Is Australia drone-ready? | Insiders on Background

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Well, last weekend, Ukraine pulled off an extraordinary drone attack on far-flung Russian air bases.

So extraordinary, it's grabbed the attention of defense experts everywhere and raised all sorts of questions about modern warfighting.

In fact, it's not just the use of unmanned systems in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but artificial intelligence and other rapidly advancing technology that's changing how we think about combat.

And for Australia's part, this does take the debate beyond a simple question of whether we're spending enough on defence.

There are big questions now about the sort of kit Australia's buying, whether Australia's defence planners are taking enough risks with technology and how vulnerable our own far-flung defence bases might be.

I'm keen to explore these issues and get a better understanding of how rapidly the game is changing as Australia is spending billions and prepares to spend billions more on submarines and frigates.

I'm David Spears on Ngunnawal Country at Parliament House in Canberra.

Welcome to Insiders on Background.

Well Mick Ryan is a retired Major General who served in the Australian Defence Force for more than three decades.

He's now a senior fellow of the Lowy Institute and an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Mick Ryan, welcome.

Thank you.

It's great to be with you.

So look, I'd like to start with trying to get a a better understanding of what the war between Ukraine and Russia currently looks like.

You've been spending time on the ground there.

You've been writing a lot about it.

We've just seen this amazing drone strike deep within Russian territory.

It probably didn't surprise you too much, seeing what Ukraine is capable of and the Russians as well.

But can you just explain to those of us who haven't perhaps had a good look at what this particular

incident involved, what happened?

What did Ukraine do?

Well, what Ukraine did was pull off a very audacious series of strikes on four or five different Russian airfields that extended from the northwest of Russia all the way out into eastern Russia over thousands of kilometers.

It was what you'd probably describe as a very, very long-range raid using drones and trucks.

And they were able to destroy somewhere between about 10 and 20 long-range bombers using very cheap

available drones with a little bit of explosive launch from the top of trucks.

And they used the Russian telecommunications network to control them with backups of control using artificial intelligence.

So hang on, using the Russian telecommunications network.

So what they've they've used mobile devices to open up the crates and set the drones off once they were in position.

Yeah, so they've been able to use Russian Russian SIM cards to do that to fly the drones and if control failed for any reason, there was backup AI control and they trained this AI to recognize Russian bombers from museum aircraft.

So this in many, many ways was not just audacious, but extraordinarily creative on the part of the Ukrainians.

And took a lot of planning, I guess.

How long were they sitting in place waiting for the trigger to be pulled?

Well, it looks like they were planning this up for 18 months.

And I'm sure over the last few months, the Ukrainians were wondering whether they wanted to pull this off given the potential for peace negotiations.

But once the Russians walked away from any kind of ceasefire ideal, I guess the Ukrainians thought, okay, well, let's try and nudge them along to some kind of ceasefire with this strike.

And look, I'm not sure how much you can say about this, but do we know whether this sort of tech has been developed by Ukraine itself?

They seem to be doing incredible things with drone technology at the moment, or have they had some help from others?

Well, I think there's a lot of evidence that the Ukrainians used a lot of their own intelligence for the planning because I was in Ukraine when the Americans shut off their intelligence for a short time.

That had a very profound psychological impact on the Ukrainian military.

So they want to become more independent when it comes to targeting.

I mean, the drones generally in Ukraine now are built in Ukraine, and they have started building drones that have 100% componentry sourced from Ukraine.

So I'd say these drones were Ukraine-made, and they were certainly exported to the only country in the world that Ukraine is allowed to export drones to, Russia.

Yeah, but incredibly self-sufficient then in what they're doing with drone technology.

This was a wow moment, I think, for many observers.

But what about for you?

Have there been other wow moments when you've seen Ukraine or indeed Russia using technology in this war?

Yeah, I think this was an exclamation mark on three and a half years of development in drones.

I didn't feel there was anything particularly new.

This hasn't changed the nature of war in any way.

