Risk and reward

That may eventually include a ballistic missile defence capability.

AIR 6500 is in its earliest stages. Defence has a vision of what it wants to achieve and is now working out how it will get there. This won’t be simple or cheap.

Group Captain Barbara Courtney, director of aviation coordination and integrated air and missile defence, says the new system will be designed to give the greatest likelihood of detecting a threat, then providing a commander with a range of options for a response, all within the shortest possible time.

“The capability goal is that across the ADF, we would have a completely integrated system of systems that would allow us to bring information in to provide a single source of truth about our current battlespace picture,” she said.

That information would then be pushed back out to all the different battlespace elements, giving them the best available contemporary information to inform how they will respond.

“It will enable a commander to respond to a threat really rapidly. It will decrease the amount of time to go through the decision-making evolution,” she said.

Sounds straightforward? It’s far from it.

If it was simple, the US, with its vastly greater resources, would have come up with an exemplar which the ADF could adapt to Australian requirements.

The US has lots of the bits, including ballistic missile defence capabilities, but only in 2013 did it come up with a vision of what it would really like.

US Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense: Vision 2020 sees all US capabilities, including defensive, passive, offensive kinetic, non-kinetic (such as cyber warfare, directed energy and electronic attack) melded into a comprehensive joint and combined force capable of preventing an adversary from effectively employing any of its offensive air and missile weapons.

“At its core, IAMD is the integration of offensive and defensive operations against air-breathing and missile threats, meant to counter an enemy’s ability to degrade or disrupt our operations and projection of combat power in a contested environment,” says retired Air Vice Marshal John Blackburn of the air power thinktank, the Sir Richard Williams Foundation.

In a Williams Foundation study of IAMD, released in April, he said the US Vision 2020 was clear and concise and could provide a good narrative on which to develop an IAMD program for Australia.

Blackburn said there was an IAMD program identified in Australia’s 2016 Defence Integrated Investment Program (DIIP), which amounted to a list of proposed equipment and systems, not a vision of what IAMD was and how it would address the emerging threat.

“We need an IAMD narrative to provide the context or and focus four our IAMD program,” he said.

“It is apparent that the gap between the threat and the ADF’s IAMD capability is growing and is likely to be larger in a decade than it is now, despite the significant level of investment the government has committed to in the DIIP.”

For anyone outside the beltway, IAMD is at best a fuzzy concept.

Here’s a fictional scenario in which Boeing describes operation of Vigilare, the RAAF’s existing air battle management system on which IAMD would be built.

In a control room at RAAF Tindal, RAAF operators scan images of the airspace thousands of kilometres in each direction, along with all aircraft, civil and military.

“Overhead, a Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft identifies a potential hostile threat north of Australia. The tactical data information is displayed in near real-time on the console operator’s screens. With a click of the mouse and without a word spoken, commands appear on an encircling Super Hornet’s head-up display instructing the pilot to change course. The Super Hornet is now on target to engage the threat and prevent a potential strike on Australia,” Boeing says in a 2009 publication as Vigilare was being rolled out.
Looks impressive?

Add inputs from F-35, over-the horizon radar, P-8A Poseidon, air warfare destroyers, satellite surveillance, coalition sources, intelligence, army air defence radar plus civil radar, fuse all the relevant data in near real time, present to a commander and then push it back out to warfighters and anyone else, such as diplomats, who might need it, all on secure networks with multiple redundancy and well-defended against intrusion and cyber-attack.

That just hints at the complexity of the ambitions of IAMD.

Vigilare, for which Boeing was prime contractor, was launched in 1998 and reached final operational capability in March 2013.

It wasn’t achieved without pain. It was initially planned that final delivery of Vigilare, replacing the legacy Warden system, would be December 2007.

With it nowhere in sight, Vigilare was an early addition to the then new “projects of concern” list in 2008.

Group Captain Courtney said AIR 6500 had just gone to its first senior defence committee milestone.

“We call that Gate Zero. That took place in February and that was really to introduce the idea of what this project will be and how we are planning to move forward,” she told Australian Aviation.

First time to government – First Pass – is scheduled for around the end of 2018.

“We just want to make sure that we can produce a really coherent strategy for government, particularly with our strategy for how we might progress this project,” she said.

The fundamental aspiration is spelled out in the 2016 Defence White Paper which says the threat of intercontinental ballistic missile attack on Australia is low but the quality and quantity of cruise, short and medium range ballistic missile forces in the Indo-Pacific is rising and relevant technologies are spreading.

