Page 42 - Australian Defence Magazine February 2022

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GUIDED WEAPONS
FEBRUARY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
These include Day & Zimmermann, Austal, Saab, TAE Aerospace, L3Harris, Quickstep, Moog Australia, and Elbit Australia.
LEFT: A Hellfire air-to-surface missile is loaded on a Tiger ARH aboard HMAS Canberra during Regional Presence Deployment 2020.
BELOW: An RAAF P-8A Poseidon conducts a training sortie over the Southern Ocean with Harpoon missiles attached.
Australia already possessed local capability in the produc- tion of missile bodies, rocket motors, propellants, and ex- plosive ordnance, and the SMA intended investing in a new common-user facility - whose location had not yet been de- cided - in which to manufacture customer-selected foreign missiles under license, using its indigenous supply chain.
“And if you look at what EOS does in guidance and control for weapons stations and space programs, all the technology is there. I don’t see anything that we don’t have here that can’t be developed and ensure SMA will have its first sovereign-designed and Australian-built missile going through T&E in five to seven or eight years and in production within ten,” McDowell said.
“That would probably be a non-platform-specific weapon such as an anti-tank missile or a short-range or medium- range air defence missile that was not necessarily linked or tied to one particu- lar system or one particular platform, al-
SOVEREIGN MISSILE ALLIANCE
So far as the Sovereign Missile Alliance (SMA) is concerned, Nova Systems Chief Executive Jim McDowell has stressed that the Joint Venture already boasts all the smart capabilities required to successfully operate the future enterprise on its own.
“The JV is not trying to gather capabilities from the four corners of the earth by start- ing up a portal, it’s actually setting up an entity with the shareholders being two Aus- tralian companies of scale,” he told ADM.
“IN THE SHORT-TERM AND INTO THE MEDIUM-TERM I EXPECT THAT OUR FOCUS WILL BE ON EXPANDING THE SKILLS AND CAPABILITIES THAT WE ALREADY POSSESS, SO DOING MORE OF WHAT WE ALREADY CAN DO”
though often bought in large numbers. “In short-range air defence you’d prob- ably get enough volume to be self-sustain- ing. But if we were to also supply a major ally like the UK you’ve suddenly got an extremely strong value-for-money revenue
system,” McDowell noted.
While IP transfer accelerated techni-
cal capability, “the problem is it will come with the usual US ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) strings at- tached – where you can possibly use it,
“The partners are absolutely complemen-
tary. EOS are a vertical systems integration
business in weapons systems and space;
Nova are a professional services business
that brings the ability to test, evaluate, certify and qualify.
how you can use it, and so on,” he added.
“So, at some point you’ve got to begin designing and
manufacturing your own missiles to meet your own spe- cific sovereign requirements. Norway has done this and so has Sweden and Singapore – countries with much smaller defence economies than us have vibrant guided weapons ecosystems, and there’s no reason why we can’t do that now there’s the political will and investment.” ■
“The big guys at the top of the Australian defence archi- tecture are all US or European-owned, then you’ve got EOS and Nova in the middle with daylight between us and the next truly Australian business, so we think that gives us sufficient off-balance sheet and human resource strength to take on the sovereign missile venture from start to finish.”
With a collective workforce of more than 1,000 local em- ployees and a domestic supply chain of more than 600 SMEs, the SMA had the resources, funding and breadth of capabili- ties, products and technologies to uniquely provide the criti- cal mass required to initiate the Enterprise, McDowell stated.
This would involve delivering three phases of capability, he explained.
“The first is the building up of existing missile stockpiles to increase capability both in numbers and in the capacity to support, manage, maintain and dispose of that existing fleet of missiles,” he noted.
“The second is a growing ability to locally manufacture and assemble existing missile fleets, and the third is to es- tablish and start to develop – and eventually deliver – a new family of sovereign Australian technologies in the guided weapons area.”
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