Page 41 - Australian Defence Magazine Feb-Mar 21

FEBRUARY – MARCH 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
BORDER PROTECTION UNMANNED 41
baseline maritime and surveillance budget, rather than as a separate funding measure.
“We’re scouting with our colleagues in Defence all sorts of new technology and whether that’s going to require the additional capital investment of a billion dollars or more, or less, is a function of that survey of technology,” Pezullo told Senate Estimates. “If you can surveil the ocean more broadly and cheaply using other technologies, it will be cheaper.”
Whether or for how long the ABF will extend its decade-long $100 million-a-year contract with Cobham Aviation Services for aerial border surveillance is still not known. The contract, known as Project Sentinel, expires at the end of 2021.
This turnkey operation deploys 10 modified DASH 8 tur- boprop aircraft flying 15,000 hours and 2,500 missions per year, providing all-weather, day and night coverage, and is an obvious candidate for a move in whole or in part to un- manned systems.
THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
Cobham and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems last year extended their teaming agreement by five years fol- lowing the selection of the General Atomics MQ-9B Sky- Guardian as the ADF’s first armed medium-altitude long- endurance RPAS.
Its MQ-9B SeaGuardian variant, deploying a specialised maritime radar and an Automatic Identification System (AIS) along with other optional payloads, is a candidate for the FMSC program.
Brad Yelland, Chief Technology Officer of BAE Systems Australia, was heavily involved in operational analysis preceding the Commonwealth’s decision to acquire the MQ-4C Triton high altitude long endurance (HALE) Un- manned Aircraft System (UAS), assessing mixes of manned and unmanned systems for maritime border surveillance and RAN intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements.
“As soon as you go unmanned, what you’re really trying to achieve is reduction in manpower,” Yelland commented. “There’s a tradeoff between situations where you use some- thing that is significantly long-range, or smaller, cheaper autonomous air vehicles for surveillance but have to wear the cost of setting up some sort of infrastructure in remote locations to support them.
“That’s why the oil and gas industries are looking to in- crease the level of autonomy in their systems to decrease the level of manpower. To understand the benefits and challenge you really need to go through a proper operation- al analysis and a lifecycle cost analysis.”
ABOVE: Sea Hunter is part the of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program, in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which is working to fully test the capabilities of the vessel and several innovative payloads with the goal of transitioning the technology to US Navy operational use..
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