Page 10 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

Team Australia’s Guided Weapons Enterprise
Aresilient Australia is a secure Australia, founded in sovereign capability and self-reliance. The path for- ward must reflect two key considerations: What can we do today to support the future need? And what
does a future focused strategy look like for establishing a strong local supply chain to support that capability and its evolution?
We believe that a sovereign guided weapons capability will lever- age the latest technology from Australia and our allies to enable scal- ing up a local supply chain to meet the weapons requirements of the joint force to defence against the current and future threat. Australia cannot afford to rely on old ways of managing those supply chains if they are going to be responsive and resilient. ‘Just-in-time’ deliver- ies from distant overseas suppliers will not alone provide surety or adequately support Australia in a modern, fast-paced conflict if that supply is easily interrupted.
What we know now is that the current threat is complex, it’s in our region and it is evolving rapidly. In his 2021 annual threat assess- ment, Director General ASIO Mike Burgess said “to detect and defeat our adversaries, we have to do things they think are impossible”. To solve the impossible requires a sophisticated solution to a problem yet to be defined. The characteristics of the threat demands faced by Australia’s defence industry, and indeed, the global security commu- nity grow daily. Our challenge is to architect a systems eco-system
so advanced that we enable at its core, the ability for the solution to evolve faster than the emergent threat.
We also know that to achieve the enduring sovereign guided weapons enterprise ambition we must take a holistic approach to the whole of guided weapons and explosive ordinance life cycle and value chain. We know there are a multitude of strategic partnerships across Primes and small to medium sized businesses here in Australia that when brought together as an enterprise, can seek to define the im- possible problem and marry it to a sovereign solution. Helping shape the ‘art of the possible’ is the introduction of the AUKUS agreement in September, which sets the stage now for a new level of transfor- mational tripartite national security cooperation and tech transfer between the USA, UK and Australia.
A future focused strategy, we call it the ‘Kill Chain to Supply Chain’ strategy, is required to look to the future with clear focus, and back-cast to the present to determine the most compelling path forward. The primary risk of not adopting a forward looking strategy now, especially in guided weapons, nuclear-submarines, Integrated Air and Missile Defence systems and sovereign military space capability is the speed
at which the threat is evolving. That is to say, the establishment of
a supply chain and manufacturing capability based on today’s need definition will surely not be able to answer, scale and adapt to the rapidly evolving threat expectations of 2030 and beyond, and could be doomed to be operationally and technologically redundant – it will be about leveraging the firm foundations of our existing manufacturing capabilities and adapting and evolving this capability with a focus on our future guided weapons and ‘kill chain’ imperatives.