$800 million developing ‘Ghost Bat’, which was meant to be ‘Australia’s first locally designed combat aircraft in 50 years’, turns out to now be being spent on a platform that will carry sensors instead of weapons.  

This is an own goal, with a firehose of public money spent on something that won’t deliver what we wanted.

What went wrong and what can be done differently?  Well, step number one is to have learned from a previous dead-end effort to get world beating Australian technology into service – the sad tale of the ALR 2002B radar warning receiver the Australian arm of BAE developed to put on RAAF Hornets in the early 2000s.

After spending $millions on BAE developing this warning receiver, Defence canned it in favour of a US warning receiver made by a US competitor – Raytheon – that the US was fitting to its own Hornets.  The reason given at the time was that ‘integration issues’ meant that the Australian product couldn’t be put on the Hornet in time to keep to the aircraft’s upgrade schedule.

Now, with Ghost Bat turning from a fearsome armed unmanned combat aircraft into an interesting additional way of gathering sensor data, we hear a similar thing: integrating weapons into the platform is too difficult now that Boeing isn’t one of the US Air Force’s main partners for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program. 

That seems to mean that if Australia does eventually want to put weapons onto Ghost Bat, the RAAF will have to foot the bill to pay for the complicated, slow and expensive work to integrate whatever weapons they choose not just onto the Ghost Bat but between the Ghost Bat, the F-35s it flies with and the larger command and control system these and other systems use.

This integration issue was a primary reason that Australia’s maritime strike desires for the F-35 were delayed for over a decade, with the obvious maritime strike missile – JASSM – not being integrated into the F-35 until the US military saw the need.  Until then, just like the ALR 2002B and now the Ghost Bat, an Australian need just didn’t make it up the queue without truckloads of Aussie cash to US integrators.

The binding constraint here is not the lack of Australian – or other non-US – great technology and solutions.  The real culprit is the cult of integration.

There is no doubt that being able to draw on the feeds of multiple dispersed sensors, from whatever platforms and sources; combine this information with knowledge of available weapons and decide which is best placed to do which particular task is a fine thing.  And the power of fused data gives insights that blobs of separate information can’t.  So a level of integration, particularly when it comes to fiendishly expensive and complex major systems like F-35s, Aegis combat systems on our warships and Wedgetail AEW&C aircraft makes sense, as does a level of interoperability with our big US ally. 

It just shouldn’t be the One Ring to Rule them all – but the Australian Defence organisation has an unhealthy tendency to embrace senior edicts and then be unable think beyond them. That’s what’s happening here.

Integration is not the path to future perfection.  It is just a particular way of solving problems and getting advantage.  In some circumstances it may cause nasty own goals and be a problem in itself (as we see with cyber security troubles from over-integration into single systems like Microsoft’s, for example).  Deciding what needs to be integrated with what – and when a much more austere and ruthless approach to integration might have value is essential.

The cult is core Defence policy

The cult of integration is now a cardinal plank in the Australian Defence Force’s Integrated Investment Plan and latest National Defence Strategy, which tells us that after more than two decades of force design and implementation centred on integration, the ADF Is not yet an ‘Integrated Force’ and must become even more obsessed with this goal.

Unfortunately, this means doubling down on the path of deep integration of everything with everything, and it leads to a force design that is centred on US systems and weapons to the exclusion of other solutions. It’s hard to believe Defence could find a way to go further down this rabbit hole, because prior to the NDS, Defence had already elevated its goal of integration nirvana from seeking ‘interoperability’ with the US military to wanting platforms and systems that are ‘interchangeable’ with the US ie. forces that can just plug in to the bigger US systems – ideally because they are US systems.

The result is that any novel solutions developed by Australian companies – even Australian arms of companies like BAE and Boeing – will be likely to be orphans left outside the US circle of love that is integration into US military use.  And that hurdle will make it uneconomic for Australia to pay to have them integrated for our own military’s use. 

That leaves our military to be a ‘fast follower’ of the US choosing from solutions and systems that the US has decided on for its own needs.  In the uncrewed surface vessel space this is what is happening with the Australian Navy’s ‘Large Optionally Crewed Vessels’, which will enter service only once we can buy vessels the US Navy is operating at some future date.  This could make sense if the US military wasn’t itself a slow follower of change in the world of warfare, struggling to comprehend the curve of developments in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, let alone counter the ‘pacing threat’ of the Chinese military.

It also means that we are driving diversity out of the joint military capabilities of the US and Australia, with Australia destined to be a minor supplement to the US bringing US systems in tiny additional numbers in the event of war. That’s a deep mistake, because the world of drone warfare is all about volume and diversity, not small numbers of exquisite systems that seek to do what crewed platforms do.

