Page 132 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

132 AIRPOWER
NOVEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
“It’s a distributed lab. It’s secure, so we can not only transfer technology from the US to Australia and have Northrop Grumman Australia engineers work and modify the software but it’s also distributed around Australia. So of our 22 Air 6500 Australian SMEs, 12 Australian SMEs will be participating directly in our CEP2 risk reduction activity and will be connected into our Parallax Labs.”
ABOVE: Air 6500 will connect all platforms and sensors across all warfighting domains into a single interface.
allowed a Lockheed Martin PAC-3 missile to intercept a surrogate cruise missile. Now that both companies have been down-selected for the Australian program, the test can perhaps be seen as a preview of what Air 6500 will deliver to the ADF.
“Flight Test Six really demonstrated the ability to connect multiple disparate systems that typically would have been in a silo,” Harbison explained. “We leveraged the Marine Corps radar and the F-35 as sensors on the network within the ar- chitecture and created a single integrated operations picture.
“That allowed the user to take action and shoot down the target using a missile that is normally connected only to the Patriot radar. So that was a great demonstration. It really showed the capability of the architecture that we will then add on to for the purposes of Air 6500.”
Flight Test Six could also be a preview of Air 6502, previ- ously referred to as Air 6500 Phase 2, which is the ADF’s future medium range ground-based air defence system. However, given the ‘best-of-breed’ requirement handed down by the Commonwealth, the down-select for Air 6500 does not necessarily indicate which companies will be suc- cessful for 6502.
“The architecture gives tremendous choices to coun- tries to determine what is the best for their capability,” Harbison said.
The bid for Air 6500 comes at an interesting time for NGA. Following her appointment as General Manager Asia
The technology being transferred to Australia derives from what Zeitz refers to as the ‘architecture’ that NGA is using for its bid for Air 6500: the US Army’s Integrated Air Missile Defence Battle Com- mand System, which is at the core of the US Army’s next- generation air and missile defence capability. In other words, another ‘all sensor, best
“AIR 6500 IS THE CORNERSTONE OF THE INTEGRATED AIR AND MISSILE DEFENCE CAPABILITY”
shooter’ model.
“The US Army approved Milestone C, which was very ex-
citing, at the beginning of 2020 which provides the ability to move forward with low grade initial production,” Chris- tine Harbison, VP and GM Combat Systems and Mission Readiness for Northrop Grumman in the US, said. “We’re about to enter into the Army’s Integrated Operational Test- ing and Evaluation.
“We will then go to producing and fielding the systems. The architecture is really the basis for our offering for Air 6500 and leverages a lot of what the US Army is doing.”
Recently, Northrop Grumman undertook a flight test that connected a US Marine Corps radar with sensors on- board an F-35 to create a common operating picture, which
LOCKHEED MARTIN AUSTRALIA