Page 62 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

62 SEAPOWER AEGIS
MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
Navy and potentially with countries like Korea and Japan. So, this really helps in terms of providing the types of de- terrence and the type of regional reach that government has put a lot of emphasis on,” Prescott explained.
“Things like Cooperative Engagement Capability and how Aegis is designed to provide that threat detection, make the assessment, and then identify which of a family of ships is best-placed to perform the engagement. So, now when you have Australia aligned with the US Navy – with the same baseline – that really drives home interoperability and that’s one of the important outputs from this update.”
While the Aegis combat system is a US Government- delivered product, the design and de-
velopment and integration with the
other sensors and weapons on board
LEFT: RAN personnel undergo Aegis training with US Navy officers aboard the USS Kidd
pabilities to be quickly integrated into the Aegis combat system as threats and responses evolve.
“To give you an example, I can pull a new load out from the system, with the continuous devel- opment going on every 3 or 4 weeks, and be able to build capabilities from that load, so I can run those activities while working on the integra- tion and continuously bring those together and to work from the most current baseline,” DePi- etro added. “And that’s been a really important change for us, it’s created significant amount of efficiency, and as far as build times for the com- bat system is concerned, things that would take days we can run the code and compile in hours.”
Lockheed Martin has also increased automat- ed testing by 200 per cent, which DePietro says has allowed the company to continue to develop
the product while ensuring it is realising the quality of the code it develops.
“This is in our Baseline 9 and Baseline 10 activities and this containerisation and approach we’re using for the soft- ware really allows us also to bring in partners to work with- in the code, in order to bring capabilities that they have, to be able to integrate new items into our combat systems capability,” he said.
“It’s a really good time for us, as we’re making this transi- tion to align with the US Navy’s integrated combat system vision of the future, but it has also allowed us to take Aegis from its traditional form factor and what we do on ships
the RAN’s destroyers – together with the adoption of Saab’s Australian in- terface – is all being done in Australia. The Saab Australian Interface is being developed to replace the current Aus- tralian Tactical Interface (ATI) on the DDGs to manage underwater warfare.
AGILE METHODOLOGY
Lockheed Martin’s further development of
system is moving away from the Baseline approach to one of agile development, which allows software to be designed, de- veloped, tested and provided to the fleet on a continual basis.
“Our activities over the last couple of years have been about moving to a new area called DevSecOps (Develop- ment, Security and Operations) and that allows us to carry out what we call Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery,” DePietro explained.
“And what that’s doing for us today is allowing us to tran- sition the way we build code, from a platform focus to a capability focus, and it’s also making us more efficient as we go through it.”
This methodology leverages the CSL but allows new ca-
with the US Marine Corps. Virtualised Aegis software of- fers the ability to employ capabilities to smaller computing footprints and in environments such as Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) events or operational planning centres.
“As we look at our Baselines in the legacy format and then as we move to the capability builds, what we’re trying to do is make sure we do more work in the core of the system, but then when it’s time for someone to have a unique capability we branch off of the core as we create those capabilities, and then we merge back to the core,” DePietro explained.
“With the processes we’ve put in place, we would prob- ably have done those merges once a quarter, or something like that. Now, because of the agile processes we’ve put in place and the evolvement of software, we can do those sorts of merges and pulls every three to four weeks.” ■
“LOCKHEED MARTIN AUSTRALIA WAS AWARDED A $33 MILLION DESIGN CONTRACT TO SUPPORT THE UPGRADE OF THE THREE HOBART-CLASS DESTROYERS”
today and apply it to programs we’ve been working for the US Army and the US Ma- rines and the demonstrations we’ve been doing across the Indo-Pacific – to show the capabilities of Aegis beyond just the ship platform, as an integrated combat system that can close the fire control loop.”
One of these demonstrations was an ‘Ae- gis Airborne’ exercise which used the Vir- tualised Aegis Weapons System (VAWS) aboard a fixed-wing aircraft in an exercise
the Aegis combat
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