And our local industrial base is destined to be a supplier of inputs to larger US primes (through things like Defence’s Global Supply Chain Initiative) and, perhaps, a place where US-designed systems are produced (as we see with the long-awaited Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordinance Enterprise that is to start with assembling a short range Lockheed Martin land missile GMLRS – here in Australia).

There are obvious commercial interests from big US companies like Lockheed and Raytheon that combine with the cult of integration.  As with the Hornet radar warning receiver, Raytheon would much prefer to sell the US and Australian militaries its own product than integrate an Aussie version.  Lockheed is happier charging Australia to set up a new production line for its GMLRS missile than hearing about an Australian-developed missile being quite good and eating some of their lunch.  But the main culprit is the Defence concept of integration.  The companies don’t have to play any commercial cards if Russell HQ is doing the work to keep competitors out for them.

What are we missing out on by remaining in the cult?

We’re missing out on making a potential adversary’s life very complicated and unhappy, and instead letting them plan around facing and defeating a much smaller range of weapons and systems than we and our allies could otherwise bring to the party.  The Chinese, for example, don’t have to worry about developing countermeasures and defences against novel weapons fielded by the ADF – they can rely on us turning up with weapons and systems they are already making top priorities to defeat because they are used by the US.  

We’re missing out on being able to develop and field novel systems in any timeframe that matches the speed of technological change in our environment – because integration is so complex it eats time.

We’re missing out on building a vibrant local defence industry that releases the creative energies of talented Australians for the purpose of national defence.

And we’re dooming ourselves to more roadblocks like those we’ve seen after spending millions on the ALR 2002B and now close to $1billion on Ghost Bat, with wasteful expenditure of public money and disappointed expectations of Australian companies the result.

The Houthis and the Ukrainians are fortunate in not having this cult of integration – and, in the case of the Ukrainian military being able to do what that song says ‘know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away and know when to run’ when it comes to integration. 

So, the Houthis do have a long range armed combat drone.  They just used it to strike Tel Aviv after flying it on a circuitous path that used civil air corridors and dipped in and out of Israeli radar coverage. They did just enough work to get the armed drone able to fly the path and to have a system of targeting and tasking that told the drone where it needed to go.  It may have all been pre-programmed, or it may have relied on onboard visual confirmation of parts of the route and the actual target so that it could operate disconnected once launched.  It worked.

The Ukrainians have hundreds of small armed and unarmed drones used on and around the front lines.  But they have also developed several long range armed drones that fly deep into Russian-held territory and destroy key Russian systems and sites – like Russian production centres, storage centres, radar systems, combat aircraft and naval ships.  These aren’t shackled to their small number of manned fighters: they operate lethally and independently at range.

When the Ukrainians think about integration, they are not doctrinaire or cult bound, they are intensely practical and ruthless.  They look at the task that needs to be done and do the least work to integrate the fewest items that can achieve the task. Because that is the most efficient, fastest and cheapest path and it gets solutions to their military as quickly as possible.

An example from early in the war is of integrating US air to air missiles onto Ukrainian combat aircraft.  The Ukrainians have Soviet-era Sukhois.  A US missile can’t talk easily to these aircraft – it’s designed to kill them not be carried by them.  Unlike Australia with our ALR 2002B radar warning receiver, the Ukrainians didn’t even try to connect the missile with the existing onboard systems.  They did attach it to a wing mount.  For targeting data, they used the Starlink satellite system, and to get that data into the aircraft and to the missile, they strapped an iPad into the cockpit.  Job done.  The result is US missiles firing at and destroying Russian aircraft.  In Australia, we’d still be thinking about a pre-feasibility study to scope the potential integration issues. We’d also be funding a big US firm to do that study for us.

So, undoing the cult of integration is essential if Australia is to develop new military power fast and not fall even more into being a military that just waits to see what’s in the big US catalogue.

Developing Australian solutions from the first principle of ruthless limited integration with existing systems and platforms is key.  The two key questions to be asked at design stage are ‘What does this system need to do?’  and ‘What is the minimum integration it needs to do it?’. Right now, Defence defaults to the opposite approach.

A standalone system that is independent of the web of intricacies in our ‘integrated and joint force’ can actually be inordinately powerful because of that disconnection. 

Such systems are also inherently more resilient when operating in a world of digital disruption and fleeting connectivity – which is the world of the contested electromagnetic spectrum we see on display in Ukraine. Arguably, the first stealth fighter – the F-117 – could use this advantage of disconnection and it’d be a shock if other ‘off the books’ programs by various militaries didn’t do this too.

Australia’s military can become more lethal and powerful quickly this decade if it starts to be equipped with systems made by medium and small Australian companies.  But this can only happen if we kill the cult of integration, which is stopping us from moving quickly and blinding us to what is possible. 

Leaving a cult is hard, but staying in it could be deadly.