Of all the big projects in Defence, there are only a few that tend to make it into wider public discussion. These are invariably the projects people can ‘see’ – submarines, combat reconnaissance vehicles, F-35s, infantry fighting vehicles.
These projects are all important in their own right. But one of the largest and most ambitious projects in Defence is often overlooked: Air 6500, the Joint Air Battle Management System for the ADF and what Defence calls the ‘core’ of the future Integrated Air and Missile Defence capability.
Air 6500 is the keystone in the RAAF’s fifth-generation archway. Its purpose is to connect all platforms and sensors across all warfighting domains into a single interface that can track threats, coordinate a joint response, and direct that response onto the target. It is ‘all sensor, best shooter’ writ large.
Initially four companies were bidding for the program – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing – on the understanding that the successful bidder would be required to work with the other three to provide best-of-breed solutions to the ADF. This understanding was laid down on the basis that no single company is capable of meeting the ambition of Air 6500 alone.
In early August, Defence down-selected Lockheed Martin Australia (LMA) and Northrop Grumman Australia (NGA) to continue to the final stage of the competitive evaluation process (known as CEP Stage 2, which is a risk reduction activity). Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price said those two companies had ‘demonstrated the best understanding of [Defence’s] capability requirements’ and ‘a strong commitment to developing Australian industry capability.’
ADM spoke to both companies about the program following the down-select decision and how they intend to provide the ADF’s fifth-generation ambitions.
Northrop Grumman Australia
“Certainly Air 6500 is the cornerstone of the integrated air and missile defence capability,” Christine Zeitz, General Manager Asia Pacific for Northrop Grumman, said. “It will be used to provide the ADF with theatre wide missile defence”.
“We just signed the risk reduction activity which will progress for 12 months and we’re talking to Boeing and Raytheon around their capabilities as we go forward. And I think that’s the spirit the Commonwealth wants us to enhance: this is about collaboration and bringing together the best of breed industry and capability outcomes.”
To facilitate NGA’s commitment to developing Australian industry, the company is utilising its recent investment in Parallax Labs, which is a means of focusing priorities in-country and creating a collaborative environment for Air 6500.
While the official launch of the lab has been delayed due to Covid-19 lockdowns in Canberra, it’s certainly no secret. The aim is to connect Northrop Grumman Australia and SMEs with technology transferred from NGA’s parent company in the US.
“In our risk reduction activity we have a large number of SMEs involved, which we know is very important to transfer technology to Australian industry,” Zeitz said. “Northrop Grumman Australia is leading this program and we’re doing it through the infrastructure that we built and invested in, which we call Parallax Labs.
“It’s a distributed lab. It’s secure, so we can not only transfer technology from the US to Australia and have Northrop Grumman Australia engineers work and modify the software but it’s also distributed around Australia. So of our 22 Air 6500 Australian SMEs, 12 Australian SMEs will be participating directly in our CEP2 risk reduction activity and will be connected into our Parallax Labs.”
The technology being transferred to Australia derives from what Zeitz refers to as the ‘architecture’ that NGA is using for its bid for Air 6500: the US Army’s Integrated Air Missile Defence Battle Command System, which is at the core of the US Army’s next-generation air and missile defence capability. In other words, another ‘all sensor, best shooter’ model.
“The US Army approved Milestone C, which was very exciting, at the beginning of 2020 which provides the ability to move forward with low grade initial production,” Christine Harbison, VP and GM Combat Systems and Mission Readiness for Northrop Grumman in the US, said. “We’re about to enter into the Army’s Integrated Operational Testing and Evaluation.
“We will then go to producing and fielding the systems. The architecture is really the basis for our offering for Air 6500 and leverages a lot of what the US Army is doing.”
Recently, Northrop Grumman undertook a flight test that connected a US Marine Corps radar with sensors on-board an F-35 to create a common operating picture, which allowed a Lockheed Martin PAC-3 missile to intercept a surrogate cruise missile. Now that both companies have been down-selected for the Australian program, the test can perhaps be seen as a preview of what Air 6500 will deliver to the ADF.
