DSTG pivots for strategic 21st century challenges

The changes Chief Defence Scientist Dr Tanya Monro is overseeing are designed to prepare the DSTG and Defence more broadly for the strategic environment’s growing uncertainties.

Chief Defence Scientist Dr Tanya Monro with Defence Minister Richard Marles at the launch of Defence's new high-performance computing capability at DSTG in Adelaide. Picture: David Mariuz / NCA NewsWire

“I think without question the whole information domain is going to become increasingly dominant,” according to the Chief Defence Scientist Dr Tanya Monro AC.

“And I mean everything – from human influence right through to information warfare. All the way through from peace time to acute, large-scale conflict.

“We’re now in a world where information is the dominant paradigm and thus the dominant vulnerability.”

This is the context for the major reorganisation that’s accelerated on Dr Monro’s watch as professional head of Defence’s Science and Technology Group (DSTG). The changes she is overseeing are designed to prepare her organisation and Defence more broadly for the strategic environment’s growing uncertainties.

She was appointed Chief Defence Scientist in 2019, as Australia’s strategic position started deteriorating significantly; the current conflict in Ukraine has validated many of her projections.

“It’s now really clear that we need the asymmetry that science and technology provides because of the worsening geopolitical circumstances,” she says.

“We need to find ways to accelerate taking those good ideas that come from R&D and pulling them through to capability.”

That’s a huge change: 20 years ago DSTO (as it was then) stated it didn’t do R&D any more, except very narrowly and in a very targeted way; instead, its role essentially was to provide a technology and sanity check on equipment that the ADF might buy.

That has changed completely, Dr Monro says. The focus now is “future-proofing” Defence.

So DSTG’s R&D, she says, “informs not only what capability we have but also what capability potential adversaries are likely to have, and thus what we might need to be doing to counter [them].

“It’s been a real shift from seeing science and technology (S&T) as a de-risker of acquisition through to seeing S&T as an enabler of new capability.

“Essentially DSTG is about making sure the ADF has the right capability – and it’s no longer possible to get that by making sure they buy the right stuff. The words I’m finding myself using a lot at the moment are asymmetry, acceleration, and urgency.”

Why does speed matter? “Because potential adversaries are moving fast,” she says simply.

Australia can’t afford to be locked into using obsolete technology because our acquisition processes are too slow and cumbersome.

However, while it’s important to be able to develop and field new technology quickly in response to a new threat, you also need time to ensure major platforms such as tanks, ships, aircraft and submarines are designed properly, she says.

A service life of 30 to 40 years means platforms must be designed to be upgraded regularly, Dr Monro says, citing the effect of continued R&D on the Collins-class submarine: “The Collins is an entirely different submarine than when it first went into the water, and after (its Life of Type Extension) will be an entirely different submarine again.”

The DSTG reorganisation is shaped by Defence’s Science and Technology Strategy, More, Together, published in 2020. This currently contains eight STaR Shots – Science Technology and Research challenges that will focus DSTG’s research efforts.

The STaR Shots are problem statements rather than a list of stove-piped technologies. They describe an operational challenge that can probably only be tackled by blending a group of different skills and technologies – Resilient Multi-Mission Space, for example: unpack that problem statement and you find layers of technical challenges affecting different parts of the space mission, and multiple opportunities to tackle them. To bring together those technologies, DSTG has reorganised itself. Instead of having nearly a dozen technology focused research divisions, its new structure has three pillars: Enabling Research, Program Delivery and Capability Development, with 10 Divisions between them.

These enable research resources to flow to where they’re needed from across the organisation, and increasingly from outside. They also help DSTG focus on practical problems, not just stand-alone technology challenges.

Under the Enabling stream, the Science Strategic Planning and Engagement Division manages DSTG’s network of R&D collaborations across the country. Just about every publicly funded university in Australia is now part of DSTG’s Australian Defence Science University Network, or ADSUN, with an R&D node in most state capitals.

However, points out Dr Monro, Australian R&D investment continues to fall, especially industrial R&D investment, and both the science and industry sectors are facing increasing shortages of skilled people. DSTG is tackling the shorter-term manpower problem through its new Navigate recruitment program.

Longer-term, Australia needs more scientists and engineers and the pipeline begins with school students studying the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Earlier this year, Dr Monro called for Australia’s science community to establish what she terms a “science force”, “Where you can think of DSTG as the ‘uniformed’ science force and all of our partners as the ‘reservists’.”

The STEM students at school would be the equivalent of the science cadet force.

Meanwhile, the focus is on information, Dr Monro believes: what we know and what a potential adversary knows, and ensuring the difference is in our favour.

“The things that are most important now are the ones that give that asymmetry where, through a sustainable application of both human and financial resources, Australia can deliver a deterrent.

“But whether that’s from potential adversaries not knowing what under-sea assets we might have and what they might be able to pop up and do, or knowing that for example our satellite communications are resilient and no matter what they do to disrupt them, they reconfigure and continue to work – to me, that is what matters.

“It’s the resilience, the degree of surprise that you can achieve, and it’s the information environment.”