Just a year after announcing the inaugural AUKUS Innovation Challenge, which focussed on Electronic Warfare, the three AUKUS members have launched their second challenge, this one focussed on undersea Command, Control and Communications (C3). Entries for Stage 1 of this challenge close on 28 April.
If they eventually secure a contract with one of the AUKUS partners, entrants will win a share of US$8 million ($12.45 million). Between them the UK, USA and Australia expect to fund between three and ten proposals.
Earlier this year Defence awarded $8 million in contracts to two Australian Canberra-based SMEs: Advanced Design Technology (ADT) and Penten, to develop new Electronic Warfare (EW) capabilities.
Last year’s event seemed to prove the model and process for the Innovation Challenge so that has remained largely unchanged for this year.
This year’s AUKUS Maritime Innovation Challenge aims to deliver five capability effects in undersea communications, one of the most difficult technology areas:
- Near real-time communications between Undersea Vehicles (UVs)
- Near real-time communications from UVs to a Command and Control (C2) or Battle Management System (BMS)
- Near real-time communications between seabed systems, UVs, C2 systems and BMS
- A robust C2 system that can allocate appropriates asset to tasks in a dynamic and complex environment
- Optimal bandwidth utilisation and effective range in a contested and congested environment
Undersea Capabilities is listed as one of six AUKUS Pillar II technology priorities and the challenge is run by the three partners as a two-stage competition by the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA) in Australia, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in the USA and the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA).
In Stage 1, which closes on 28 April, submissions will be evaluated for their desirability (is this a good idea?) and technical merit (is it actually do-able?) by evaluators from each of the three AUKUS partners – all the submissions will be evaluated by all of the partners. Successful submissions from Stage 1 may be invited by any of the partners to submit a more detailed, costed proposal in Stage 2.
If entrants sign a contract with an AUKUS partner following Stage 2, they’ll be required to develop their technology to at least a prototype level and then demonstrate it at a multi-national maritime exercise around the end of 2026.
“Final contract deliverables may be shared by all three AUKUS partners, to enable the three partners to consider their suitability for any future use or possible exploitation by one or more AUKUS partners,” the solicitation documentation says. “However, no such future use or exploitation is guaranteed to occur.”
The Stage 1 decision will be released on 26 May 2025; if entrants are subsequently invited, the Stage 2 submission portal opens on 9 June and closes on 7 July and a decision on which companies will advance to contract is due on 18 August.
The AUKUS partners want innovations that can synchronise and team multiple undersea systems, starting with a central C2 node: this will plan a mission for a network of Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) – and the solicitation document notes this mission may need to be communicated to multiple UUVs over a variety of ranges.
The UUVs need to talk to each other and to the C2 system – a UUV could fail. or the mission could change: all elements need to be kept updated. And the communications and data must be kept secure as well.
The UUVs will need to know where they are and when they are there: timing is the basis of accurate navigation. And they live in the real world: -they need to negotiate anything from drifting containers to cast-off fishing nets. And there just might be a need for one of them to send a lot of unexpected data back to the C2/BMS node across a long distance and with minimum chance of the message being intercepted.
Nothing about underwater communications is easy.
But the biggest challenge faced by the AUKUS partners will be funding: the inaugural Innovation Challenge only funded eight of the 173 entrants from across the three partner nations, and just two of the three Australian companies who were successful in Stage 1. The competition was run to find low cost, disposable, high volume and highly autonomous electromagnetic technology that can detect enemy actions or protect against them, according to the UK Ministry of Defence (UK MoD).
Adelaide-based Inovor Technologies successfully developed an undisclosed EW capability but has not yet been awarded a contract. The company declined to comment but it looks as if there simply wasn’t enough money to fund their proposal as well.
If last year’s competition was worth $8 million to the Australian winners alone, and this year’s competition is worth just $12.45 million for entrants from all three countries, then funding has become a sharper issue.