But I think the Ukrainians have been slowly

creeping up on a very important transformation of warfare with uncrewed systems in the air, but also at sea with some very important achievements in pushing the Russians out of large parts of the Black Sea with naval drones.

I mean Ukraine has no surface navy and they've pushed one of the world's biggest navies out of most of the Black Sea.

Are they surface drones or are they undersea drones?

Most of them are surface.

Some of them are semi-submersible, which means they have a very low profile.

But most of them are variations of small speedboats and small jet skis.

I mean these are not high-tech expensive systems.

They can now launch drones to conduct reconnaissance and to strike Russian platforms.

But what we're seeing now, David, is a very significant expansion in the use of drones on the land.

We saw a very big battle in December where the Ukrainians only used drones to defeat the Russians in a battle at a place called Lipsy.

And

this kind of use of drones is only going to expand more in the coming year in Ukraine.

Yeah, I mean, how does this change

the way we think about war fighting,

the rapid acceleration of the use of unmanned systems, be it on water or on land?

Well what it does, it extends what current military forces can do.

It can place robots between humans and threats in many circumstances, not all of them.

You can't do everything with a drone that you can with a human.

But it allows humans to cover more ground.

It allows them to be more lethal while sitting back and hopefully not being exposed to as much threat.

But it also allows small military forces to generate a much larger force using drones than might otherwise be possible.

And that's one of the reasons the Ukrainians have been so keen on drones because they're smaller than Russia.

They know they need to generate mass in a different way.

And they've, as you've pointed out, they've become the first nation to form an independent drone service, the Unmanned Systems Force.

So that sits alongside Army, navy air force you've effectively got four forces should this give us a sense of the significance of unmanned systems to ukraine in particular and do you think other countries will inevitably go down that path as well well i i had the chance to spend an afternoon with the commander of the unmanned systems force colonel sugarevsky who's who's now just been promoted to commander corps but the russians on their may day parade announced that russia is forming a drone service very similar to this one the Ukrainians have.

And what this service is doing is it basically provides the central nervous system for all uncrewed systems in the Ukrainian Army, Navy and Air Force, from the frontline all the way back to linking in with industry.

And it's providing a very quick feedback loop and adaptation cycle from frontline lessons all the way back to new drones.

And the Ukrainians are releasing a new long-range strike drone every every two, three months at this point in time.

And this is actually one of the difficulties.

You would have seen the Australian Defence Force Chief, Admiral David Johnston, just this week pointed out that you've got this sort of 12-week window with technology development where, you know, after 12 weeks, your enemy's coming up with a counter-technology, so it becomes irrelevant.

Is that what we're seeing on the ground there?

Yeah, I think the writing of his speech would have taken longer than some of the adaptation of these drones in Ukraine, to be quite frank.

We are seeing software for drones change daily.

We are seeing the techniques and the technology that's used in them change weekly.

And we're seeing battlefield tactics change monthly.

The speed at which Ukraine and Russia are learning and adapting is incomprehensible to most Western military forces and certainly to the Canberra bureaucracy.

Yeah, and I'll come to the Canberra bureaucracy and where this leaves us.

But is AI playing a role in that rapid

change and

adaptation to what's happening on the battlefield?

Yeah, it's playing several different functions.

Firstly, it's helping drones with targeting, particularly

what they call last mile targeting.

If the drone's being jammed, AI can take over using image recognition.

AI is also being used to help fight through jamming and find frequencies that aren't being jammed.

It also helps control multiple drones at once.

And it's also helping with the strategic planning for long-range drone strikes, particularly with imagery analysis and these things.

So it has many different uses, and there's lots of bespoke algorithms that are being used in this role.

And look, I won't go through every technology, but there are some areas that we're also seeing pretty rapid development as well.

And you've written about 3D printing as well.

How is 3D printing being used by Ukraine at the moment?

Well, it's being used for lots of different things to prototype new types of drones, to print repair parts, to mass produce a lot of elements of drones.

And the technology of 3D printers is improving rapidly.

