Approximately 100 Army and Royal Australian Air Force personnel, together with 80 scientists and researchers from DST Group and their equivalents in the US, Canada, the UK, and NZ participated in CUE Adelaide 17 between November 20 and December 1.
The CUE (Contested Urban Environment) is a defence technology activity aimed at investigating new and
technologies which will both reduce risk to soldiers operating in an urban battlefield as well as maximising the protection of the civilian population.
CUE Adelaide 17 is part of the Contested Urban Environment Strategic Challenge, run under the Five Eyes Technical Co-operation Program (TTCP). This was the first field exercise run under the program, which has been run in the simulated since first launched in 2016. It used the facilities afforded by the vacant Adelaide Dental Hospital and nearby Adelaide Hospital, both of which have recently moved to new premises.
Australian lead for the event, DST Group’s CUE project lead Dr Justin Fidock said the goal of CUE Adelaide 17 was to determine what benefits can be derived from the integration of wide area aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), ground-based sensors and target sharing for troops operating in the difficult and complex urban environment.
“Basically we are integrating ground and air based sensors and using multiple methods to draw insights into technology, with a strong emphasis on qualitative data,” he said.
A range of technologies from Australia, the US and Canada were integrated into CUE Adelaide 17, including DST Group’s Defence Experimentation Airborne Platform (DEAP) aircraft, configured in the WASABI configuration, with Angel Fire 2 96-megapixel camera, a Selex Galileo picoSAR synthetic aperture radar and a Wescam MX-20HD full-motion, high-definition video sensor.
Other DST technologies included Evolutionary Layered ISR Integration EXemplar Architecture (ELIIXAR) ISR enterprise software, Social Media Analysis systems and the ability to track targets using existing public infrastructure, such as CCTV cameras.
“The challenge is to understand which sensors from which nation fit into the ISR ‘picture’ and how we push that down to the user,” Fidock said.
CUE 18 will be hosted in Canada and the 2019 event will take place in the US.