A key cog in the AUKUS defense industrial base is taking shape in Australia

RAPCON-X is SNC’s rapidly configurable platform for aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and includes the open-architecture SNC TRAX common data fabric. (SNC photo)

Aerospace and defense company SNC established a new presence in Australia, expanding on its existing presence in the US and UK, to facilitate closer partnerships and technology integration in support of the countries’ AUKUS trilateral security partnership. With an emphasis on AUKUS Pillar 2, SNC AUS is focused on development and delivery of a greater cross section of technologies beyond submarines. SNC AUS, a subsidiary of SNC located in Adelaide, South Australia, at Lot Fourteen – an aerospace and defense technology hub supporting 160+ organizations – will expand on SNC’s current work to deliver future capabilities to the Australian defense sector.

Key capabilities include common electronic warfare (EW) architecture, digital radio frequency (RF), manned and unmanned ISR sensors and platform integration, and net-enabled solutions like Digital Grid and SNC TRAX – all to be managed from SNC AUS.

Breaking Defense discussed these topics with SNC’s Senior Vice President of Strategy Stu Wildman and SNC AUS Director Josh Rooney.

Describe the importance of the Australia/UK/US (AUKUS) partnership, and the importance of AUKUS Pillar 2 to Australia’s defense industrial base.

Wildman: AUKUS Pillar 1 is an opportunity for the US, UK and Australia to collaborate on submarines and provide better technologies across the three partner nations. The idea behind Pillar 2 is that if we’re able to share this level of submarine technology, then a lot of other types of technologies ought to be shared, as well. Why be constrained by the traditional guidelines for certain technologies?

Pillar 2 allows us to have conversations at a company level. Companies can talk to universities and have conversations at both academic and manufacturing levels. A lot of the constraints around sharing original ideas are now a lot easier to deal with. I can talk about it to people who are bringing new energy into the market.

Australia is focused on increasing its ability and knowledge in defense, which is now beginning to grow universally across the three countries. That is the amazing thing about the opportunity of Pillar 2. A bright idea that was created at MIT or in an SNC lab could be executed in a laboratory in a school in Adelaide. That’s a big deal.

Rooney: Unshackling some of the rules and constraints around what we do will provide us the ability to undertake some synchronous development of our EW and Digital Grid JADC2 capabilities at the speed of relevance. It’s needed for any threat that emerges in front of us. It will allow us to keep pace and outpace our adversary because we are doing it every day, 24 hours a day, not just a 9-5 shift.

The AE-4500 ESM system, installed on crewed and uncrewed platforms, provides radar detection and collection capabilities. (SNC image)

Before we discuss your new subsidiary in Australia, tell us about the work you do there now in the maritime and C5ISR areas.

Rooney: SNC has capabilities on a lot of ISR platforms coming into the Australian market, and all the ISR/EW platforms for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) have some form of SNC capability integrated into them.

What Australia has created is a common EW-architecture thread that runs across all these platforms. That puts SNC AUS in a unique position to deliver upon our promises to the Commonwealth to provide the sustainment and continued support for those systems so that a warfighter is in a position to be able to use them when they’re needed.

That’s the key foundational growth of SNC AUS, getting that position set up so we can support the warfighter and regional partners through their needs – that being the US, New Zealand and the UK, all those regional partners who utilize SNC capabilities. They can all be assured that we have their back if there is a conflict in the near region.

Wildman: The way SNC builds systems is what ties this all together. The systems that we’re building and delivering for Australia have built-in upgradeability interfaces. The people using them can add new functionality by upgrading software, by changing out some of the components and so forth.

SNC TRAX is a good example of this. It’s important to create an open-architecture environment that promotes scalable growth for your products. SNC TRAX provides a common data fabric so third parties have fast access and can upgrade hardware and software easily to reconfigure platforms quickly. Over the years, SNC TRAX has proven to be a tool that integrates seamlessly with over 60 platforms and has made a big difference in the way forces can communicate across military branches and countries. Because SNC TRAX software is adaptable, it creates a gateway network.

