Australia ramping up counter-drone fight with $17m move
A brutal new war tool is rapidly reshaping modern warfare - and it’s prompted a major response from the Australian government.
They’re fast, powerful and rapidly reshaping modern warfare.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are becoming increasingly utilised by armies, with the aircraft now responsible for 80 per cent of all battlefield casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war, according to some estimates.
“Drones are no longer an emerging threat, but very much a dominant one,” Kacey Lam-Evans, Government Affairs Director of DroneShield, told news.com.au.
“(The conflict in Ukraine) goes to show the importance of ensuring that militaries globally are thinking about counter-drone technologies in their strategic plans.”
Australia is among the nations leading the charge against powerful aircraft.
The federal government announced it was ramping up the fight last month by awarding $16.9 million in an initial rolling wave of contracts to 11 vendors to deliver counter-drone technologies.
The announcement – part of the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) Project LAND 156 – will see at least 120 tested threat detectors and cutting edge drone-defeating technologies rapidly introduced by the ADF.
Announced five months ago, Project LAND 156 aims to deliver comprehensive Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System (C-UAS) capability to the ADF to identify and neutralise UAVs.
“Through Project LAND 156, the ADF will continually upgrade and refresh capabilities to address emerging drone threats,” the Department of Defence said in a statement.
“This process is driven by $58 million of investment by the Albanese Government over the past three years in research, development and prototyping.”
The department announced further counter-drone acquisitions would be revealed in the coming months, including “contracts to deliver a command-and-control capability, and additional advanced counter-drone sensors and effectors, giving the ADF more options to protect Australian defence bases”.
It comes amid the government’s over $10 billion investment in drones over the next decade.
“The Australian Government knows drone and counter-drone technology will continue to evolve rapidly,” Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said last month.
“The delivery of cutting-edge drones and counter-drone technology shows the increasing speed at which Defence and industry are able to deliver new capabilities to the ADF.”
Australian company awarded $5 million to help fight drones
DroneShield, which has a presence in over 70 countries, was among the five Australian vendors selected as part of the $16.9 million contracts for Line of Effort 2 of LAND 156, with the Sydney-based company awarded $5 million to deliver handheld drone detection equipment and radio frequency defeat units.
“We were very pleased to see the Australian government investing in Australian sovereign capability through this contract,” said Ms Lam-Evans.
The company’s portable radio frequency drone detection unit ‘RfPatrol Mk2’ is already being deployed to help soldiers identify drones in Ukraine.
“When it detects a drone in its vicinity, it will vibrate,” Ms Lam-Evans explained. “For a Ukrainian soldier, this gives them time to then go and hide, for instance, in a trench until the drone passes.
“So it provides that soldier with the situational awareness to know where the drone is and the ADF procuring that will provide them with that drone situational awareness capability.”
The company’s handled radio frequency based effector ‘DroneGun Mk4’ is also being used in Ukraine to quickly and precisely neutralise drones.
“It is directional, which means it’s very much a point-and-shoot capability. It is also non-kinetic, which means that nothing blows up or explodes when it’s utilised,” said Ms Lam-Evans.
“A drone usually has a protocol attached to it that when it loses communications with the controller. usually it will either land in a controlled manner or it will fly back to where the controller is,” she added, explaining that neutralising the drone without having it blow up is useful to identify the location of the controller.
Ukraine drone attack a ‘wake-up call’
Ms Lam-Evans said drones have rapidly revolutionised warfare in Russia-Ukraine, offering a cheap asymmetric advantage.
“A relatively cheap $5,000 drone can cause a lot of damage to a traditional military platform that is valued at hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars,” she said.
“So counter drone technologies now need to be part of planning to ensure that traditional platforms aren’t essentially easily destroyed by cheap drones.”
She said Ukraine’s recent ‘Spider Web’ drone assault in particular, was a real “wake-up call” for militaries around the world.
The June assault, which took 18 months to plan and execute, saw Ukraine smuggle drones across the border into Russia – which has also deployed drones during it’s three year war with Ukraine – hidden in trucks.
Once inside the country, the trucks drove to the sites of military bases and, at a co-ordinated moment, released the remotely controlled drones.
