One of the great geopolitical challenges facing Australia is keeping ahead of trends and threats to our vast landmass, exclusive economic zone and regional areas of interest. This requires persistent multi-domain intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).
Our current ISR capability includes RAAF crewed and uncrewed aircraft, warships and patrol boats – all able to see no more than a small part at any time. There’s also the Jindalee over-the horizon radar network (JORN), able to sense far out into the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago, an impressive and world-leading capability but with limited access to areas of interest.
In other words, Australia currently lacks deep sovereign capability for persistent satellite observation, which hinders our ability to detect changes over time and draw useful conclusions which may indicate an emerging regional trend or threat. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) currently has no earth observation satellites of its own and relies on imagery sourced from allies and commercial providers. Similarly, the ADF relies on the US WGS network and commercial operators.
Some change to this capability gap is underway. The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) lists priorities for an integrated focused ADF, including space and cyber capabilities to strengthen situational awareness and the ability to project force and create decision advantage. That ties in with another priority – greater ability to target adversaries at long range to deter any attempts to project power against Australia.
For space capabilities, the NDS cites a need for enhanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and also the ability to counter emerging space threats. One strand of that is greater investment in geospatial intelligence capabilities.
The 2024 Integrated Investment Plan (IIP) goes a little further, saying the government will invest $9–12 billion on enhanced space capabilities to provide “resilient communications, surveillance and reconnaissance”.
While the current IIP outlines projects for enhancing satellite communications and measures to enhance tracking of objects in space and space control, it doesn’t speak to enhanced surveillance and reconnaissance. Updated NDS and IIP documents are set for release next year under the two-year cycle of refreshing key strategic guidance in the fast changing global strategic landscape.
In 2017, Project DEF 799 was launched to modernise Australia’s space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. The government invested $500 million to improve Defence access to commercial satellites to provide information to government agencies.
“DEF 799 is an operational capability delivered in 2021 that provides commercial imagery to support Defence and the National Intelligence Community,” a Defence spokesman told ADM. “Defence will continue to build its space-based imagery coverage through to 2040 to enhance monitoring of the Indo-Pacific region and support national and regional security.”
Capabilities delivered through DEF 799 include a Ground Station Operations Centre at RAAF Base Edinburgh in South Australia, five antennas across three sites at RAAF Bases Woomera and Tindal plus Christmas Island. Defence has contracted commercial imagery providers.
Meanwhile the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) is the lead agency for geospatial data, information and intelligence within the ADF and the Australian National Intelligence Community.
Additionally, in 2021 the government launched Joint Project 9102 to acquire a sovereign satellite communications capability by way of an unspecified number of satellites in geostationary orbit. This was to cost up to $5 billion with capability delivered in the 2030s. A revised project is now under consideration, perhaps using satellites in low earth orbit.
Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to strengthen Australia’s ISR capability beyond the above investments. Access to up-to-date Earth observation (EO) data would supplement all of the above extant platforms and programs and greatly improve Australia’s ability to keep ahead of changing geopolitical threats and security challenges.
Space company Planet is offering just this through its constellation of EO satellites which can image every part of Earth’s landmass nearly every day. Planet, founded in 2010 by former NASA scientists, has accumulated almost a decade of imagery archives, with more added every day.
“We are constantly collecting that data and have done so for many years,” explained Tom Farrow, Planet’s Brisbane-based head of strategic business development for the Asia-Pacific. “That gives us the ability to train algorithms and AI on top of our existing archive to create solutions for the government that extract insights from our persistent broad area coverage.”
This would give the Australian government a greater monitoring capability to stay ahead of regional geopolitical changes and challenges.
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