The ADF isn’t nearly fast enough. It must rush into the cheap-drone revolution
The Australian Defence Force isn’t doing enough to adopt cheap drones. It needs to be training with these tools today, at every echelon, which it cannot do if it continues to drag its feet.
Cheap drones have changed the way armies fight on today’s battlefield, and Australia is already years behind in adopting this new technology. In July 2023, the government’s Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA) laid out the challenge to industry to develop sovereign small drones for ‘training, surveying, photographic, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance purposes.’ Noticeably, strike was not listed as a requirement. Following a fly-off a year ago this month, three vendors signed $2.2 million contracts to provide 3,000 drones each weighing less than 2 kilograms and having a range of 5 kilometres, all for a price of $5,000 each.
This is a step in the right direction, but it is a baby step. Our adversaries aren’t being so timid. Neither are our allies. In the time ASCA has taken to admire the problem, Ukraine has built an entirely domestic drone industry and is now iterating thousands of cheap drones each month. Other Baltic countries have become fast followers. Countries without large defence primes are already producing lethal cheap drones with four times the range ASCA asked for, at a fifth of the price.
According to the World Bank, Australia had the world’s 14th largest economy in 2023; Ukraine’s ranking was only 57th. Ukraine is also fighting a war for survival. There is simply no excuse why Australia can’t develop cheap drones faster. Ukraine has no advantage over Australia, except that it lacks the illusion there is plenty of time to do this.
Cheap drones have changed the character of war in as machine guns did more than a century ago. While they will not replace tanks or artillery, as some have predicted, they are ubiquitous on today’s battlefields. They are revolutionising intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, all tasks ASCA is focused on. They are also revolutionising strike. Cheap drones augment major platforms in fascinating, and lethal, ways—if our militaries know how to use them.
The unmatched proliferation of cheap drones on today’s battlefield has been driven by the same forces which created the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-19th century, British economist William Jevons identified that, counter-intuitively, improved efficiency in coal engines drove not a need for fewer of them and lower demand for the fuel but an increase in that demand. Dubbed ‘Jevons paradox’, this same underlying force is accelerating today’s ‘fourth industrial revolution’. The paradox helped make computers logarithmically more powerful, while also vanishingly lighter, which has given rise to the cheap drones that are now infesting the field of battle.
This is nothing like the bespoke, lumbering, high-end acquisition process that defence is accustomed to. It requires a completely different development and acquisition philosophy. Such programs as AUKUS Pillar 1 should continue to build their Birkin bag platforms, but at the same time, the ADF needs to also embrace the Shein of strike. These new, fast-fashion tools empower the smallest echelons of the battlefield in ways most Western forces haven’t begun to understand. We need to start building them and training with them immediately.
Cheap drones aren’t only quadcopters, either. There are ground drones employed in logistics, medical evacuation and mine laying. Meanwhile Ukraine’s sea drones—uncrewed boats—have terrorised the Russian fleet so badly it had to abandon its ports in Crimea for the eastern fringes of the Black Sea. While questions remain on just when Australia will receive how many of the AUKUS Pillar 1 submarines, for the cost of a single Virginia-class submarine Australia could buy more than 24,000 of the Ukrainian-made Sea Baby maritime strike drones, which have a range of over 1,000 kilometres. That’s deterrence by denial that Australia could be manufacturing on its own within the next two years.