Foreign partnerships grow with trust

The Defence Department has its sights on expanding international research collaboration further beyond the Anglophone partners and Europe and into the local region.

The Defence Department has its sights on expanding international research collaboration. Picture: ADF

The Defence Department has its sights on expanding international research collaboration further beyond the Anglophone partners and Europe and into the local region, but new arrangements will have to clear raised security hurdles.

The department says it “recognises the considerable opportunities presented by further developing science and technology partnerships with countries in the Indo-Pacific region’’, adding South Korea, Japan, Singapore and India “consistently produce world-leading defence technology, and we share a variety of … security objectives”.

That goal is cited in the department’s Defence Science and Technology Strategy 2030. Collaboration between Australian and foreign scientists and other researchers has often ridden on relationships arising from asset purchases, and present links with Asian institutions and governments are relatively minor.

But a major boost towards that expansion goal may come next year. In 2022, the government is expected to make a choice on its future tracked infantry fighting vehicles for the army, with a contract known as Land 400 Phase 3 and variously reported as being worth $18bn to $27bn.

South Korea’s Hanwha Defence group, with an Australian consortium called Team Redback, after its prototype vehicle contender, is competing for the contract with German group Rheinmetall and its Lynx vehicles.

Most of the hundreds of billions in planned Defence acquisitions are coming from foreign companies, and there can be cost savings and technology gains in associated collaboration for research.

Australia’s strongest foreign ties in Defence research are with its main supplier-countries and outstanding among these countries is the US, which dominates the research spending by major Western economies. The US relationship is displayed both in inter-government collaboration, including between the forces, and in efforts by individual researchers at universities or specialist centres.

A Defence Department spokesperson says it has “well over 100 bilateral and multilateral science and technology arrangements in place” to support the US collaboration.

“These include data-exchange arrangements where there is no money exchanged, but valuable information is shared,” the spokesperson tells The Australian.

The arrangements “enable technology development, interoperability and project arrangements where both Australia and the US are investing financial resources to co-develop technologies”.

“All of these agreements are entered following the necessary legal and financial clearances to undertake the work.”

Researchers face a complex compliance and regulatory regime in international defence collaboration to prevent security-risk technology transfer, and can seek advice from the department’s internal research base, the Defence Science and Technology Group, or DST. They may have to negotiate through the notification and veto provisions of the new Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act, plus other laws and rules.

Defence-research collaboration is evolving and is moving into more sensitive and nationally classified areas, DST says. This research provides a “technology edge” but the research and its application should be protected from access by potential adversaries and competitors, it says.

“Research partners will use the Defence Industry Security Program to apply the necessary levels of protection, and will be fully supported by Defence to make sure this process is as smooth as possible,” DST says.

Overall Australian Defence Department expenditure on research and development is more than $800m this financial year which, the department says, “places Australia in the top 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for defence research and development expenditure as a percentage of GDP”. That compares with the federal government’s planned purchasing of defence capability, meaning defence assets, of $270bn during the next decade.

The department’s internal research base, the Defence Science and Technology Group, has an annual budget of about $408m with about 2300 staff. Available OECD figures show member-countries’ government defence-research spending is topped by the US, with about 80 per cent, and South Korea, the UK, Germany and France, with Australia about ninth.

Only about 6 per cent of Australia’s government-funded research and development spending went into the Defence budget in 2020, compared with about 48 per cent for the US, according to the OECD.

Spending on defence research in Australian higher education institutions is modest. It was about $154m in 2018, according to the most recent available figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That was about 1.3 per cent of the institutions’ total research spending of $12.16bn from all sources, including about half-a-billion each from the state-government sector and from private business. The top field is health and medical research.

Some universities are finding foreign partners for defence projects of their own, while the Defence Department says its own international teamwork begins on a government-to-government basis.

Defence has multilateral collaborations “where we work with the key allies to share information, develop and demonstrate new capabilities’’, the spokesperson says.

“Aa an example, with the US we are working collaboratively to research and develop new capabilities, bringing not just funding but highly qualified personnel and science and technology capabilities to cooperative technology development in areas of mutual priority,” a Defence spokesperson says.

These include “hypersonics, information warfare, electronic warfare, space, cyber and directed energy [such as laser and microwave weapons]”.

Research collaboration with the US necessarily includes further specific acquisition programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter, Growler and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, Triton unmanned aircraft, heavyweight torpedoes and the Next Generation Jammer for airborne electronic attack.

Defence cites the government’s Force Structure Plan 2020, where the government has committed about $3bn for defence innovation, science and technology in the next decade, “underpinning Defence’s commitment to grow the innovation sector”.

The Defence spokesperson says “nearly all direct funding of collaboration [is] directed to Australian universities, industries and publicly funded research agencies such as CSIRO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and the Bureau of Meteorology “to name a few”.

The federal and Western Australian governments late last year announced a round of collaborative research grants delivered through the WA Defence Science Centre, and they showed the human factor is a common denominator in defence research.

A $150,000 recipient was Edith Cowan University, for studying the health and performance impacts of the Australian Special Forces selection course in collaboration with partners including the University of Pittsburgh and the CSIRO.

Another $150,000 went to an ECU-led group that included the US Army and the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, for “categorising lower-body injury risk” in recruits through muscle-bone imaging.

A professor at the University of Newcastle, Paul Dastoor, is working on low-cost “printed” biosensors to monitor soldiers’ “physical and mental readiness and the state of their environments in real time”, in collaboration with the US Air Force’s Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development, among other partners.