I was visiting an organization last week where they had a 3D printer on the shelf that took a day to print a certain part.

several months ago it now takes a couple of hours so you're seeing the quality and the speed of 3d printers also improve at the same time as drones are rapidly evolving.

And does this involve munitions as well?

So you don't need, you know, big

munitions, factories and warehouses.

You can have a 3D printer knock out

bombs and other ammunition.

We're not quite at that point with munitions yet.

Explosives are still pretty sensitive.

So we're still going to need the factories that produce the explosives.

There aren't a lot of places in the world that do that.

Fortunately, we have that in Australia.

Yeah, okay.

So look, when we look at all of this technology, the unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, let's talk about where Australia is at.

I doubt there are many countries that are anywhere near what Ukraine and Russia are doing for obvious reasons, but where do we sit when it comes to understanding,

being ready for this technology, being willing to take some risks on this sort of technology?

Well, I think unfortunately we've made very small baby steps in the last three and a half years.

We haven't demonstrated deep systemic understanding of how these things might be used across air, land and sea.

We've had drone programs cut and money transferred for things like

frigates and these kind of things.

We had armed drones cut from the budget.

We see a lot of bureaucratic obstructionism to units buying drones and experimenting with them.

So we have a long way to go because where the Ukrainians have disaggregated authorities to trial drones, to use drones, to procure drones in units, Australia has taken a very Russian approach, which is to centralise authorities and procurement and these kind of things.

And it's something we need to break down.

So what does that look like in practice if we're going to decentralise that decision-making?

What would that mean for defence?

Well, what it would mean is that defence has

pretty much like army does with boots.

You have a a list of approved drones that a unit can buy and they're given a certain budget to be able to do that and they go buy them, they trial them, they use them.

And then it allows them not just to learn about the current generation, but to suggest improvements to the next generation, which we really need to be introducing every single year.

I mean, these things are $500 to $1,000.

We can afford to be recapitalizing every couple of years with drones, whereas we could not do that with fighters.

I was going to say, is there a risk that you pour too much money into a technology that's going to be outdated very quickly?

But what you're saying there, it's pretty cheap stuff at the end of the day.

You need to be keeping up.

Yeah, you need to be keeping up and you need to be having the soldiers train with it and experiment with new ways to use them.

I mean, one of the things we've seen in Ukraine is the number of different missions that drones are used for has exploded from

dropping blood to medics on the battlefield to using them as loudspeakers to freak out the Russians behind the front line to attack Russian robots on the ground or lay mines.

I mean,

the creativity and innovation of the Ukrainians over the last few years in how they're used has been absolutely amazing.

And we can't imagine that it's just the Ukrainians who can be that creative, that clever, and that adaptive.

When we look at our own adversaries, and we look at our own vulnerabilities, does Australia, and particularly I'm thinking about its northern air bases, face

a growing risk as this technology evolves?

I mean, we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, those far-flung air bases that were hit by these drones.

Could that happen here?

Absolutely, it could.

I mean, the Russian Air Force was a great exemplar of what happens when you don't learn and adapt fast enough.

The Ukrainians...

identified that the Russian Air Force hadn't adapted fast enough from the other attacks on its air bases, and it made them pay for that.

Unfortunately, democracies are probably even more vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that Ukraine conducted against Russian airfields.

So Australian air bases, American air bases, British air bases are very, very vulnerable to these kind of attacks, not just from foreign countries, but potentially from criminal actors and non-state actors.

So what do you do about that?

I mean,

Does it also involve rapidly evolving, constantly shifting defenses of our bases?

Well, the Ukrainians have developed a whole lot of different defenses over the last couple years to small drones and big drones.

And it necessitates a combination of small radars, microwave, electronic warfare.

But the Ukrainians have pioneered the development and employment of small drone interceptors,

which

take down large Russian UAVs and these Shahed drones.

And they do so at a cost that's an order of magnitude cheaper than the Russian drones that they're downing.

So it will be a combination of factors, but we're going to have to do that.

I don't imagine if the Americans were to deploy B-2 bombers to an Australian base and a drone comes over the fence and damages them, that we'll be very popular with the Allies.

