Air Power: JORN into the future | ADM February 2012

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Julian Kerr | Sydney

JORN has recently faced criticism for its failure to detect people-smuggling boats in Australia’s northern approaches. This was never part of its remit – or of its capability, and the planned upgrades are unlikely to produce any significant improvement to this aspect.

As set out in a 1987 technical specification and eventually delivered in 2003 via the three JORN radars at Longreach in Queensland, Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and Laverton In Western Australia, the JORN system has a specific requirement in monitoring the country’s northern maritime and sea approaches to detect and track aircraft the same size or larger than the RAAF’s Hawk Lead-in Fighter Trainer, and ships the same size or larger than the RAN’s now decommissioned 42 metre, 220 tonne Fremantle-class patrol boats.  

By all accounts it does this very well – so long as the ships involved have a metal hull, or a metal structure encased in wood, that is at least the size of a Fremantle-class vessel.

As stated in evidence to a West Australian Coroner’s Court by Dr Gordon Fraser, Research Leader High Frequency Radar at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO): “There are no enhancements to JORN that will overcome the physics limits of detecting and tracking small wooden boats that contain only small size metal components.”

The upgrades which will be completed in the middle of this year under JP 2025 Phase 5 involve a number of work packages incrementally bringing Radar 1 at Longreach and Radar 2 at Laverton up to the current technological specification of the Alice Springs Jindalee facility. They also improve performance against air targets and surface vessels of the specified size or larger, integrate the Alice Springs radar into the overall JORN network, and continue development of advanced over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) concepts for incorporation into JP 2025 Phase 6.

This phase is seen very much as a next-generation effort, improving all-round performance with the introduction of new and/or upgraded sensor hardware and software, signals processing, data fusion, communications and information systems while enhancing support instrumentation, supportability issues such as maintenance and obsolescence, and providing new mission capability.

Although no details have been released on the latter aspect this is expected to include line of sight tracking linked with US missile defence and a new focus on using JORN for signals intelligence, initially through improved direction-finding algorithms. A small SIGINT cell is known to already exist in the JORN Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) at RAAF Base Edinburgh.

For surface vessel detection, the emphasis will be on Mode Selective Radar (MSR), allowing individual targets to be interrogated more closely, while the key objective to improve air performance will be on reducing internal noise and interference.

Australian content

The good news, as set out in the 2009 Defence Capability Plan (DCP), is that a very high level of Australian content is expected and expenditure is estimated at the middle of a $300-500 million band. The bad news is that first pass approval is placed between 2013 and 2015, the year of decision somewhere between 2015-2018, and Initial Material Release between 2018 and 2020.

Much is expected of Phase 6 and welcome continuity will be provided by the renewal of extendable five-year support contracts with Lockheed Martin Australia Electronic Systems (LMAES) for Radars 1 and 2 and BAE Systems Australia for the Alice Springs facility.

But concern is already being expressed about the ability of industry to retain the key engineering skills needed to implement the complex upgrades, given the gap between the conclusion of Phase 5 this year and the start of Phase 6 which may or may not conform to the DCP schedule, and the type of acquisition strategy, which has yet to be decided.

As recalled by LMAES Program Director Rodney Hislop: “When Phase 5 was introduced (in 2005) it took considerable time and effort to source and develop our technical capability, and nothing has changed since then in competing with the mining industry for these sorts of resources.

“This is an indigenously-developed technology and it’s not as if we can go to the US to buy one – Australia is a world leader in this field and we’ve got to do it ourselves.”

The Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO through the OTHR Systems Project Office (SPO) and DSTO through its Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division (ISRD) are understood to be seeking Ministerial approval for early work packages to assist in the retention of core skills, although with what success is not yet known.

Meanwhile early evidence of Phase 6 development activity comes from an area cleared of scrub and then compacted, about a kilometre from the Radar 2 transmit array. Occupied in December only by a dilapidated caravan and a pair of work gloves, the space will soon host a 100-plus MSR transmit array installed by antenna specialist Radio Frequency Systems Ltd as part of DSTO’s strategy to understand the ideal solutions for enhancing JORN sensitivity moving forward to Phase 6.

The practical objective is understood to determine whether greater use of signals bounced from the lower or E layer of the ionosphere would improve performance against slow-moving and surface targets.

On the ground

A visit to the LMAES-managed JORN Radar 2 Transmit and Receive sites about 350 km north of Kalgoorlie demonstrated how the company has successfully maintained a low turnover of JORN operational support staff despite isolation, extreme temperatures, floods, flies, and the presence of venomous snakes, spiders and scorpions.

Each site has two rotations of about 20 staff who are flown into Laverton from Kalgoorlie and then driven about 75 km to their respective sites, which themselves are 85 km east and west of each other along dirt roads edged by the burnt-out hulks of abandoned cars. LMESA personnel work two weeks on, two weeks off working two shifts while at site; subcontractor staff work two weeks on, one week off, and all put in 12-hour shifts, although they can be longer.

