Project Currawong SATCOM trailer. (Boeing Australia)
LANDFORCES — Multiple industry players appear to be positioning themselves here in Australia for what one executive called “the biggest thing in town regarding comms — and will be for years to come.”
The Australian military is expected to begin the competition to pick a winner for what some in industry believe will be a contract worth hundreds of millions to build and maintain the Army’s new battlefield communications network early next year.
Boeing Australia, builder of the Currawong tactical radio program, believes it has the inside track to win what is called Land 4140 because of that experience. But Boeing is not uncontested. “It is a program we are tracking closely,” a Hanwha Defense Australia spokesperson said today. Executives here were closed lipped about the program, but the Australian arms of L3Harris, Leidos and Lockheed Martin are all believed to be similarly tracking the program.
The Australian military released a request for information related to Land 4140, also known as the Land C4 Modernisation Project or the LC4 Program, in June 2022, saying it “will modernise and enhance Land C4 systems in order to deliver decision-making superiority and improve the Command and Control, intelligence, sensors, and weapon system effectors, essential for the conduct of Joint Land Force operations.”
Earlier this week the military requested that defense firms raise their hand if they’re interested in Tranche 1 of the project, and said they expect the delivery timeframe for the tech to run from 2025 to 2030.
The acquisition approach appears different from standard Australian programs where a prime contractor would design and build the system. Eager to ensure the software-heavy communications system would be regularly upgraded to cope with new cyber and electronic warfare threats, the government wants what it is calling a “program integration partner.” It would be supplemented or augmented by at least one panel that apparently would approve the upgrades.
Boeing executives, clearly hopeful they might win based on their Project Currawong work, spoke with reporters here about the program.
“So they’re looking for a company that has the pedigree, the relationships, the right behaviors, the right experience, the right capabilities to partner with them over the next 10 years to help them effectively build the next generation of networks,” Darcy Rawlinson, a senior IT and cyber executive at Boeing Australia.
It will be a challenging venture, according to the scope Rawlinson described.
“It’s all the communications that army needs, from the forward rifleman, who’s walking around carrying his pack, who’s really just talking on a radio right the way through to a big Joint Task Force headquarters with heaps of people in it, a field hospital with big logistics sort of node — everything that’s deployed,” he said.
The executives who spoke with Breaking Defense made it clear the program is still evolving. The formal request for tender, when companies will have to decide whether to bid and how, is scheduled for the second quarter of 2025.
