The inaugural ADM Defence and Industry Research Symposium, hosted by the University of South Australia, was launched in Adelaide on Tuesday.
The event brought together over 100 delegates from the ADF, industry and academia to discuss innovation in defence. Chaired by Sumen Rai, Director of the Defence Innovation Partnership, Peter Stevens, Director Enterprise Partnerships, University of South Australia welcomed delegates and outlined UniSA’s enterprise strategy to grow the scale and focus of its research.
“At UniSA, we address capability challenges by bringing together industry and researchers from multidisciplinary areas,” Stevens said. “With expert researchers and state of the art facilities, we have the capability to work with our partners on a range of [defence] related challenges and opportunities.
“We talk about impact at UniSA as much as we talk about research.”
Minister for Education, Training and Skills for SA Blair Boyer, in a last-minute step in for SA’s Deputy Premier Susan Close, spoke to the importance of the university sector to the AUKUS task.
“Given the magnitude of the task ahead of us, we need to ensure the pipeline of future skilled employees starts now in our education system,” Boyer said.
“This includes five new technical colleges for students in SA, flexible to the demands of the modern economy. We will keep these technical colleges relevant by partnering with industry to make sure the young people graduating have skills that employers need.”
Major General Jason Walk, Commander Joint Logistics, Joint Capability Group, spoke of the outlook provided by the Defence Strategic Review and the current challenges that military logistics face.
“Russia’s failed drive to Kyiv was in large part caused by a logistics failure,” MAJGEN Walk noted.
“These observations and others have motivated the ADF to build resilience into the force, as required to prosecute the kind of elongated conflict that we are witnessing in Ukraine. But true resilience requires partnerships between Defence, government and industry.”
MAJGEN Walk spoke of the need to reinvest in the ADF’s logistics chain to withstand ‘shock’ and sustain battlefield efforts for long periods of time, counter to beliefs in some quarters that modern weaponry might compress the length of military conflicts.
“From a logistics point of view, this requires hardening, dispersion and rapid regeneration capabilities. But this is expensive. So the ADF is seeking innovative ways to offset the costs of increasing our resilience,” MAJGEN Walk said.
Colonel Tim Orders, Deputy Commander, 9th Brigade, Australian Army – who will take over command of 9 Brigade in 2024 - gave a second keynote on the need for need for military, industry and academia collaboration.
“There is a tendency for a specific technology to become the focus of changing warfare,” Orders said. “This focus on platforms as a driver for change can cause us to miss other innovations. Today’s environment calls for a greater collaboration than ever between the military, academia and industry.”
Later in the day, Horden Wiltshire, CEO, Acacia Systems and Professor Siobhan Banks of the Behaviour-Brain-Body Research Centre at UniSA discussed a collaborative project to deliver the ‘Reflex’ command decision analytics platform to the RAN’s Collins class submarines.
Amongst other capabilities, ‘Reflex’ will allow submarine commanders to monitor crew physiological and behavioural indicators of performance and fatigue.
Other speakers included: John Towers, LM Fellow, Lockheed Martin Australia and Dr Peter Schumacher, of the Studio for Complex Human Environmental Design from UniSA; Dr Anne Collins, Chief Operations Officer for Sementis; Greg Wicks, Manager Strategic Innovation for Nova Systems; and more.