven designs.
In wartime it may be, as in the Ukraine now, crucial to national survival.
It’s time for the Australian government and Department of Defence to not just talk the talk about building Australian defence industry capabilities but actually walk the walk.
Dr Peter Layton is a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, author of Grand Strategy and co-author of Warfare in the Robotics Age.
ADF invests $100m in new drones
Further reading:
Defence calls for high volume local drone production
ADF invests $100m in new drones
Picture: Defence/Sypaq Systems CorvoX