Peter Dutton’s war plan mired in red tape

Regulatory hurdles and the West’s determination to fight wars ethically are preventing the ADF from obtaining the drones Peter Dutton says we need, an industry leader warns.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton. Picture: AFP

Regulatory hurdles and the West’s determination to fight wars ethically are preventing the Australian Defence Force from obtaining the cheap autonomous and swarming drones that Defence Minister Peter Dutton has declared the nation needs, an industry leader has warned.

The ADF currently has no armed drones or “loitering munitions”, which are being embraced by countries like China and Russia and can allow smaller forces to defeat well-armed adversaries.

Mr Dutton said this week that Australia needed such capabilities to “send a clear deterrent message” to potential adversaries.

But an Australian industry leader in unmanned aerial capabilities, DefendTex’s Travis Reddy, said it was difficult to get approval from Australian authorities to test and develop lethal combat drones, or allow the ADF to train with them.

He said his company’s loitering munition products, which have been sold to the US and Britain but are yet to be purchased for operational use by the ADF, were able to operate in swarms using a “one to many” control system.

“But the reality of implementing a swarm under the current regulatory environment is very difficult,” Mr Reddy said.

“We can get exemptions for testing and trials, but that exemption expires and it doesn’t apply to anyone else.”

Mr Reddy said Australia and other Western countries were struggling to develop an acceptable regulatory environment to enable the development and deployment of the next-generation of unmanned capabilities.

“There is a tension between operating safely and trying to operate something that is cutting edge, and coming up with appropriate compromises to ensure that works,” he said.

“We can never deploy a system that is not safe to operate. The question is how do we go about proving it safe to operate? “And how do we go about training people to ensure they are competent to operate that system while we are still dealing with the regulatory issues that govern that system? These risks can be mitigated if we have a concerted effort to do something about it. But what it will require is the will to deploy a capability by a certain date.”

Unlike in China or Russia, Western nations typically required a human “in the loop”, maintaining active control over the system.

“Someone has to be responsible for that decision to engage or not to engage. There is a lethal responsibility that sits behind that,” Mr Reddy said.

Cheap unmanned aerial systems are at the heart of modern asymmetric warfare. They were decisive in the 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict, in which Armenia’s forces were overcome by cheap Azerbaijan-operated Turkish drones.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Malcolm Davis said Western nations had “one arm tied behind our back” when developing killer unmanned systems. “As a Western liberal democracy, we are obliged to observe ethical, legal and moral constraints on how we use auton­omous systems,” he said. “The Chinese and the Russians have no such constraints, so they are at an automatic advantage over us.

“They can develop these things, they can test them, and they can use them operationally in wartime without any regard whatsoever for such ethical constraints, in terms of avoiding civilian casualties or proportionality, and so forth.

“The way we approach warfare means that we can’t just go in and bomb the hell out of people irrespective of whether civilians are there or not.”

Mr Dutton told the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia on Tuesday that the ADF needed to acquire new weapons “which can be produced in bulk, more quickly and cheaply, and where their loss would be more tolerable (than that of aircraft or warships), without significantly impacting our force posture”.