Pay rates are confidential, but top-level catering is provided with snacks available 24 hours a day, a wet bar is open for an hour every evening, and staff are accommodated in demountables with ensuite showers and toilets, airconditioning, satellite television and telephones. Mobile phones are not permitted on site to prevent electromagnetic (EM) interference and buildings are shielded with mesh windows and metal doors for the same reason  – in Transmit to prevent the entry of radiation; in Receive to prevent its exit.  

Although flooding has occasionally isolated the Receive facility, each site has an emergency airstrip which can operate at night and the Royal Flying Doctor Service can be quickly summonsed in case of emergency.

Each site is in essence a small, self-contained and hard-working community, dominated in the case of Transmit by two 0.4km-long 90 degree high and low band arrays that together provide 180 degree coverage in an arc from Geraldton in the east to Cairns in the west; and at Receive by two 3.2 km long arrays, each consisting of 480 dipole receive antenna all laser-aligned within 10mm of each other.

With the Laverton facilities producing their own electricity from diesel generators their biggest consumable is diesel fuel – lots of it. There are five 650 kilowatt generators at the Transmit site, supplied through four 75,000 underground tanks that are regularly topped up by road train. The Receive site is supplied through storage for 100,000 litres uses 3,500 litres a day and has storage for 75,000 litres. Together, Radar 1 at Longreach and Radar 2 and Laverton consume approximately 6 million litres of fuel a year.

LMAES has developed a very good working relationship with the local community and suppliers. This was evident when the local publican helped guide a fuel truck through flooded roads.

Availability

Although the JORN operational support contracts specify 98 per cent availability and the ability for each radar in the network to operate 24/7, due to the coverage overlap of the three-radar network an individual radar can be taken offline for maintenance, research and development, and system improvements. The system does not usually operate on a 24-hour basis.

The operating schedule is advised by the JCC at the request of the RAAF through 41 Wing in Williamtown – itself supported by a number of LMAES personnel – and Transmit is turned on first followed by Receive, a process that with fault-checking, atmospheric analysis and determining what transmit channels are available (JORN is always a secondary user of the HF spectrum) takes about two hours.

The JCC then takes over operation of the system and 41 Wing decides on areas of interest (each of which is referred to as a ‘tile’) on which the system will focus (referred to as a ‘dwell’). During a dwell the radar is configured to detect either maritime vessels or aircraft, but not both. However, the radar can be run in half-array configuration to allow it to dwell simultaneously doing different taskings.

Should circumstances require it, Operations Centres at both the Laverton and Longreach Receive sites are each capable of autonomously operating the entire JORN system although RAAF radar operators would need to be flown in, and this ability will also have been incorporated into the Alice Springs facility by mid-year.

Officially JORN allows the ADF to monitor air and sea activity north of Australia to 3,000 km from the radar site. This encompasses parts of Java, all of Papua New Guinea, and halfway across the Indian Ocean.

It would be an unusual defence establishment that was upfront about the performance of a strategic asset such as JORN, and other sources put the range at least 4,000 km from the Australian coastline depending on atmospheric conditions, with some capability as far north as the Korean peninsula.

Phase 6 is expected to improve target resolution but not range. The system currently provides target type, speed, heading and position accurate at best to about 7.5km (at worst about 75km) but not target height which is furnished by other more precise sensors, where available.

Support review

The OTHR SPO advised LMAES in September 2009 that its JORN operational support contract, running from July 2007 to June 2012, would be one of the first to be reviewed under the SRP. The incentive-based contract change proposal which went into effect last May will produce, in conjunction with a separate Commonwealth negotiation with BAE Systems Australia for the Alice Springs Jindalee facility, savings of 16 per cent over 10 years. LMAES shares in cost savings and can have its five-year contract extended year-by-year beyond its original term if RAAF-determined key performance indicators continue to be met.

Hislop is understandably guarded about same commercial aspects, but says LMAES instigated a top-to-bottom review of the business after receiving general targets from the Commonwealth, albeit without any reduction in the 98 per cent availability requirement.

“We engaged executive management early on, we identified the major cost drivers, we renegotiated supplier and subcontractor agreements, we changed maintenance regimes, increased in-house work on depot-level repairs, reduced an unnecessarily large spares inventory, and have even started replacing copper pipe in buildings with PVC units as an investment to reduce costs longer-term.

“The copper pipes may be a small example, but it illustrates our ability now to better handle obsolescence management. Under the new contract, with sufficient notice we can also move costs between years and apply underspends to system and infrastructure improvements.”

Proving there is no gain without pain, under the new arrangements the Commonwealth took over responsibility for fuel supply, thus saving the profit made by LMAES on deliveries.

However, this then resulted in a reduction in LMAES engineering headcount and thus in development capability.

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