Ghost Shark and AUKUS

SUBJECTS: Ghost Shark; AUKUS 

JOURNALIST: Minister and Chief of Navy and David and CDS, thank you very much for the invitation. A quick question, if I may. You’ve said that this is the first facility. When do you expect to announce the others? When are you going to build them? 

MINISTER FOR DEFENCE INDUSTRY PAT CONROY: Well, that’s actually a question for Anduril, because that was their announcement. So, I’ll invite David to talk about all the wonderful things he’s doing. 

DAVID GOODRICH: Thank you, Minister. Anduril is a company that is expanding at a rapid rate of notes. We have opened our first facility, our Ghost Shark facility, here in Australia. We are very keen to contribute further to the Australian industrial ecosystem. And we are looking forward to working with the government on a range of capabilities, including in the GWEO space, in the next few years. So, thank you for that question. 

JOURNALIST: I have a question, again, for the CEO. I wonder – just a very simple question, really. Can you give us a bit of a description of what this vehicle achieves, what it actually achieves for the Navy and the benefits it delivers? 

DAVID GOODRICH: Sure. The Ghost Shark is an extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle that can undertake ISR and strike missions. It can go a very long way. And I think as the Deputy Prime Minister said, if you push me, I’ll say a very, very long way. There’s obviously a lot of capability that we can’t talk about. But as the Chief of Navy said, the Ghost Shark provides the Royal Australian Navy with the ability to start teaming crewed and uncrewed assets, which will deliver an asymmetric, disruptive capability to the ADF. 

This capability has been developed in partnership with DSTG, with the Royal Australian Navy and with the Advanced Strategic Capability Accelerator, and that partnership has enabled us to understand the missions that are of value to our nation. An autonomous undersea capability is a capability that can do the dull, the dirty and the dangerous activities where we don’t want to put our sailors in harm’s way. 

But I might hand over to CN to kind of add a little bit more colour and movement to that. 

MARK HAMMOND: Intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, strike. There are some of the mission sets. More to come. As David said, there are some things we don’t want to talk about, but what you see here is something that can operate unseen, undetected underwater over extended periods for extended lengths of time. 

JOURNALIST: Your point about it heading to a hybrid fleet – crewed and uncrewed – as we move forward, will it be predominantly uncrewed, this fleet that you talk about, as technology improves? Is that where we’re headed eventually? 

MARK HAMMOND: I think the inevitable advantages of scale will drive us in that direction because I think the future involves swarms of uncrewed systems operating and teaming with crewed capabilities, which are exquisite. They take a long time to build and acquire and they’re in service for an extended period of time. I don’t expend – expect the first Ghost Shark to be in service for 30 years; I expect our crewed submarines to be in service for 30 years. So, we’ll play to the strengths of both crewed and uncrewed systems and maximise the opportunities through [indistinct] into the future. 

JOURNALIST: One for the minister – 

MINISTER CONROY: And I just want to add one more thing to that. As the Chief of Navy said, this will do intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and strike a very long way from Australia. It has that capability, and the strike element is a critical part of that. 

The other part is it’s been designed to fit into a 14-foot shipping container, a standard shipping container. And it’s designed to be launched from both vessels and from wharves – any wharf in Australia with a shipping container near it could be a launch point for a Ghost Shark. And that’s a really important thing to emphasise with this capability, is that any shipping container near the water in Australia could have a Ghost Shark in it. And that’s an important deterrence factor. 

JOURNALIST: Are you concerned by the AUKUS submarine timetable, given the US has just signed a deal with South Korea to help them build nuclear submarines? 

MINISTER CONROY: I am very confident about the AUKUS timeline. And as President Trump said, standing next – or sitting, rather, next to Prime Minister Albanese in the White House, AUKUS and the submarine delivery is going full steam ahead. I’m very confident. 

JOURNALIST: You don’t think there to be any delays? 

MINISTER CONROY: I’m very confident. President Trump has said full steam ahead, and we’re getting on with doing it. And we’ve hit every single milestone of AUKUS. Yesterday, USS Vermont, a Virginia-class submarine, arrived at HMAS Sterling for the next submarine maintenance period. Every milestone is being hit, and both systems are, in the words of President Trump, going full steam ahead. 

JOURNALIST: [Indistinct]. Can I ask what interest there is from overseas and, in particular, Japan, in the Ghost Shark? 