By 2035 more countries are likely to have acquired missile technology.

“To respond to these developments, we must increasingly develop capabilities which can protect our forces when they are deployed across large geographic areas, particularly in air and missile defence and anti-submarine warfare and better link the ADF’s individual capabilities to each other,” DWP says.

The Williams Foundation report goes further into the emerging threats and there’s a lot.

They include Chinese and North Korean ICBMs, air-breathing threats, including conventional aircraft, cruise missiles, unmanned aircraft systems, long range rockets, artillery and mortars. These could use a range of advanced capabilities such as stealth, electronic attack, manoeuvring re-entry vehicles, decoys and advanced terminal seekers with precision targeting.

The US IAMD vision says never has the US faced a more complex or comprehensive global challenge in this area and forecasts for 2020 and beyond are no more optimistic.

“….a dire and growing air and missile threat to the United States and its interests around world. Success in negating it will take no less than a bold holistic reimagining of America’s IAMD,” it says.

DIIP 2016 says the ADF’s existing air defence systems will be upgraded, including command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) systems and sensors.

“Investment in C4I will provide the foundation for an enhanced integrated air and missile defence system for the ADF, ensuring key C4I systems are able to fuse and share air and space surveillance information effectively to enhance the accuracy and speed of ADF systems’ response to air and missile threats,” it says.

“The ADF’s enhanced integrated air and missile defence C4I architecture will have the flexibility for further enhancement to handle more complex threats that may emerge in future.”

DIIP cites a program cost of $2-3 billion over the period 2018-30. Vigilare is regarded as pretty much state-of-the-art, fusing data from a range of inputs, including over-the-horizon radar, civil and military radars, RAAF aircraft, space and coalition networks into Defence’s “recognised air picture” right cross Australia’s area of interest, from the mid-Indian Ocean across to the western Pacific.

AIR 6500 plans to take that a whole lot further, creating a fully integrated system across the three services, fully exploiting new fifth generation capabilities such as those of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

“It will do what Vigilare does right now but we are very interested in making sure we can have the most contemporarily advanced radars or sensors so we can respond more quickly to an emerging threat environment,” Courtney said.

“This project replaces a number of separate projects which were over time going to replace the radios, the radars, the fixed capability and the mobile capability. Put this all together and that gives you this project.”

Courtney said the ADF was very happy with Vigilare. A priority will be to ensure integration of AIR 6500 is achieved without interrupting day-to-day operations.

AIR 6500 is being planned in two phases – upgrading or replacing the fixed and forward deployable elements of the air battle management system, then introducing a RAAF medium range ground-based air missile defence capability.

The missile capability will complement the proposed new short-range ground-based air missile defence capability for the Army’s 16th Air Land Regiment under the $2 billion Project LAND 19 Phase 7B.

In April, Raytheon Australia was chosen as prime systems integrator for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), in use in the US and six other nations.

Originally this was the Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, originally developed for the Norwegian Air Force by Raytheon and Norwegian firm Kongsberg.

NASAMS can use different sensors and missiles. The baseline missile is the familiar AIM-120 AMRAAM, though it can also launch AIM-9X and ESSM, all already in the ADF inventory. Raytheon is now assessing integration of the Australian CEA radar, in place of the US Sentinel, and use of the new Hawkei vehicle as a launch platform.

Courtney said initial operating capability (IOC) for the mobile elements of AIR 6500 was planned for 2022-23 and fixed elements for 2025-26. IOC for the new medium range missile capability is planned for 2025-26 and full operational capability (FOC) in 2029-30.

She said the ultimate vision was to integrate as much of the new ADF capability as possible and desirably everything.

But, she said, as Vigilare demonstrated, integration is always complex.

“So you need to prioritise what you are going to integrate in what order to make sure that you are delivering the most appropriate capability in the quickest time possible,” she said.

But before that, there’s a lot of work.

Already Defence has canvassed the views of the Defence Science and Technology Group, the Williams Foundation, as well as defence companies.

Defence has already reached out to industry, with study contracts awarded to the big four, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

Courtney said it was probably a fair assessment that Defence was embarking on developing the most complex command and control system Australia had ever attempted.

She said Defence had conducted a fair amount of discovery over the last four years to understand the nature of the challenge.

“We have our vision, we know where we want to end up and we have access to excellent representatives of industry, great thinkers in thinktanks and also tremendous leadership to help us understand how we move this forward to create the best result,” she said.

