Page 64 - Australian Defence Magazine March-April 2022

64 FROM THE SOURCE
MATTHEW JONES
MARCH-APRIL 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
“IT’S AN EXCITING TIME FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL TECHNOLOGY LIKE DIRECTED ENERGY SYSTEMS”
the Australian customer show interest – but only because it’s already being sold into the US or a European market first. It makes for a really difficult road.
I think the acquisition strategies that the Department currently follows in buying products off the global market really restricts the opportunity for Australian industry to develop technology that would both give the ADF a combat advantage and create export opportunities.
ADM: What is the latest news with the C4 EDGE program? The objectives of C4 EDGE were to demonstrate a sov- ereign C4 battlegroup capability to prove that Australian industry can work together to deliver an integrated solu-
tion, and to showcase what Australian industry in the C4 domain actually has to offer.
We covered a wide range of capabilities: dismounted soldier equipment, command and control applications, hardware, UGV integration, UAV range extension using radios to sov- ereign radio, sovereign waveform and sovereign encryption, not to mention the actual application environment to host the development of niche and tailored applications to support command and control or logistics, intelligence and more.
EOS delivered an end-to-end demonstration of the tech- nology demonstrator in December at Majura Field Firing Range, and followed that with a showcase of the broader range of capabilities that those companies had to offer.
While a number of the companies that participated in that demonstration are defence companies offering ma- ture technology solutions, we are actually able to leverage a range of adjacent industries, like mining, to bring world- leading autonomous applications and technologies. These are being deployed in the mining environment and devel- oped in Australia for mining use, and we are then bring- ing that across into the defence market to provide some additional breadth, but also a different view on how some of these technologies could actually be deployed. That’s re- sulted in a number of these companies, obviously, raising their profile in the defence market for the first time.
The C4 EDGE contract ran through to the conclusion of the demonstration and the showcase. All reports have been written up and supplied, and that’s now closed. We’re now
ABOVE: An image of EOS’ T2000 taken during the Land 400 Phase 3 risk mitigation activity
BELOW: EM Solutions Sovereign Australian Satellite Communication Facility
EOS
EOS