No, I can imagine we're not.

All of this raises the question, though, about what we are doing with our allies.

And of course, under AUKUS, we're going to be spending a lot of money on nuclear submarines.

Is this a wise investment?

Should it be those plus all of this new technology on unmanned systems, or are we pouring too much into effectively old technology?

Well, I think the problem is we don't have a good balance.

We have

a real fixation on small numbers of exquisite, expensive systems.

And whilst we do need some of those, we need to complement them with large numbers of cheaper, more capable platforms that are easier to train our people on.

So it's about the mix.

And one of the problems we have at the moment, the defence budget's being eaten up exclusively by these exquisite small numbers of systems, it's not a sustainable approach at this point in time.

But you would say stick with the plan for the AUKUS submarines, the frigates, all the things that are there in terms of the big stuff in our defence systems plan at the moment.

Stick with that and then spend additional on some of this new technology.

Well, we're going to need some of that.

Whether we need all of that is a good question.

And one of the problems we have is that we haven't looked at different options.

We haven't looked at the opportunity costs of things like the AUKUS submarines, which at 2% of GDP are not affordable.

If we want to have AUKUS submarines and an Australian Defence Force, at 2%, you get one or the other, not both.

So where do you sit on this debate that's been raging or building some time around what we should be spending?

The US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says Australia should spend 3.5% of GDP on defence.

That's a big step up from the 2% we're at at the moment.

We are due to get up to 2.3% in about eight years' time.

Where should it be?

And is this sort of arbitrary GDP number the best way to go about it?

Or do we identify, as the Prime Minister says, identify the kit that we need and buy that?

Yeah, I mean, I

understand the weaknesses with the GDP percentage.

I mean, it's not a perfect measure by any

kind of measure, but it's the best we've got at the moment.

And at the end of the day,

there are many analysts in this country, including myself, who've been saying for some time that 2% of GDP is not enough.

We need to head to 3% or 3.5%

just because inflation alone is eating the defence budget alive.

And there's been some very good analysis in the last couple of years about the impacts of inflation alone on the defence budget.

But the size is not big enough.

But we also need to look at efficiencies in where people are and the amount of senior military officers and senior bureaucrats in Canberra, in many respects, the number of them is slowing down decision-making and innovation in defence.

So we also need to look at the structure.

and the authorities and the trust we put in lower people compared to how we do it at the moment.

Well, that comes back to that decentralization point, I suppose, doesn't it?

That structurally, culturally, we have a problem in the way we're making acquisition decisions that really needs to be broken down.

Yeah, the last 20 years,

we've developed a culture where we centralise decision-making in Canberra and decisions are only made in committees.

What that's doing is developing a generation of military leaders who don't want to make decisions unless they refer it to a committee.

That's not going to work well for us on the future battlefield.

So there are some cultural issues here, not just budgetary issues.

And I guess finally then, if we are to increase defence spending on the scale of getting to 3% or 3.5%, that is asking a lot of the Australian people.

They need to know why.

Is the level of threat we're facing, a potential threat, really that serious in your view and is that being explained to the Australian people?

Well, firstly, I think the level of threat from what I see in my travels and my discussions with many people around the world is probably greater than what we appreciate.

Unfortunately,

the government has not engaged in a serious, sustained and honest conversation with the Australian people about the threat posed by big three baddies in our region, North Korea, China and Russia.

And what's happened is you saw the release of the National Defence Strategy the day before ANZAC Day.

You don't do that when you want to have an honest, sustained and open conversation with the Australian people.

So, you know, I would hope that this government in this term engages the Australian people and gains some kind of social license for increased defence spending, but explain why and where it's going to go.

Well, Nick Ryan, it is a fascinating space that is changing so fast.

I really appreciate your analysis.

Thank you for talking to us.

Thank you.

It's great to talk with you.

And if you have any thoughts on this conversation or ideas for the podcast, do drop us a line, insiders at abc.net.au.

We'll have more Sunday morning.

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