Page 49 - Australian Defence Magazine Oct 2020

OCTOBER 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
FROM THE SOURCE SCOTT CARPENDALE 49
Special Operations Command in the US, but what the Aus- tralian customer was looking for was different at this stage and we don’t think Little Bird was the right platform.
Conversely, for what we call the Apache program, the armed reconnaissance helicopter program, we think Apache is absolutely the right platform. The ability for us to leverage the established fleet of Apache aircraft across the world and extend that into Australia is a great opportunity to give the Australians a real step up in capability, a system- of-systems platform that allows them to integrate much more freely with other airborne platforms, and also creates great opportunities for Australian industry lead-in to a sup- ply chain that supports a worldwide fleet of helicopters.
ADM: How are the various phases of JP 2072 coming along? Are the 2020 milestones going to be met, consid- ering the coronacoaster we’ve been on?
CARPENDALE: The Currawong Project, under 2072 Phase 2B, has seen three material releases that we’re delivering to our customer. Despite the impacts of coronavirus – and they have obviously impacted our ability to move as freely as we’d like and to move parts around as freely, or to get to testing sites and a range of other impacts -- that team has been really innovative. We’ve been able to deliver train- ing virtually, we’ve taken some really innovative approaches to how we support the customer, and the Australian Army customer has been excellent at working with us and being collaborative around the solutions. We delivered a Release 2 capability earlier this year on schedule and we’re leaning in towards Release 3 next year and we are very confident about our ability to meet the schedule on that program as well.
So we have, to date, continued to deliver that program without significant impact as a result of coronavirus, as we have in a lot of our programs, to be honest. The impacts of COVID-19 certainly are hitting us across the board and par- ticularly even in the soft area of collaboration. We pride our- selves on our ability to design programs around a heavy sense of collaboration and people working together. When you get to six months of working together via phone or via video, it does make things more difficult and it really challenges our ability to collaborate the way we intended to on day one; it does have an impact on our people and our programs.
But our people and Australian industry have really come to the fore and one of the benefits on the Currawong Pro- gram is it’s a heavy, heavy Australian industry supply chain and so the ability of Australian industry to be able to help us be successful in that program has really stood us up for success. If we had been more reliant on a global supply chain that was diversified around the world, we think the impact would have been bigger.
ADM: Also on the comms front, there’s many billions of dollars being spent on satcoms in the coming decade. What role do you think Boeing and BDA could play in that domain?
CARPENDALE: JP9102 is a program that we are definitely in- terested in. From a WGS perspective, satcoms is part of our core capability and we think that there’s a real role for us to play on JP-9102. We are working through that with our
global team and obviously in advance of the customer re- leasing an RFT, hopefully later this year or early next year, we think we’re well positioned to be highly competitive on that program.
ADM: What is the likelihood of the lost Growler being replaced by the RAAF? Have they shown any interest in getting the fleet back up to the 12 after the loss of a frame in 2018 due to an engine fire?
CARPENDALE: Definitely they’ve shown interest. We’ve had a number of discussions with the RAAF and had discus- sions with the US Navy; any replacement or additional plat- forms acquired would be a transaction between the Austra- lian government and the US Navy, so we stand by ready to support that and obviously locally we’d support the imple- mentation of any new platforms delivered and our team in the US is obviously supporting the US Navy and responding to that interest. There’s no committed order for additional Growlers at this stage but the Australian government has certainly expressed an interest.
ADM: Is there a mates’ rates option available given the circumstances of the aircraft?
CARPENDALE: Well that’s a question for the US Navy. It’s an FMS program between the USN and Australia, so I’m not best placed to answer that.
ADM: The updated policy documents released earlier this year in the De- fence Strategic Update and Force Structure Review; how affected your planning and business model? CARPENDALE: If anything it’s really just reinforced our strategic plan. We set our updated strategy about 18 months ago and a lot of that strategy was around continuing to leverage the plat- forms that are in service, focus heav- ily on next generation, fifth generation capabilities but also heavy network and integration programs that support the enhancement of capability for the ADF.
WE EXPECT THAT AT ITS PEAK THERE WILL BE AT LEAST 150 JOBS FOR AUSTRALIA SUPPORTING THE UK E-7 PROGRAM, PRIMARILY BETWEEN WILLIAMTOWN AND BRISBANE.
What we saw in the updated Force Structure Plan really just reinforces to us that the path we are on is the right path to support our customer and to meet our customer’s needs. We’ve got multiple ways that our platform, systems and in- tegration activities can support Defence and we’re really excited about some of those opportunities.
I’m also encouraged about Defence’s increased focus on the cyber domain and obviously that’s an area that we’re really continuing to grow our local capability but also to ensure that our supply chain is also cyber ready and able to support the Australian customer. And so that obviously was a significant benefit of the Force Structure Plan, to rec- ognise the role that cyber has in the future. We were also more than a little excited about the Teaming Air Vehicles line in the Force Structure Plan that shows a significant continued investment by Defence in what we see as a really important capability going forward. ■