“Flight Test Six really demonstrated the ability to connect multiple disparate systems that typically would have been in a silo,” Harbison explained. “We leveraged the Marine Corps radar and the F-35 as sensors on the network within the architecture and created a single integrated operations picture.
“That allowed the user to take action and shoot down the target using a missile that is normally connected only to the Patriot radar. So that was a great demonstration. It really showed the capability of the architecture that we will then add on to for the purposes of Air 6500.”
Flight Test Six could also be a preview of Air 6502, previously referred to as Air 6500 Phase 2, which is the ADF’s future medium range ground-based air defence system. However, given the ‘best-of-breed’ requirement handed down by the Commonwealth, the down-select for Air 6500 does not necessarily indicate which companies will be successful for 6502.
“The architecture gives tremendous choices to countries to determine what is the best for their capability,” Harbison said.
The bid for Air 6500 comes at an interesting time for NGA. Following her appointment as General Manager Asia Pacific last year, Zeitz undertook an internal restructure to bring project execution expertise, as well as profit and loss accountability, into the local company.
“It makes no sense to me as to how you can effectively manage a program from the United States,” Zeitz explained. “My American colleagues are very good at managing US programs for the US customer, but we have particular requirements here that Australians understand deeply.
“So when I was appointed last July I came with a delegation of profit and loss, and with the authority to manage the programs from Australia.”
This, in her view, is at the foundation of successful program bids in Australia.
“The program management office, program management scheduling, risk management, most importantly SIET (Systems Integration Engineering and Test): when those aren’t managed from Australia, I think you’ll find a direct correlation to programs that get off course and go red,” Zeitz said.
“You need profit and loss and you need Australians that know how to deliver Australian projects.”
When asked how NGA intends to handle the maxim that no one company can deliver the entirety of Air 6500 alone, Zeitz explains that conversations are already underway.
“No one company can provide the full capability by themselves,” Zeitz said. “The US trials show how easy it is to integrate to different effectors and sensors. That’s a real strength of how we’re going to approach this.”
On the surface, the proposed acquisition model for Air 6500 – which is likely to see one company appointed as a prime systems integrator – could run into issues about sharing IP. But Zeitz is optimistic.
“There’s something different between IP and integration data; they’re two different things,” Zeitz explains. “To integrate across two platforms or our system into a platform, as we’re talking with Raytheon, you work on the interface control documents as government furnished equipment (GFE). When we do work directly with Boeing and Raytheon, sometimes we’ll work as GFE through the Commonwealth and sometimes we’ll work directly.”
“In the US we talk about an A-kit and a B-kit,” Harbison adds. “We’ve integrated into capabilities that haven’t typically been open. The Patriot missile is a perfect example – we don’t know the guts of that.”
And in NGA’s view, what are the top three risks facing the successful delivery of Air 6500?
“One of the risks could be that the Commonwealth don’t look forward enough to growth in the environment, but this risk plays into our solution through the modular architecture it has,” Zeitz says. “Also, we want to ensure the importance of this program to Australia’s future Force Posture is continually reinforced, as it is a systems of systems solution rather than an air, sea or land platform, it is less visible to key stakeholders.”
Lockheed Martin Australia
“Lockheed Martin have been a part of this Air 6500 journey for six years,” Steve Froelich, LMA program executive for Air 6500, said. “It was something that we took seriously from the beginning and so we started making investments in 2016.”
According to Froelich, LMA began organising for Air 6500 by looking at SMEs active in the Australian marketplace and with DST Group. As momentum grew the company built a demonstration centre at the Endeavour Centre in Canberra and teams in Adelaide and the US.
“We started small and looked at some of the promising SMEs that were actively doing work with DST and in the marketplace,” Froelich said. “We’ve continued to mature the solution. We’ve brought in more and more thinking. We’ve looked at various architectures, we’ve built a number of models. The core engineering team is primarily in Adelaide but it is also distributed in the US.”
LMA held a roadshow around Australia and virtual session with New Zealand’s defence industry, from which it identified 130 SMEs that could eventually contribute to the Air 6500 solution.
