Australia looks towards space with force restructure, investment and training
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
SitaWare software will be installed in C2 variants of the Australian Army’s Hawkei protected mobility vehicles. (Photo: Australian DoD)
Systematic has been named as a sole-source tenderer for Australian Defence Force Land 200 Phase 3 Tranche 1 Battle Management System – Command and Control (BMS-C2) software applications.
First pass approval of the tranche occurred in mid-July and on 28 July Systematic announced it had been asked to tender its SitaWare Headquarters and SitaWare Frontline BMS to support C2 functions for the Australian Army.
These functions are across a limited number of critical fixed, static and mobile locations for deployment at battlegroup level and above. This includes mounting SitaWare in C2 variants of the Australian Army’s Thales Bushmaster and Hawkei protected mobility vehicles, as well as Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons.
Progressing an artificial advantage: Battlefield AI and C4ISR support (Sponsored)
Australia greenlights Land 200 Phase 3 Battlefield Command System
SitaWare was originally purchased as a Track Management Capability in 2019 and announced as a BMS for the Australian Army in 2021. Army rapidly fielded SitaWare Headquarters, and deployed it on a number of major exercises, leveraging the platform’s variable message format gateway to ingest and share data around the battlespace.
Land 200 Phase 3 will supply BMSs and an integrated tactical communications network to the army. It will have a beyond-line-of-sight communications capacity, dismounted battlefield command system, radio modernisation, a data interface with joint and coalition systems and offer a technology refresh.
Australia had already decided to acquire Systematics’ SitaWare application for its BMS. For the past four years, joint headquarters have been using SitaWare, and more recently the army adopted it as part of an interim BMS capability.
Tranche 1 will integrate SitaWare into a wider range of hosting environments in fixed and deployable systems. Because these systems and subsystems are owned/managed by different project managers, integration will require a lot of collaboration.
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
The Portuguese company’s naval communications system is in service across more than a dozen countries. It has turned to its home nation for support in developing a new vehicle based C2 system.
The Vision4ce Deep Embedded Feature Tracking (DEFT) technology software is designed to process video and images by blending traditional computer vision with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to present actionable information from complex environments.
Persistent Systems has been cleared by National Security Agency (NSA) to transmit sensitive data on commercial networks. The devices are added to the NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) component list which also includes other companies’ products providing the same security.
The release of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) has been long promised as mid-year. It is possible it could be as early as 2 June although the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) continues to play its cards close to its chest.
Intelsat outlines how its multi-orbit SATCOM architecture is enhancing connectivity and resilience for special operations forces operating in degraded and contested environments.