In Australia, when they take over the maintenance and support of this equipment, any kind of planned improvements or upgrades, Australia can actually execute on those themselves. They can use their government laboratories and people to design upgrades to the solution. Those upgrades are equally applicable to the US or the UK, and can be packaged, integrated and sold among the three nations. That’s a revenue stream for them.

Rooney: Australia is doing unique things down here based upon what some people call the ‘bad neighborhood’ that we potentially live in. We do some unique things with the electronic warfare spectrum; if the US is here working with us, we can then adapt those signals and load them onto their systems so they can have the latest capabilities for the area of operation that they’re going to be flying in.

Let’s move on to the launch of your Australian subsidiary, SNC AUS, which will eventually sustain all the ISR/EW programs we discussed earlier, while pushing forward on Australian supply chain Pillar 2 efforts.

Rooney: We’re creating this to undertake those sustainment efforts in a very intentional way so that we are building up the office as the technology and other infrastructure is also being established. By the end of the year, we will be able to undertake on-aircraft and down-to-card-and-component-level repair of SNC systems. This will continue to grow given all the different systems we have in-country between SNC TRAX software and integration services, as well as airborne EW systems.

We need to supply and provide the development efforts behind that, along with the FSRs (field service representatives) that are needed to make sure that remains robust for the Australian Defence Force. We are working hand in glove with the Commonwealth of Australia to make sure that our technicians are at the edge and able to deliver as required next to those platforms of importance.

We don’t want to be sitting in a building an hour down the road so when they call, we have to send somebody out. We are working, as I said, very closely with the Commonwealth so that we can provide support at the speed of relevance that’s needed.

How will SNC’s presence in Australia help the Commonwealth expand its domestic supply chain and grow the AUKUS coalition?

Rooney: It’s probably not what SNC will provide to the Australian industrial base. It’s what SNC can identify within the Australian industrial base that can provide those assured supply chains and what we can deliver back into that. These tenable logistics lines of communication are going to be put under a lot of pressure. We’re going to need to provide those assured supply chains, and that will happen by us being able to create a lot of those components here in Australia.

We are working to identify those potential suppliers now. PCB (printed circuit board) manufacturers are a good example. I met with one recently to identify who is here that can do the work at the skill level and quantity that is required for the high-end EW systems that we produce. If we can do that, we can potentially provide some of the spares pooling that can actually be generated here in Australia. This allows us to push into that supply chain and make sure that we’re not going to get caught in a time when those logistics lines of communications are tethered.

Wildman: Here’s an example related to the technological demands in Australia to service what’s currently in Australia versus the technical demands and constraints in the US. A lot of our technologies use FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays. They are very compact, recompilable, reconfigurable pieces of silicone, and they’re the technologies that are in your cell phone and car.

In the US, FPGA experts who know how to program and work in that environment are extremely in demand. I met a number of companies when I went down to Australia recently that had no more than about 60 employees, but some of them had more FPGA programmers than we have at SNC. They actually have more people who are skilled in that technology than are available to us because in the US the hiring environment for that skill is so competitive that those FPGA experts are being pulled off to the car industry, the satellite industry, and so forth.

So, there’s just a pool of people who are available to work on projects in Australia that aren’t available in the US.

Final thoughts?

Wildman: SNC is a trusted partner, committed to the Commonwealth, the ADF and the individual states. Currently we’re working in South Australia, and have interests in Victoria, Queensland and elsewhere.

What it means to be a partner is we’ll bring technologies and opportunities to everybody who wants to work with us with the goal of making things efficient and accessible for Australia, the UK and the US. Our job is to facilitate the opportunities, inject technology when it makes sense and be somebody that the Commonwealth can consider to be fully invested in the goals of the Commonwealth. We’re doing everything we can to set up an organization to do that.

Rooney: SNC is the only prime contractor working for the ADF that covers the entirety of the ISR/EW fleet. SNC is here to support the Commonwealth and our regional partners within the industry across the entire breadth of those capabilities.