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Nestled between cafes and Pilates studios in Sydney’s inner west, the unassuming brick building has no external signage and isn’t identified on Google Maps. A passer-by would have no inkling that, inside this secret factory, some of the world’s most advanced military technology is being created. This is where United States defence technology firm Anduril is manufacturing the Ghost Shark, an autonomous submarine drone. David Goodrich, Anduril Asia Pacific’s executive chairman and chief executive, gave this masthead a tour of the facility this week.
Having opened only a few weeks ago, you can almost smell the paint still drying on the walls inside. Electrical engineers tinker with components as a crane lifts part of the Ghost Shark’s aluminium skeleton. A 20-metre-long tank, which looks like a family swimming pool, is used to test how the vessels perform when submersed, with help from underwater cameras. Totally off limits to those without a security clearance, the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, is where the Ghost Shark’s military secrets are held and discussed.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy unveil the Ghost Shark.Credit: Janie Barrett
The black, boxy vessels don’t look impressive on the outside; in fact, they resemble a beached whale more than a shark. Inside, however, they are packed with ultrasophisticated equipment. “It uses extremely powerful AI to sense, detect and make decisions on its own,” Goodrich says, explaining how the vessels operate without any crew on board. Capable of reconnaissance, surveillance and strike missions, they are designed to carry out the “dull, dirty and dangerous” work that submarines would otherwise carry out.
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Co-founded by entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, Anduril specialises in the use of artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous technology. Goodrich, who previously worked as a strategic negotiation adviser on acquisitions for the Department of Defence, says when the firm opened in Australia in 2022 he and his colleagues set themselves a challenge. “We asked: ‘What would be the most audacious thing we could do here that solves a problem for Defence?’ And we came up with developing an underwater drone. We said we could do it in 3½ years which is a ridiculously short timeframe. Everyone laughed at us … This was an utterly new way of thinking for Defence.”
The gamble paid off. After co-funding the testing and development of the technology, the federal government this week announced it will spend $1.7 billion to buy dozens of Ghost Sharks for the Royal Australian Navy. The first is scheduled to enter service in January. Standing in front of a Ghost Shark amid pelting rain at the navy’s Garden Island base on Wednesday, Defence Minister Richard Marles described the vehicle as the “highest tech capability in the world”.
A week earlier, China’s People’s Liberation Army put its military might on display at a lavish ceremony in Beijing, including revealing two new classes of advanced underwater drones. Marles insisted, however, that Australia’s locally developed and locally made technology could not be beaten. “I mean, we are really confident in standing here today and saying that Ghost Shark is the best underwater autonomous military capability on the planet,” he declared.
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The vehicle’s exact specifications and capabilities, including how far it can travel, are being kept secret to prevent other militaries from copying the technology.
“It goes a long way,” Marles told Channel Nine’s Today, commenting on its range. “And if you really press me on that, I’d say it goes a really, really long way.”
A few days earlier, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy and Air Force Chief Air Marshal Stephen Chappell travelled to a testing range in Woomera, South Australia, to observe the first public test flight of the MQ-28A Ghost Bat. While the Ghost Shark prowls the ocean’s depths, the Ghost Bat is designed to survey the skies. Like the Ghost Shark, the drone has been designed and built in Australia. That’s no small thing. The Ghost Bat is the first military combat aircraft to be designed, engineered and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years.
China shows off its AJX002 underwater drone in the victory in WWII military parade held last week. Credit: AP
Developed by Boeing in Australia, the autonomous drone is known as a “loyal wingman” because it is designed to operate alongside traditional crewed aircraft. “The Ghost Bat has the potential to turn a single fighter jet into a fighting team, with advanced sensors that are like hundreds of eyes in the sky,” Conroy said in June. The government is expected to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the Ghost Bat, on top of the $1 billion it has already invested, to get it ready to enter military service.
