Due to a growing operational demand to further secure its coastline borders, the Australian military may accelerate the timing of a potential RQ-4 Global Hawk buy by three years, possibly inking a deal by 2016, a senior industry official told Defense Daily.
The long-term Australian defense spending blueprint, known as the Austrialian Defence Capability Plan, issued in 2009 discusses a “procurement profile” of seven Broad Area Maritime Surveillance [BAMS] aircraft and two ground control stations, the official said in a June 9 briefing here. Those unmanned aircraft–built by Northrop Grumman [NOC]–would be deployed in the northwest quadrant of the country, according to the Australian proposal.
The Global Hawk variants being discussed as part of an Australian Foreign Military Sale (FMS) would be nearly identical to those that will be flown by the Navy, Northrop Grumman Director of BAMS Business Development Walt Kreitler said at the same briefing.
“There may be a few nuanced differences [the Australians] have at the national level, but fundamentally it will be [the Navy] jet,” he said. “We are working closely with the Australians. We are on the verge of signing an export license with them…and we anticipate some progress with that.”
The initial BAMS acquisition plan offered by Canberra had Northrop Grumman beginning deliveries in 2019, according to the official. That procurement in 2019 would have been followed by large-scale purchase of the Boeing [BA]-built P-8 Poseidon manned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, to supplement the new BAMS aircraft and their existing fleet of P-3 Orions, the first official said.
However, members of the Australian ministry of defence opted to flip that initial buy schedule, and buy the Poseidons in 2019 and the BAMS planes in 2020.
“As it works out, the Australians have a very serious problem with illegal immigration in the northwest part of the country…[and] the Australians do not have a lot of maritime surveillance capacity to detect them,” the official said.
That lack of maritime awareness led to Australian military officials being unable to detect a boat full of illegal immigrants attempting to cross into the country last December. That boat crashed into Christmas Island, in the Northwest territory of Australia, and 40 people were killed.
“So there was the political imperative to do something about that,” the official said. “The broadly understood metric is ‘maybe we need to get BAMS sooner.'” That said, an Australian FMS of BAMS could take place as early as 2016, three years ahead of what had been originally anticipated.
“It would be a lot sooner than 2019,” the official said. “It will be in the next couple of years.” But the official reiterated that no FMS would take place until the Navy version of BAMS hit initial operating capability, scheduled for 2015.
Once BAMS is fully operational, the Navy plans to field five orbits, or combat air patrols (CAP), stationed at various locations across the globe, flying 24 hours a day, beginning in 2015.
However, before any discussions can be had on bumping up the FMS schedule with Australia, company officials have a handful of challenges to clear.
One of those hurdles to an Australian FMS will be in developing an exportable version of the AESA-equipped version of the Global Hawk, due to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations statue governing all FMS, according to Kreitler.
When asked about the possible acceleration of the Australian sale, and the impact of ITAR on that effort, Kreitler said company officials have “made a lot of progress” on clearing the way for a foreign sale to the Australian military of the Navy-variant of the RQ-4 “in the very near term.”
Negotiations over the Global Hawk deal come on the heels of the Australians’ recent decision to buy 24 MH-60R helicopters for the Australian Navy (Defense Daily, June 17). The first two planes will be handed over to the Australians by fiscal year 2014, with the final tranche of the 24 helicopters arriving by FY ’18, H-60 Program Manager Capt. Dean Peters said last week.