Australia's red dirt and spinifex outback, once amusingly described by British humourist Ben Elton as suitable only as a dingo's dunny, is turning into a major strategic asset, specifically the bit that comprises the Woomera Range Complex.
A Special Correspondent | Canberra
This covers 122,188 square kilometres of the South Australian outback, an area just a little bit smaller than England but more than 10 times the size of the US Military’s White Sands Missile Range, where the Trinity atomic bomb was let off in 1945.
During the election campaign, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned up in Adelaide to announce that the government had awarded Raytheon a $297 million contract to remediate and upgrade Woomera to make it the most advanced test range in the world.
“It will enable us to test and evaluate the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s performance, its ability to work and operate with other weapons systems. It will also be available to our allies, in particular the United States,” he said.
"With not much civilisation nearby, it’s electronically quiet and free of ubiquitous mobile phone emissions."
Well, surely the US has all the range facilities it could ever need to test F-35 to the maximum? Actually no, as it now emerges. Bill Redmond, head of the US Air Force operational test and evaluation centre in New Mexico, has outlined a whole range of emerging F-35 test challenges.
For starters, as he noted in a publicly released presentation, there are restrictions on trialling GPS jamming. Imagine the potential mayhem across nearby communities if everyone’s GPS suddenly went crazy.
Then there is this: “Full system employment constraints due to adversary exploitation concerns”. That means you can’t try out the full range of capabilities anywhere the Chinese or Russians or others might try to watch, which they surely would.
Redmond noted it was very difficult to generate the threat density and complexity to meet fifth-generation aircraft test requirements. That includes advanced surface-to-air missiles, adversary aircraft and digital radio frequency jamming.
“Raptors and Lightnings have voracious appetites – they chew through adversary with volume and velocity,” he said.
One solution, according to Redmond, would be to do this all through simulation but that’s an enormously complex task and still a long way away. In the Australian context think of integrating sims of F-35, Wedgetail, Hornets, Growlers, KC-30A, P-8A, Triton, new army UAVs, along with JORN, AEGIS, JTACs, satellite communications and imagery and a whole lot more.
Woomera already features a full range of instrumentation, including telemetry, optical and radar tracking and electronic warfare but Raytheon Australia managing director Michael Ward says they’re at the end of their useful life and unable to support future events involving complex networked aerospace systems.
What Raytheon is proposing through project Air 3024 is an integrated solution to create the world’s largest and most advanced overland test range. There will be plenty of work to go around, with Raytheon working with local firms including CEA, Daronmont and Cirrus.
A key piece of kit will be a trailer-mounted CEAFAR2-C radar, deployable around the range and capable of 36 degrees detection and tracking of test targets plus general air surveillance. So how well would CEAFAR work against low observable platforms such as the F-35? Like much about this very advanced test capability, we’ll probably never know.
Ward says their core architecture will allow for multiple complex tasks over a large area.
“Raytheon Australia’s range solution will play an essential role in the preparation of the ADF to meet current and emerging threats, and will support the safe co-existence of national security, heritage and economic interests in the Woomera Prohibited Area, within a secure and integrated range management framework,” he said.
The PM’s announcement cited a contract price of $297 million but there’s much more money than that planned for this work. The new Integrated Investment Program says $500-750 million over the 2018-26 timeframe. This of course isn’t just for aircraft – it’s just as useful for trials of land systems.
But for testing of air systems, it has some unique advantages. One is that it’s so big that curvature of the earth is apparent within the range template and that allows over-the-horizon trials.
With not much civilisation nearby, it’s electronically quiet and free of ubiquitous mobile phone emissions. Range security and remoteness from prying eyes isn’t a trivial issue. Though mining is permitted within the prohibited area, the government has made clear it won’t let Chinese interests get too close.
In 2009, it blocked Chinese state-owned Minmetals from acquiring the Prominent Hill mine as part of its $2.6 billion bid for Oz Minerals. The government cited national security concerns because of the mine’s proximity to Woomera.