Get on With It: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Endless Experimentation

Last week Richard Marles and Pat Conroy trumpeted Exercise Autonomous Warrior 2024 as “AUKUS Pillar II in action’.

Mr Marles told us that this year’s “Exercise Autonomous Warrior is an exciting and tangible demonstration of progress being made under AUKUS Pillar II”.

Delivery minister Pat Conroy told us the exercise “stands to advance the development of cutting-edge maritime capabilities that provide strategic advantage”. He added that “This is another example of the ingenuity of Australia’s companies and innovators to partner with Defence and reflects the Albanese Government’s commitment to investing in a future made in Australia”.

The ministers told us that “hundreds of uniformed personnel and industry participants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have operated 30 asymmetric capabilities from across the three countries”.

Media reported that “Japan has observed secretive exercises on the NSW south coast involving the latest autonomous maritime technology from the three AUKUS partners”. We even heard that “The ABC can reveal several Japanese officials have also attended the event as “observers” ahead of a likely invitation for the nation to formally participate in the event next time”.

Exciting stuff.  Unless you bothered to check the facts and history behind this set of hyper-inflated assertions.

Autonomous Warrior predates AUKUS and has simply been rebranded as an AUKUS beast.  It’s been overpromising and underdelivering since 2018, with the same hype about cutting edge technology and international cooperation repeated every year.

According to themselves and the hapless Defence portfolio ministers they brief, Australia’s Defence bureaucrats and their Navy colleagues have been on the cusp of adopting uncrewed surface, air and sub-surface systems every year since 2018.

And some of the same unfortunate, capable but over-trusting Australian defence companies have participated each year hoping that the demo days and trials in Jervis Bay might lead to contracts and acquisition of their technologies by our military.  They have been disappointed.

Others have realised Autonomous Warrior is a pea and thimble game that distracts and deceives. They have shifted their efforts to selling to militaries overseas who want real world capabilities as fast as they can get them.

Here’s the 2018 defence media release: “The Future of Unmanned Operations Demonstrated at Autonomous Warrior 2018”.

“Autonomous systems will continue to increase in prevalence for military applications and Australia is a leader in developing unmanned systems”, said then Minister Christopher Pyne.

“Industry, defence science organisations and militaries from five countries are examining air, land, sea and cyber systems and their potential for use in complex and contested environments”.

“(W)e have up to 500 people from more than 40 companies showcasing their latest capabilities and demonstrating their application through real-world scenarios”.

“Autonomous systems will be fully integrated in our future fleet and Autonomous Warrior 2018 is an opportunity to inform our future projects that will deliver enduring capability”.

The May 2022 media release from Autonomous Warrior 2022 echoes these sentiments, telling us Jervis Bay “will be the scene of a simulated, next-generation naval battlespace”. Uncrewed, robotic and autonomous systems were being tested and evaluated by “approximately 300 personnel from 40 organisations across three countries – Australia, the United Kingdom and the US”.

The exercise was to “evaluate cutting edge technologies to help us respond to those challenges”.

Ah. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The ugly truth around this eight year old initiative is that it is a perpetual demonstration machine that gives false hope to two key stakeholders. The first are Australian companies who are putting their talent and capital into developing warfighting systems they know Australia needs. And the others are Australian taxpayers who are footing the bill for a sham initiative that gives the impression Defence is remotely interested in acquiring these systems anytime soon from Australian companies.

These cut and paste press releases are eaten up by an uncritical media that fails to use Google Search to test the breathless assertions put out by various ministers the Russell Hill bureaucrats have served this nonsense up to, year after year.

It’s not progress to have had Ocius’ Bluebottle uncrewed surface vessel demonstrated since 2018 ­– and which has achieved real operational outcomes in border protection – still not have a production contract from Defence.

It’s not success to have had DroneShield and DefendTex at the exercise back in 2018 only to have them still not equipping Australia’s military, even as their products make a difference on the battlefield in Ukraine and are in service with European militaries like the UK Army.

And it’s not progress to have seen the power of the long range Speartooth unmanned sub in this and previous Autonomous Warrior exercises and failed to give it a contract even a fraction of the value of Anduril’s lavishly funded and praised Ghost Shark.

One reason Autonomous Warrior is a failure is that Defence has no budget to turn any technology demonstrations there into acquisition programs.  AUKUS Pillar II doesn’t change that. AUKUS’s Pillar I subs program has a budget of up to $368 billion over decades, but Pillar II is the orphaned, penniless brother. Pillar II has no line budget and has to rely on the kindness of strangers – people in Defence with budgets for other things who feel enthused or sympathetic towards specific Pillar II initiatives.  So far, that kindness has not been on display.

The other reason is related to this.  Uncrewed systems are simply not a priority in Defence’s $330bn “Integrated Investment Program” and neither is Australian industry unless it’s a local subsidiary of a big foreign prime. And the systems on display for years now at Autonomous Warrior don’t fit this picture – they are mainly from Australia’s medium and small companies.

Two poster child projects are funded: Anduril’s Ghost Shark and Boeing’s Ghost Bat.  This allows Defence to dismiss critics by rolling them out when anyone mentions autonomy. Neither has yet delivered tangible capability to our military. Moreover, if and when they are delivered, they will be complex, multi-million  dollar systems, not disposable and attritable systems that can be used, lost and replaced at scale.

Aside from Boeing and Anduril’s projects, real money for anything else is in the notoriously unreliable ‘out years’ of the Defence plan, meaning it’s at the mercy of cost overruns and budget pressures in things like the big frigate and sub programs, and it’s subject to the whims of future military chiefs, Defence bureaucrats, prime ministers and treasurers.

What gets funded is what gets done.  And no matter how successful the systems Australian companies have demonstrated on, under and over the waters of Jervis Bay have been, uncrewed systems remain unfunded and unloved by our military and its bureaucratic supporters in any way that matters to our security this decade.

Something that keeps delivering year on year, though, is a slightly tweaked version of that 2018 media release, often from a new minister, assuring us all that Defence is right there on the cutting edge, poised for a revolution, together with our closest of allies.

As Tanya Munro, our Chief Defence Scientist, put it so well back in June 2022, “We have long recognised in Defence that we need to transition innovative concepts into capability more quickly”.

I’m already looking forward to seeing those words rolled out again in 2025.

This article was published on Strategic Analysis Australia.