Defence Strategic Review: Diggers ‘naked’ to drone attacks

Australian troops will continue to be vulnerable to killer drones and are years off being able to field lethal unmanned capabilities like those being used in Ukraine.

DroneShield's DroneGun in use with the US Army.

Australian troops will continue to be vulnerable to killer drones and are years off being able to field lethal unmanned capabilities like those being used in Ukraine, the government’s Defence Strategic Review suggests.

Australian company DroneShield, which is listed on the ASX, has seen a surge in sales of its drone detectors and handheld jammers since the start of the war, but is yet to secure any significant contracts to supply the life-saving capabilities to the Australian Defence Force.

Despite warning of the need for rapid capability improvements, the declassified defence review was silent on the need for counter-drone systems and gave no clue to when the ADF would get cheap armed drones.

DroneShield CEO Oleg Vornik said the omissions were curious given the role being played by lethal unmanned systems on the battlefields of Ukraine.

“Ukraine is really demonstrating the potential of drones for battlefield reconnaissance, for dropping charges and directing artillery strikes,” Mr Vornik said.

“So what we're seeing now is a lot of militaries around the world observing this … and they’re saying to themselves, ‘We need both drones and counter-drone equipment’.”

He said DroneShield, valued at $175m by market capitalisation, was now the “go-to supplier” of handheld counter-drone equipment to the US Army, the FBI and America’s intelligence agencies.

Mr Vornik said there was “nothing that exists right now” in the ADF’s array of capabilities that could be easily repurposed to deal with unmanned threats.

“You can’t really just get your firearm out and take a shot at a drone,” he said.

“Detection of these things is essentially impossible with your classic radars. You need dedicated equipment.”

Mr Vornik said that without counter-drone technologies, the ADF’s bases and “exquisite platforms” like the RAAF’s F-35s could be put at risk by cheap unmanned aircraft.

He said the need to protect ADF people and equipment against drone strikes was “so prevalent it belongs in just about every program”, but was consistently left out of capability ­budgets.

The Defence Strategic Review said the ADF needed to develop “asymmetric” weapons that could cause adversaries to suffer disproportionate losses.

Cheap and lethal unmanned systems have emerged as key asymmetric capabilities, but the only aerial drone mentioned in the review was Boeing’s Ghost Bat, which will be sophisticated and expensive.

Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge said the need for drone and counter-drone capabilities was “blindingly obvious”.

“If the ADF is to not take large numbers of casualties in any conflict that it is deployed in, then it is urgent that it gets on board the bus that any capable military has been on for years now,” he said.

Without the means to disable attacking drones, Australian troops would be left “naked” to unmanned attacks, he said.