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Australia exits BAMS
Australia has announced it is pulling out of the US Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) project with government citing a combination of programme slippage and workforce pressures as the basis for its decision.
Australia had been planning to acquire up to six Northrop Grumman RQ-4N Global Hawk unmanned air systems through membership of the BAMS project, but with formal government acquisition approvals repeatedly deferred over the past year.
Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon says that the “delivery schedule for the United States Navy’s BAMS program has slipped and resulted in the earliest possible in-service date for the BAMS aircraft moving out to 2015.
“Introducing such an advanced new aircraft at this time would have caused incredible workforce pressures on the Australian Defence Force, particularly given the requirement to transition the Air Force’s AP-3C Orion fleet to a new manned surveillance aircraft in the same time period”
Fitzgibbon claims the withdrawal decision represents “swift action to alleviate these transitional issues by declining the option to continue on with further collaboration with the United States Navy’s developmental program at this time.”
Australia has missed two deadlines from the US Navy for a formal commitment to the acquisition phase of the BAMS programme while also repeatedly sliding its own timeframes for what was intended as an “intermediate” approval to ratify the selection of the RQ-4N.
Fitzgibbon says “Defence will continue to closely monitor the progression of BAMS and other similar unmanned aircraft programs.” He says requirements for new “broader intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities will be fully covered” in a new national defence white paper due for release mid year.
Pre-empting potential adverse reactions in the US to the Australian decision, Fitzgibbon says “the Australian Government has every confidence that the United States Navy BAMS program will deliver a very capable uninhabited aircraft. However, at this stage in the development of this project, it is in Australia’s best interests to not knowingly risk incurring the unmanageable workforce chaos that would result.
“Blindly pushing on with the program would have placed a huge and unnecessary strain on our personnel in trying to potentially manage three separate airframes at the one time and I was not prepared to place this unnecessary burden on our men and women in uniform.”
By Peter La Franchi - Asia-Pacific Editor
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