As Australia moves towards production of guided weapons, the head of Defence’s Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise says he will have failed if all Australia ends up doing is assembling missiles from foreign-made components.
GWEO was launched in 2021 to boost Australian Defence Force (ADF) stocks of guided weapons and munitions and to promote their local manufacture.
However, the Defence Strategic Review released in April 2023, wasn’t impressed with GWEO’s progress. This led to Air Marshal Leon Phillips being appointed as the inaugural head of GWEO.
Air Marshal Leon Phillips said he was seeking to qualify Australian companies to build components which could also be exported into other countries’ supply chains.
Speaking at the NIOA industry dinner ahead of the Land Forces Expo in Melbourne, he said that Australia would stand up a manufacturing facility for the Kongsberg Joint Strike Missile (JSM) and Naval Strike Missile (NSM).
Production will begin in 2027 and reach full rate in 2028.
Next year, Lockheed Martin will produce the first Australian-made Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rocket for the Army’s new High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) vehicles, though with US-sourced components.
“We have not been idle. We have working hard to make real tangible steps to deliver real capability to the warfighter and establish manufacturing in this country,” he said.
Now, acquisition of precision guided munitions (PGM) from overseas and from domestic manufacture accounts for 12 per cent of Defence’s Integrated Investment Program (IIP).
Air Marshal Phillips said Defence was also looking to increase production of 155mm artillery ammunition.
GWEO involves more than just the production and acquisition of munitions.
Defence has to consider explosive ordnance certification particularly for manufacture of missiles, test and evaluation capabilities and research and development .
There’s also storage. Air Marshal Phillips said there was no point of buying a whole lot of weapons or producing them if there’s no suitable storage facilities.
“It would be a great travesty to secure weapons for overseas only to leave them overseas only to leave them in cashes overseas because we don’t have the storage capacity in this country,” he said.
He said Australia possessed a good capability to produce energetics such as rocket propellants and explosives, including TNT and RDX.
“But what we really don’t have is tip to tail guided missile development and production in this country,” he said.
“We have deliberately taken a crawl walk run approach and looked at a range of things where might lift our current industrial base from something that’s a near stretch like 155 production and gradually do more about it.
“Then obviously more complex things like world leading Naval Strike missile and JSM. So, we have a range of capabilities we are exploring.”
He said it was not just a case of assembling them together.
“If all we did when we are sitting here in five years is bolting components together off extant foreign production lines, I will have failed in our ability to uplift our sovereignty,” he said.
“If all I am doing is taking rocket motors our of the US and trying to assemble more rocket motors, I will be hitting the same constraint supply point that already exists.
“While we might start with assembly, very very quickly we are looking to qualify Australian suppliers and get them into the supply chain as a second sources of supply.”