Since the roadshow LMA has formally partnered with five Australian SMEs for Air 6500: Consilium Technology, Consunet, Shoal, Silentium Defence and Ultra. These companies will focus their efforts on electronic warfare battle management, contested communications, cyber protection, advanced systems engineering and passive sensing.
“We’ve been able to integrate with their capability and then demonstrate that integrated capability in real time,” Froelich said. “We stimulate the input and get live reactions out of these systems, even though they weren’t designed to work together.”
Like NGA, Lockheed is transferring technology and drawing on experience from teams based in the US to build the Australian capability. So far the company has had ‘well over a dozen’ Technical Assistance Agreements approved to allow the transfer of US technology over to Australia for co-development.
“There’s a large number of people who are actively working on Air 6500 today and the majority of them are in Australia,” Froelich said. “The US and Australian teams share information every day, but all of the work today that we’re under contract for is primarily being done in Australia. We have seven risk reduction areas that we’re going through – which is just a maturation of the program.”
LMA is considering a wide array of technologies from across industry for its Air 6500 test system. One of the candidates is a ‘Virtualised Aegis Weapons System’, which uses a tactical cloud to – as Froelich describes – ‘package Aegis into a virtual, expeditionary form.’
Yet Froelich also emphasises the centrality of open systems thinking to LMA’s bid for Air 6500, confirming that the company is in conversations with Raytheon, Boeing and others to look for best-of-breed solutions.
“We looked at other US based systems, we have looked at various display systems and we went outside of the company,” Froelich said. “Vigilare for instance, uses a Raytheon product, so we’ve started to talk to Raytheon. With Boeing we talk about Wedgetail aircraft – what do they have today, where are they headed.
“Both of those companies have systems that are deployed today, so we’ve asked, what are the areas where you would like to lean in and go forward?”
Those conversations even extend to research and development programs: “We also wanted to understand was there anything that they were bringing to the table in terms of research and development that they wanted to put on the table,” Froelich confirmed.
When asked how LMA identifies ‘best-of-breed’ in a truly agnostic manner – i.e. without favouring its own products – Froelich laughs: “When you are building command and control systems, you have to look at products as nodes. You must be willing to be agnostic. I’ve been in programs where we had to integrate old Soviet radars in the early 2000s, when we were trying to give an air sovereignty capability to some of the old Soviet bloc nations,” he said.
“You make selections based on requirements. So there is a set of requirements that the RAAF has flowed down to us. Anything that we would do has to be measured against those requirements, and so that’s what we’re doing. Any final selections will be made in consultation with the Commonwealth and the industry team, so there is a natural check and balance against any one company simply advocating for its products. At the end of the day Air 6500 is not about Lockheed Martin, and we never lose sight of that.”
Like Zeitz, Froelich is not concerned about the acquisition model creating IP issues.
“In a command and control integration IP is almost always preserved,” he said. “There is a standard for communications, and the interface design specs and the design of the actual system itself will meet those. You don’t have to pierce that IP bubble.”
“That’s where the open mission system is particularly important,” Neale Prescott, Director of Rotary and Mission Systems Business Development for Australia, added. “Vitally important is that technical set of boundaries and interfaces. That’s where we can then publish a method by which data is streamed backwards and forwards, and whether the product is from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, CEA, or Silentium, we’ve now got the capacity to many companies contributing to the collective picture.”
And the same question again: in LMA’s view, what are the top three risks facing the program?
“The ADF has a very diverse set of capabilities,” Prescott said. “That is going to require a lot of care and interface management. Ensuring that is done methodically and in a prioritised way so that the system evolves is one of the key areas that requires focus.
“Air 6500 is a vitally important program. Australia really has advanced this requirement faster than any other country. Now what’s necessary to give Australia that security advantage is being able to network these capabilities together.”
For Froelich, the main area of focus is undertaking the cultural shift required to create and deliver a truly evolving and open capability.
“For programs to stay relevant in the 21st century threat environment, they need to be able to continuously evolve as threats and technologies change. There’s a cultural shift required to execute an agile continuous integration and continuous delivery model. We hope to earn the Commonwealth’s trust to take that journey together.”
