Page 52 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2020

52 DEFENCE BUSINESS VIEW FROM CANBERRA
APRIL 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
RESILIENCE IN SPACE
LEFT: Australia has traditionally relied on large satellites for the ADF.
With a suitable bilateral agree- ment, maintaining stocks offshore is perfectly permissible under IAE obligations. The fundamental problem remains that when we need oil, it will be in the US and will have to be transported 7,500 kilometres across the Pacific in a convoy of tankers.
In a benign security environ- ment that could work just fine. In time of conflict, an adversary wouldn’t have to work too hard to compromise Australia’s fuel supply, just a submarine or two out in the Pacific, or, even simpler, minefields strategically placed off key ports.
There’s another area in which Australia is beholden, mostly, to the US and that’s in the area of military satellite communications (SATCOM).
Defence is investing very heavily in updating communications tech- nology to enhance what’s already pretty good. SATCOM is the go-to communications capability provid- ing high capacity global comms for deployed forces.
Australia needs more resilience. We’ve heard WGS
that a lot since the summer bushfires and mostly we’re pretty good at it but there are certainly areas where we could lift our game.
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
ONE is fuel security, a topic on which your correspondent has touched previously. There’s this curious idea that rather than invest in our own onshore strategic stocks, we access US reserves when we run a bit low.
Turns out this is precisely what the government is doing, with a deal signed in March. Quite how this could work hasn’t been made too clear as apparently the fine details are still being negotiated.
It would seem we will maintain stocks in the US within the US strategic reserve, with these counting towards the 90 days of supply we’re mandated to maintain by the Interna- tional Energy Agency (IEA).
Figures for actual reserves in Australia vary but at best are well under half that stipulated by the IEA.
However, this depends on other people’s infrastructure, specifi- cally the US wideband global SAT- COM (WGS) constellation and the Optus C-1 satellite which hosts an ADF communications payload.
C-1 is in its twilight years. The satellite was launched in 2003 with a design life of 15 years. In 2017 Defence extended the
agreement which was set to conclude in 2020.
Since satellite lifespan is determined by onboard fuel for attitude and station keeping, C-1 will be running on fumes, if at all, past mid-decade. Already Optus has adjusted C-1’s
orbit to minimise fuel use.
Defence’s growing appetite for SATCOM at a time of in-
creased operational activity speedily exceeded what C-1 could deliver. Rather than develop our own satellites, De- fence opted into the new US WGS system by funding an en- tire satellite WGS-6 which gives us proportional access to the network.
The first WGS satellite was launched in 2007 and our WGS satellite was launched in 2013. However, it’s not just us
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