Page 32 - Australian Defence Magazine May-June 2020

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MAY/JUNE 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
The MC-55A has two pilots. The number of onboard mission operators has not been disclosed, although it’s re- portedly sufficient to handle a significant portion of any operation while airborne (the Israeli Air Force’s Eitam G550-based airborne early warning and control aircraft is understood to accommodate six operator consoles).
“The MC-55A flies at about 480 knots, so it gets on station pretty fast,” GPCAPT Lind said. “It can fly at up to 40,000ft giving its sensors really excellent perspective, and although it’s not capable of air-to-air refuelling it
FOC was scheduled for 2017 but has yet to be achieved. The facility is intended to ingest information from nu- merous Australian and allied imagery and SIGINT assets and combine it with strategic reference material from the Australian intelligence community to improve command-
ers’ situational awareness.
DGS-AUS was officially established as an RAAF unit in
January 2020 as part of the Information Warfare Director- ate under the Air Warfare Centre at RAAF Edinburgh.
can stay airborne for around 12 hours. “It’s also designed to fly hard because it’s acivilaircraft;it’sasignificantcapability.”
BIG DATA AND AI
Big data and machine learning would pro- vide the means to quickly identify value in the vast flow of incoming material, but these attributes needed to be employed in such a way that decisions were still made by humans “although some of our adversaries may not have those kinds of restrictions”.
“YOU NEED RESILIENCE ACROSS YOURPLATFORMSANDPEREGRINE HAS A NICE BALANCE OF RESILIENCE WITH SOME OF THE OPERATORS ON BOARD, SOME WORKING REMOTELY, WITH THE ABILITY TO TAP INTO OTHER INFORMATION THAT MIGHT BE RESIDENT ELSEWHERE.”
Incorporating personnel from Navy and Army into DGS-AUS or as air- borne or ground station Peregrine mission operators was “something that will happen” in development of the Joint Force, GPCAPT Lind stated.
The coordination role being played by the Joint Capabilities Group with Air Force Headquarters helped foster un- derstanding of Joint ISR requirements, data dissemination and storage as well as the policy implications. It was not just helpful, “it’s actually working very well”.
“It takes a lot of effort to build algo-
rithms that are actually robust. They
will be extremely helpful and we need to understand how to use them ethically and effectively,” GPCAPT Lind said.
“There’s an interim capability at DGS-AUS and as that is built up it will become key to how we actually use our Ar- tificial Intelligence algorithms into the future. We’re con- tinuing to grow that capability each and every year.”
Established at RAAF Edinburgh in 2014, DGS-AUS is staffed by air intelligence officers working alongside geospa- tial and SIGINT specialists, and reached IOC in early 2016.
ABOVE: There are only two Orions left flying in RAAF service with a blend of replacements on the horizon.
Meanwhile the ISR precinct at RAAF Edinburgh would provide more mobility for aircrew and ground crew and blur the distinc- tion between platforms – “whether you’re in the air or on the ground, whether you’re operating a sensor on a Pere-
grine one day or a Triton the next.
“Some of the paradigms that we’ve had previously are be-
ginning to change, it’s not an easy road but it’s something we need to do to provide more flexibility for our Joint Force so that we can make the effect that we need to make at the right time and at the right place.
“Previously we haven’t had the ability to do what we’ll be able to do in the future with that kind of inter-platform mo- bility to increase our operational effectiveness,” GPCAPT Lind concluded. ■