The adaptive, risk-reducing process known as spiral development will increasingly feature in Australian military acquisition, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy told the ASPI Defence Conference on Thursday.
A rapid, ongoing project for counter-drone capability was an example of the policy, Conroy said.
In spiral development, a system’s features are added or changed incrementally, as program managers and engineers avoid biting off more than they can chew. Fewer problems should arise than in attempting to achieve all goals in one go. Spiral development also eases adaptation as development proceeds.
The Royal Australian Air Force has favoured that approach for the MQ-28 Ghost Bat, a fighter-like drone that Boeing is developing in Australia in partnership with the service. In 2022 the RAAF’s then manager for the program said the plan was to revise the design every two years.
In December the government said it would buy a prototype for a new Ghost Bat version called Block 3. Boeing this month revealed that this would have a larger wing – an incremental change in the design.
Conroy said on Thursday, ‘You’ll see more and more projects where we’re looking at spiral development. And the best example of that is Land 156,’ the project for fielding systems for protecting against drones. ‘And I want to pay tribute to Army and CASG [the Defence acquisition organisation] in driving that process, where we recognise counter-drone technologies are evolving at a rapid rate.’
Adapting to meet changing threats is another reason for incremental, iterative development. Conroy referred to and rejected a proposal by Strategist contributor Timothy Millar this week that the government urgently acquire a large stock of cheap interceptors to deal with cheap strike drones.
‘If we just bought 10,000 counter-drone interceptors and put them on the shelf, they’d be out of date within three months, and we just would have blown hundreds of millions of dollars,’ the minister told ASPI’s conference.
So there would be ‘spiral development where we get the architecture in place and we acknowledge a funding line to do spiral development to introduce new capabilities as they develop, as they become mature,’ he said. ‘So that’s the way we manage that. Because I recognise that technology doesn’t stand still. But through spiral development and prioritising open architecture we can do much better.’
ASPI analyst Malcolm Davis last year urged the forthcoming Defence Delivery Agency to adopt spiral development for rapid capability acquisition.
‘That means challenging ossified regulatory and bureaucratic practices and being prepared to embrace change to workplace culture, a challenge confronting defence industry in Europe,’ Davis wrote then.
Spiral development is sometimes associated with minimum viable capability – aiming at fielding something that’s good enough rather than ideal. The Land 156 project has been tasked with achieving a minimum viable capability as an early step.
The Defence Delivery Agency will be formed in part by consolidating other acquisition organisations, including the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group.
