Page 32 - Australian Defence Magazine July-August 2022

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DEFENCE BUSINESS AIR 7003
JULY-AUGUST 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
A ROAD TO NOWHERE?
NIGEL PITTAWAY | MELBOURNE
An early victim of the previous government’s quest to find almost $10 billion of savings in the Defence budget was Project Air 7003 – the only pathway to the acquisition of an armed Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone.
TO FUND its $9.9 billion REDSPICE cyber security program, Defence had to find almost the same value of savings else- where and while the bulk of the funding came from money allocated to the now cancelled Attack-class submarine pro- gram – which will have to be reinvested in whatever subma- rine program follows – Air 7003 was axed.
The $1.3 billion Air 7003 project intended to acquire at least twelve General Atomics Aeronautics Systems (GA-ASI) MQ-9B SkyGuardian remotely piloted aircraft, but was pre- sumably selected for cancellation because the program had yet to reach the Gate 2 milestone and therefore seen as low hanging fruit. The program had been expected to go to gov- ernment for Gate 2 approval in the middle of this year.
To say that Defence – and Air Force in particular – was disappointed by the cancellation of the project after almost a decade of work is a significant understatement and, in the light of the ongoing success of unmanned systems in the war in Ukraine, the decision would seem ill-conceived. Af-
ter a decade or more in the making there are now no plans to acquire an armed unmanned aerial system (UAS) and presumably we must now wait until the release of the next Force Structure Plan in 2024 to see if one will be added.
While ADM understands the then-opposition promised to review the cancellation if it won office, the current De- fence Minister Richard Marles has yet to make any an- nouncements on the program and for the time being at least, Defence no longer has a clear mechanism for acquir- ing such a capability.
CANCELLATION BY STEALTH
Although rumours had been circulating for a couple of months prior to the axing of Air 7003, the news only be- came public in the end when a senior Defence bureaucrat answered questions in a Senate Estimates hearing in April.
Up until that time, ADM understands the industry team working towards delivering the MQ-9B capability – Team