The Australian Defence Force (ADF), it seems, is finally entering the age of drone warfare after years of being lambasted as a laggard. Almost a decade ago, former defence force chief Angus Houston warned that the ADF was “underdone” in the emerging drone technologies that had been used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “If you look forward, 50 years from now … I think all the platforms that will be out there on the battlefield, the vast majority of them, will be unmanned, and we need to basically embrace that future with enthusiasm and with a great deal of innovation because, if we don’t, we’re going to get left behind, and we’re going to be caught short,” Houston said in a 2016 speech.
Boeing’s Ghost Bat is among several military drone projects in Australia.Credit: Department of Defence
According to most military experts, that’s exactly what happened. “The ADF has been extraordinarily resistant to autonomous systems,” retired army major general Mick Ryan told this masthead in 2023. “We’re a long way behind the rest of the world and there are lots of Australian companies that can do this.” Ryan, a strategic adviser to drone and defence companies, says Australia’s military has been plagued by a deep-seated bias in favour of traditional, crewed platforms such as submarines, frigates, bombers and helicopters. Australia only introduced an armed drone into service – the US-made Switchblade 300 – this year, over two decades after the US military began using killer drones.
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Michael Shoebridge, a former senior defence official, says: “We have companies here making some of the world’s best drone systems, but the Defence Department has refused to buy them. All the money is locked up in a slow-moving, constipated procurement process with a focus on exquisite, crewed platforms that take decades to deliver. They have an outdated peacetime mentality.”
While welcoming the progress with Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark, Shoebridge says it is hyperbole to argue that the ADF has become a global leader in uncrewed, autonomous systems. “It’s more like we’ve poked our head out of the turtle shell,” he says. “We’re at least 10 years behind China in this area.”
Drones have played a pivotal role in the war in Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of the neighbouring country in 2022. In June, Ukraine revealed it had used 117 attack drones to target airfields deep inside Russian territory in a spectacular mission known as Operation Spider’s Web. Ukraine said the secret mission damaged or destroyed 41 Russian planes, including bombers that carry strategic cruise-missiles. “The Russia-Ukraine War has seen the rise of an array of military capabilities – including the use of drones en masse as one-way attack systems – previously only used in small quantities or considered in theory,” Michael Horowitz, senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote following the operation.
Shoebridge praises Britain for announcing this week that it will begin producing thousands of Ukraine-designed interceptor drones, many of which it will provide to Ukraine for its war effort. “They’ve realised how far behind they are, and are doing something about it,” he says. “We do not seem to have grasped the idea that partnering with Ukraine on cutting-edge technology will not just help Ukraine, it will help us.”
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The Albanese government says it is investing $10 billion in drone and counter-drone technology over the next 10 years, including over $4 billion for aerial drones. The Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator, a new agency set up by the government in 2023 to spur defence innovation, announced in May that it will invest in the “development of medium-range precision loitering munition systems that carry a kinetic payload and have the precision strike capabilities of a guided missile”. The OWL-B, an armed combat drone being developed by Perth company Innovaero with government funding, is in the advanced stages of testing.
Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, praises the government for boosting investment in drone technology but urges it to go further and faster. “We need to ramp up the acquisition of mass, replaceable technologies that can be acquired cheaply and quickly,” he says. As well as large, expensive platforms like the Ghost Bat, he wants the ADF to procure thousands of cheaper, smaller, locally made drones that can act in swarms to deter an adversary. Shoebridge agrees, saying: “We need to be pursuing affordable, replaceable mass. Australia considers dozens of drones impressive while China, Russia and Ukraine are thinking in the thousands.”
China’s “robot wolves” on display at last week’s military parade.Credit: Nine News
Davis points out that liberal democracies such as Australia are developing autonomous military systems while complying with their ethical and legal responsibilities. “That is a constraint; it slows us down,” he says. “For adversaries like China and Russia they have no such constraint. They can move a lot faster.”
As Australia makes advances with aerial drones and uncrewed submarines, Davis says autonomous tanks and other military vehicles will be another key source of innovation in the coming years. So will robots used on the battlefield alongside human soldiers. At last week’s military parade in Beijing, China attracted attention by showing off new “robot wolves”. Keen-eyed observers noticed they were mounted on the back of a moving vehicle rather than marching themselves, suggesting the wolves may not yet be ready for a conflict scenario.
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