Australia’s defence industry is vital to helping defend our way of life

Advanced capabilities to defend against and deter adversaries are essential in today’s world. And Australian industry is in a unique and advantageous position to provide them.

David Goodrich is executive chairman and chief executive of Anduril Australia and Anduril Asia Pacific.

The Defence Strategic Review (DSR), a once-in-a-generation undertaking, is coming as Australia faces the most challenging and complex set of strategic circumstances since World War II.

We’re in a precarious state: not at war, but not at peace either.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a wake-up call for democracy-loving people. Many believed that a global, interconnected economy meant an end to major wars. Dictators like Vladimir Putin blew up that idea.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, 3D printing and other advanced technologies have brought disruptive change, new jobs and wealth creation that have helped the West flourish, but China has flourished too.

Beijing’s promise of a “peaceful rise” can now be seen as a pipe dream. The Chinese Communist Party’s civil-military fusion industrial approach has brought cutting-edge defence tech to a rapidly modernising military that continues to move aggressively beyond its shores.

So, how should Australia respond to all this? Advanced capabilities to defend from and deter adversaries are essential today. We need smarter and significantly cheaper capabilities deployed at massive scale to make China think twice about having a go. And Australian industry is in a unique and advantageous position to provide them.

Covid-19 has taught us that Australia needs to invest in our sovereign supply chain, but it’s not as well understood why Australia is an excellent R&D and manufacturing base for sophisticated defence technologies and what we can bring to the allied coalition.

The Australian environment lends itself perfectly to innovation, development and production at speed. We’re a large country with low population density and plenty of electronically quiet expanses of water, land and air for testing. This speeds up the R&D process.

We have a pragmatic regulatory environment and collaborative Defence customer which means we can co-develop to get better equipment into warfighters hands more quickly. This can be seen in our Ghost Shark collaboration with the Royal Australian Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group which is resulting in an end product highly tailored to the requirements of the user.

Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro and Anduril Australia and Anduril Asia Pacific CEO David Goodrich with an autonomous submarine.

It’s easy to say that Defence moves slowly, but defence industry can also disrupt the status quo.
Our way of life is precious, and our democracy is worth protecting. Our defence industry must step up to deliver what’s needed.

Traditional defence companies usually think of hardware first and software last. They spend decades and billions of dollars building exquisite and expensive platforms that are often perfectly designed to fight yesterday’s wars. However, today’s fast-moving tech-driven battlespace requires agility and rapid updates to stay one step ahead.

In the same way that a Tesla instantly gets new features with every software update, we push
live updates of our software code
to respond to adversary countermeasures, in real-time. Continuous software updates refresh and extend our transient advantage on the battlefield. We move faster to give our warfighters the capabilities they need to win. They deserve nothing less.

Applying a software-first approach to transform defence is how we can restore Australia’s competitive advantage. We have a small population and a military force of only 85,000 troops (compared with about 1.3 million in the US), but autonomous tech can enable us to do more with less, to defend the large, open oceans that surround us. The clever, disruptive idea behind today’s software-defined, hardware-enabled capabilities is that Australia can do this much more cost effectively than in the past.

Big exquisite crewed platforms are built to carry humans, needing long engineering cycles with costs to be amortised over decades. The new hardware approach is to build large numbers of cheaper attritable (or expendable) capabilities that operate alongside fewer expensive crewed systems. This is a different mindset. “Attritability” means affordability and shorter engineering cycles as non-human capabilities are simpler and cheaper to build, enabling capability gaps to be rapidly filled.

Despite Australia having a small population, we have a very skilled tech workforce. Anduril Australia is designing capabilities, subsystems, sensors, and developing a lot of the software here in Australia.

We will also be manufacturing in Australia, building resilience. If we go to war, we will likely “attrit” (retire) systems (probably a lot of systems). Manufacturing cost-effective autonomous systems in Australia means we can quickly resupply ourselves and our allies from a southern hemisphere location.

Given the current regional tensions, we look forward to the release of the Defence Strategic Review. This landmark document is an important step forward that will outline a new future of Defence for Australia.

Our peace and prosperity depend on getting the best equipment and ideas into the hands of the women and men who are risking their lives to defend ours. We must give them the best tools and technology that our defence industry has to offer.

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David Goodrich OAM is executive chairman and chief executive of Anduril Australia and Anduril Asia Pacific.