“Planning, organisation, every detail was perfectly executed. It can be said with confidence that this was an absolutely unique operation,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the assault.
In the immediate aftermath of the operation, Ukraine’s security forces claimed to have taken out about a third of Russia’s strategic bombers, partially crippling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s capacity to launch long-distance missile strikes.
“(The operation) shows that in this day and age, really anything is possible, and that the drone threat is real and that it is here, it is now,” said Ms Lam-Evans.
“I think no chief of air force globally wants to see that happening to them and it really has been a wake-up call for militaries globally in what is possible.”
While Ms Lam-Evans noted the drone threat in Australia differs to that in the war zone in Ukraine, she said the use of drones to aid in espionage is a real concern at home.
“We have seen through commentary by Australian spy agencies that espionage is on the rise and the reality is that first-person-view drones can provide this capability to state actors and adversaries without needing to actually set foot on the premise.”
It’s why she says counter-drone systems here at home are critical.
“The systems provide decision makers with the situational awareness they need, to firstly understand what is happening on our military air bases, but then to also understand what the response needs to look like.”
Warning for Australia
As technology continues to be used to cause harm on a devastating scale, there are warnings that similar threats playing out in Ukraine could manifest elsewhere.
“The most sophisticated threats that we see (in Ukraine) many have not yet been exported outside of that theatre, but many have and many more will,” Ash Alexander-Cooper OBE, the Vice President of EMEA & APAC at Dedrone by Axon and former specialist military unit commander in the British Armed Forces, told news.com.au.
“We have to assume in Australia that what we see in Ukraine in the way that the technology is being employed to do harm, are things that we should anticipate might well be a threat that Australia’s home bases and civilian population could expect to see in the future.”
“So it is a cat-and-mouse game where all companies that are providing airspace security solutions and counter drone solutions have to keep up with that evolving threat.”
Dedrone, a US-based company and leading provider of airspace security solutions around the world, has also been selected for Line of Effort 2 in Project LAND 156.
“For us … and for everybody that involves (providing) dismounted capability for soldiers, which includes non-kinetic effectors, kinetic effectors I believe, body-worn and portable systems. And we’ve got a couple of solutions that are in play with that,” said Mr Alexander-Cooper.
“So we’re just waiting for that phase of testing and evaluation to begin, and we’re excited to be to be part of that.”
The company, which also helps protect urban areas, stadiums, and airports, is already deployed in every state and territory in the country, providing Australia’s first national CUAS network.
“We’ve got everything from DedronePortable … which comes with stand-alone battery power if you’re deploying somewhere where there’s no fixed power. It’s good for SES or emergency services deployments or militaries that are deploying into places where they may be on a front line where there is no infrastructure,” he said.
“(We also provide) passive RF sensors, all the way through to multi-sensor solutions that are fixed sites.”
‘Proactive’: Australia is leading the way
Mr Alexander-Cooper, who works with a number of nations including New Zealand and Ireland, said Australia “genuinely is really leading the way in many areas in relation to counter-drone thinking”.
“We see a lot of different customers and the way that they’re approaching the problem and Australia is very forward thinking. It’s moving a lot faster than many countries can move.”
He praised the open nature of the systems Australia procures and the nation’s rapid speed of procurement, as evidenced by Project LAND 156, saying “Australia’s talking but then very quickly doing”.
“There are too many countries I worry (and) too many governments that are still just talking every year. In some countries that I won’t name, I have the same conversation probably every six months with the same people saying ‘we’re really going to do this, we really need to do something’ but they don’t actually do something and I worry that there’ll be a big incident and then they’ll do something.”
“It’s a reactive behaviour rather than proactive. So Australia is being very proactive. The 156 program is exciting to see that their ambition is the right level of ambition.”
Looking to the future, Ms Lam-Evans said drone technology will only continue to advance, and while the government’s investment in counter drone technology is “admirable”, continuous investment in needed for Australia to remain a world leader in the space.
“It will be interesting to see over the coming years how modern warfare will continue to evolve and the technologies that it will bring.”
Originally published as Australia ramping up counter-drone fight with $17m move