MINISTER CONROY: We’re – earlier this year, we announced the Australian Defence Strategic Sales Office, which is all about having government partner with industry on sales campaign – sales campaigns, rather, to sell Australian products overseas to grow defence exports and to grow defence jobs in Australia. We’ve had tremendous success with exporting Boxer Combat Reconnaissance vehicles to Germany, which is the largest export deal ever, defence export deal ever. But we’ve just announced the Arctic Over the Horizon Radar deal with Canada, which will, when it comes into contract, will surpass Boxer. And Ghost Shark is one of the future campaigns. So we’re working very hard with Anduril to identify markets where this can possibly be sold to. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty of that because we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. But many partners are very interested in it. And in my visit to Washington a couple of weeks ago, I briefed the Trump administration about it as well. 

JOURNALIST: You said you expect to see the first Ghost Shark in the water by January. How long will it take for the second and third to get in? Is it going to be as quick as a process? And can you give us a rough idea of how many overall the government is committed to? 

MINISTER CONROY: Well, we don’t talk about exact numbers because that’s significant and sensitive information to adversaries. But I can say the initial order is in the dozens of these, so a significant number. And we expect the production line to go at pace. As David said, three months from contract signatures to the first being delivered. 

I’m not sure if David wanted to talk more about that. 

DAVID GOODRICH: Thank you, Minister. The Ghost Sharks will continue to roll off the production line at pace. We are obviously not in a position to share the exact numbers of those, as much as we would like to, and I know that you would like us to. But this is a production facility which is designed to meet the needs of the Royal Australian Navy, both in peacetime and in wartime and our allied partners. 

We have the very best production team, who have all the experience both in the commercial world and in the defence world. And I can assure Australia that as Ghost Shark comes off the line, we will let you know when the next production variants come on. Thank you. 

JOURNALIST: David, just a quick one for you: is the vehicle on the stage, in fact, destined for Navy or is it, in fact, a civilian vehicle? 

DAVID GOODRICH: This is the first Ghost Shark that is to be delivered to Navy in January of next year. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you. 

MINISTER CONROY: Time for one or two more questions if there’s any. If there’s not, that’s fine. Last chance? 

JOURNALIST: Just on the export of the Ghost Shark – and it was mentioned again by the CEO during his speech there, he made a point about that happening with the all clear from the federal government. It’s a fairly obvious question, really, but to what extent do we need to be stringent about this in terms of where these amphibious vehicles are actually going to? 

MINISTER CONROY: Absolutely, we need to be very stringent and exercise strong discretion about who we sell these to. As I said in my remarks, this is the most advanced extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle in the world. This is the crown jewels of autonomy and will be the crown jewels of our uncrewed fleet in the Navy. So, who we sell it to matters a lot, and that’s why it’s a partnership between us and Anduril on that matter. 

There are obvious markets of allies and like-minded countries that have a lot of interest in this, and we’ll work closely with them. But ultimately, any sale will have to be in the national interest. But I’m confident that there are partners that will be interested, that will grow our jobs and, as importantly as those jobs and export earnings, will contribute to allied capability. Just as the Chief of Navy said, we’re looking at teaming this with crewed platforms, we’re looking at teaming this with navies around the world. 

At the last AUKUS pillar 2 maritime big play activity, which is – they’re actually words for having capabilities from all three nations working together – we had a Ghost Shark working with assets from the UK and the United States. So, there are examples of us already working together under the AUKUS pillar 2 framework that involves Ghost Shark. 

JOURNALIST: Another potentially obvious question: we’ve had some recent discussion around the level of security for Australian defence installations. Security around an installation like this and, by the sounds of it, even more factories that are coming, how important is that going to be in terms of protecting these assets? 

MINISTER CONROY: Well, security is paramount, and a big factor in all our discussions with industry is making sure they invest in appropriate security – not just physical security; cyber security is equally critical – as well as what the Australian government is doing around drone defences. We’ve announced $1.3 billion of investment in counter-drone defences for the nation as part of an over $10 billion investment in autonomy. Under Land 156, we’ve announced a series of rolling contracts with companies, including companies like Acacia and others like DroneShield. So, we’re deploying counter-drone technology right now to defend Australia, and you can expect that investment to flow over the next few years quite rapidly. 

Thank you very much, everyone. 

ENDS