With the project in infancy, she’s not about to indicate what capabilities could be purchased a decade hence.

“Open system architecture for us would be very helpful because what we need to have is a vendor agnostic C4I solution for the integrated air missile defence because our capabilities come from a range of sources,” she said.

“That is for industry to help us understand – how do you integrate most effectively, most completely when you haven’t bought every single element from the single vendor.”

Courtney says a number of vendors might work together but there needed to be an over-arching element driving the acquisition.
“That’s for us to determine how do you arrange that so you have responsibility for delivery of the overall system vesting in one organisation. That could be the Commonwealth,” she said.

“Then how do you then arrange to remainder of the elements to bring them together. The timelines won’t be serial. They may be concurrent.

We need to have a really well understood requirements and a well understood concept of operations to make sure we are buying something for the right reasons and it will allow us to work the way we want to work, particularly as we start to really understand the capability of the platforms.”

Kenneth Todorov, retired US Air Force general and former deputy director of the US Missile Defence Agency, says Australia is taking a much better approach to IAMD than the US.

“Frankly the US has some battle scars from its experience. As I look at Australia and how they are going about it, I am actually very jealous of the approach h that is being taken here,” he told Australian Aviation at the Avalon Airshow.

He’s now director of global air and missile defence for Northrop Grumman and also a former director of the US Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organisation (JIAMDO), with firsthand experience of the US’ IAMD challenge.

He said each of the US services had acquired air and missile defence systems which met their own needs.

“They have each purchased and procured and have acquisition processes that very much take care of their own problem but don’t work very well together. They weren’t designed to work together,” he said.

“That was why JIAMDO was stood up.

“The integration challenge is really something we didn’t do smartly. We bought all the stuff and then said Oh Gosh, we now have to make it work together.”

Todorov said the difference in Australia was a recognition that this needed to be joint force by design.

“Regardless of which company, or companies because it will be more than one, is selected to help, first let’s get the architecture right,” he said.

“There are plenty of opportunities for companies in Australia to participate. This is not by any means a US-only solution. Local content will be very much in the mix.”

Australia has long pondered acquisition of a ballistic missile defence capability. That was again canvassed following recent missile tests by North Korea, which certainly aspires to an ICBM capability which could reach the US or Australia.

Should Australia decide to go for an ABM capability, the most straight forward approach would be by way of the Navy’s three new Hobart-class air warfare destroyers. They would require an upgrade of the Aegis combat system to Baseline-9, allowing launch of the SM-3 missile.

But Todorov says the IAMD backbone needs to be in place long before acquiring capabilities to shoot down other people’s missiles.
“That command and control, that architecture you have got to get right first. Then you can worry about the sexy stuff, the shooters, the effectors, even some of the sensors,” he said.

Todorov says the threat from ballistic and air-breathing weapons was maturing in three areas.

There are more and more of them, they are relatively cheap and some producers will sell to anyone with the cash.

Range is improving as is sophistication, with better countermeasures, designed to make missiles more difficult to detect, track or intercept.

There’s growing diversity.

“Five years ago I wasn’t talking about the hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) threat. Today’s it’s front and centre on my radar,” he said.
“Fast forward five years from now there could be new things. We can’t design and procure a system and have it static. It has to be living and breathing.”

The HGV is an emerging capability, with the US, China and Russia all seeking to develop a viable weapon. Launched from an ICBM, HGVs don’t follow a relatively predictable ballistic trajectory but, in effect, glide at speeds of up to Mach 10. That makes them much less vulnerable to anti-ballistic missiles.

The US Prompt Global Strike system aspires to deliver a precision conventional strike anywhere on earth within an hour. China’s experimental DF-ZF could conceivably deliver a nuclear weapon and penetrate the layered defences of a US carrier battle group.

Todorov said IAMD brought a vitally important defensive capability but that was only part of the equation.

“There is an element here of an offence-defence mix. Your adversary may take a shot. He may get the first shot off,” he said.

“An IAMD capability is designed to keep the first, second, third shot at bay until you can react. IAMD won’t win you a war or a conflict but you can certainly lose without it.”

Neither is IAMD necessarily about shooting something down. Passive defence is much cheaper.

“If you can get an enemy not to shoot at all, that’s missile defence as well,” he said.

Todorov said Australia wasn’t starting from scratch and there were existing elements, including Vigilare, which could be blended into future capability.

“We can take existing capabilities and mould them into a revolutionary architecture that continues to grow,” he said.