On Eagles’s Wings

But that interim delivery meant only that Boeing had provided the Wedgetails to the RAAF for familiarisation training, with the two aircraft remaining Boeing owned and operating under the US civil register with a Boeing pilot in command and engineer on all RAAF training flights.

So May 5’s official handover of the first two aircraft was in fact a momentous event, signalling a whole new capability for the RAAF. For the first time Australia has its own organic airborne early warning & control aircraft, giving it air battle detection and management capabilities that will act as dramatic force multipliers, whether being used in the defence of Australia or supporting coalition operations overseas.

The Wedgetail, in conjunction with the Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network (JORN) and the soon to be operational Vigilare command and control network, will give the ADF game-changing surveillance and coordination abilities. This is allowing the long held vision of network centric warfare to be realised – a system of systems approach where individual platform capabilities matter less than the performance of the system as whole, and where the challenge will be not so much a lack of information, but managing too much, and who needs what and when.

Instructively, all three of those key elements of the RAAF’s surveillance and control abilities – JORN, Vigilare and Wedgetail – have been ambitious, technically challenging developmental programs that have run considerably later than planned. The RAAF’s ambitious networked vision is being realised, but at a considerable cost in both time and money.

Wedgetail, like JORN and Vigilare, highlights neatly a core issue at the heart of almost every defence acquisition – there is invariably a premium to pay for the capability improvements that leading edge, advanced but risky technologies offer compared with buying off-the-shelf.

Those advances in technology have, to use the economic parlance, an ‘opportunity cost’.

In the longer run you should get a better, perhaps significantly so, capability from a project that involves developmental and technological risk, than buying off-the-shelf. But history shows the ‘cost’ of that better capability is greater expense and longer timeframes before service entry.

Still, there’s little doubt that in the Wedgetail’s case that was a ‘cost’ worth paying, as there was no viable off-the-shelf alternative, and while the aircraft are around 40 months late, Australia is not out of pocket, as the $3. 9 billion program was covered by a fixed price contract. Indeed, Australia is getting its six Wedgetails for a bargain, as Boeing has taken a $1. 8 billion or so haircut on the program in extra development expenses, all paid for out of its own pocket.

Certainly Boeing officials have subsequently said they would never again sign a fixed price contract for what was effectively a developmental program.

But it is interesting to remember that Defence did have a risk reduction process in place before the Wedgetail’s selection, with the DMO funding Initial Design Activity contracts covering technical design reviews of the three original contenders for the Air 5077 AEW&C program (as well as Boeing the other contenders were Lockheed Martin marrying the C-130J airframe with the E-2C Hawkeye’s radar and systems, and Raytheon offering an A310 platform with the radar from Israel’s Phalcon AEW&C aircraft).

And so despite the best will in the world, Boeing’s undoubted AEW&C experience, and the addressing of risk through the Initial Design Activity process, nobody foresaw just how late and over budget the Wedgetail would run. For nearly four years Australia has been without the AEW&C capability it had contracted for, and Boeing’s project management reputation has been tarnished, and its bottom line hit.

And even today, with the first aircraft delivered, the program remains high on Defence Material Minister Greg Combet’s ‘projects of concern’ list, and work is continuing to integrate the ESM (electronic support measures suite), so that Wedgetails won’t be delivered in a final configuration until later this year. Indeed, Combet told the May 5 delivery ceremony that “hurdles” remain to be overcome.

Still, from the dark days of 2006 when Boeing first revealed that technical problems would cause considerable delays, many hurdles with the Wedgetail program have been overcome, and the aircraft looks to be very close to delivering on its much vaunted capabilities.

For Boeing the lessons of Wedgetail have come at great expense, but for Australia, if only because our strategic environment has remained so benign over the last few years, it will have been worth the wait.