Following the early and within budget Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark success stories comes a rapid SemiAutonomous patrol boat development - see APDR's article. All these semi-Australian projects are forging ahead - all unmanned-SemiAutonomous-remotely piloted technologies. These terms sound contradictory, but all these represent multi-node, distributed technologies with some artificial intelligence input.
The above projects are in such contrast with almost inevitable failures in Australia's MANNED vessel and submarine projects.
The Australian Government should look hard at cancelling more manned "Shipwrecks in the making". All Australia's Manned naval projects seem to be 10 years late at 3 times original cost estimates.
Manned projects might increasingly be seen as gratuitous career promotion opportunities for too many armed forces offices seeking combat overseas. Some members of my family directly recognised this. We need more computer experts who can operate systems remotely.
The studies of how to safely weaponize SemiAutonomous systems is a major study of Five Eye software and computer hardware specialists. I think a subset of this study are some activities under AUKUS Pillar 2. Having some men in the loop makes such systems safer.
eg. the US showed the way with weaponized Predators and Reaper UCAVs. On the whole they functioned extremely well in the Middle East, Afghanistan and less well known theatres. These US UCAVs were/are being remotely piloted from Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, with in the loop approvals coming from Washington DC, and forward observation posts in theatre. The public don't/didn't hear about the 1,000s of successful weapon release and/or reconnaissance Ops, only about the rare targeting mistakes. Reapers over Yemen might now be very much the go.
So Australia is catching up and will probably save A$Billions avoiding totally manned traditional weapon solutions.
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