Page 42 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

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Critical information infrastructure designed and operated to defend Australia’s north
There is now an increasing strategic focus on – and invest- ment in – Australia’s north. The prelude to this was the 2015 Commonwealth White Paper on Developing Northern Australia, which allocated $10.7 billion to economic infrastructure proj- ects. This infrastructure is typically deployed in challenging and remote environments, with low population densities, and with business cases characterised by marginal commercial returns.
Against this background, there has also been a substantial uplift in military and defence capability in this region, evident in initiatives such as:
• Increasing airbase resilience which is planned from 2030 to 2040 with indicative funding of $2.9 billion - $4.3 billion for northern bases, including RAAF Base Learmonth, RAAF Base Curtin, RAAF base Tindal, RAAF Base Darwin and RAAF Base Scherger
• Spending $747 million on upgrading training bases, includ- ing Robertson Barracks Close Training Area, Kangaroo Flats Training Area, Mount Bundey Training Area and the Bradshaw Field Training Area to facilitate a ramp up in military exercis- es alongside international partners, including the US Marine Rotational Force in efforts to bolster interoperability
• Committing $184 million for the upgrade and refurbishment of the runway on Cocos Island to support P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft operations.
Public and commercial investment in networking infrastructure across the region to support this capability has ultimately failed to keep pace, especially given the increasing reliance on com- munications, analytics and IT systems for defence operational requirements.
Telecommunications sector investment in Australia’s north has most commonly focused on supporting last mile access for households and consumers, not in industrial-grade core fibre networking, private LTE and 5G wireless and edge compute fa- cilities to support operational technology (OT) applications and use cases. In some instances, bare bases in the locations of RAAF Learmonth and RAAF Scherger , have been bypassed by national fibre and facilities development programs altogether.
Defence OT applications and use cases are not well served by off-the-shelf network solutions that are geared for consumer or general corporate environments and will need to acknowl- edge the following realities:
• OT has limited scope of application and is not for general use
• OT is characterised by specific technical requirements cov- ering both reliability (usually high) and latency (usually low)
• OT usually nominates mandatory features such as specific QoS capability
• OT is defined by particular traffic flow patterns such as – in the case of autonomy and remote operations – from con- troller-to-vehicle not vehicle-to-vehicle.
From an organisational perspective – and across different industry sectors – these OT networks are usually controlled by a specific owner group and typically funded by an operational capability budget. They often have different reporting struc- tures to IT and product lifecycles which are tightly integrated with the operational capability and do not use standard main- tenance and monitoring procedures, often requiring specialised portals and network operations centre (NOC) protocols.
These technical and organisational realities are now widely recognised in industries such as mining, energy, and oil and gas, where there is an increasing reliance on automation and remote operations to deliver efficiency and productivity dividends to shareholders. Customers in these industries are now designing and purchasing solutions from a mix of network and technol- ogy choices based on specific OT use cases and not broader, generic corporate IT requirements.
It appears that tactical – or ‘special’ – capability for military use cases warrant a similar approach.
Although Defence is an early and deep adopter of OT, the geo- graphic locations of its activities in Australia’s north ultimately mean that it is compromised in terms of network innovation, supplier choice, resilience and price. There are often single points of failure and certain geographic markets in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory are often defined by monopoly characteristics and outdated legacy telecommu- nications assets.
However, there are now a range of global sector developments – fuelled by highly disruptive technology and business models – that are likely to benefit Australia’s defence posture. Com- mercial operators are now capitalising on these developments to deploy new network architectures and communications solutions. Of particular relevance are:
• The ongoing commissioning of low-earth orbit (LEO) con- stellations and the related Australian market entry strategies by leading and well-resourced global providers including SpaceX Starlink, Telesat Lightspeed, Amazon Kuiper and OneWeb
• The establishment of highly customised and dedicated private LTE and 5G networks for campus-based solutions. In Australia much of this has centred on enabling remote and autonomous applications for mining. In overseas defence markets, this is now gaining traction, including the recent $26 million Prototype Project Agreement (PPA) with Lock- heed Martin for the development of a 5G communications network infrastructure testbed for expeditionary operations experimentation
• Increasing optical performance and reach of fibre networks providing up to coherent 400Gb transmission capacity underwriting an emerging high-bandwidth environment char- acterised by dramatically reduced per Mb price structures
• Utilisation of the acoustic capabilities of terrestrial and subsea fibre for purposes other than transmission to provide monitoring and surveillance capability