The technical details of maritime missile defence systems are often fairly highly classified, but some days the one thing more dangerous than the combat system itself can be the minister in charge of buying them trying to explain how they work in kitchen-table English.
On a Friday at the end of a very long pre-Budget week, with multiple announcements running daily, minister for defence industry Pat Conroy fronted up in Brisbane to cut the ribbon on a new $180 million deal for Rheinmetall to build a new “Multi-Ammunition Soft-Kill System (MASS), to equip Anzac Class frigates and Hobart Class destroyers with anti-ship missile protection” according to Defence.
It’s a bittersweet moment for Rheinmetall’s Queensland manufacturing operations, given orders for its infantry fighting vehicle have been severely chopped to pay for guided missiles that replace tanks in a future conflict.
The new deal will add 45 jobs to Rheinmetall’s manufacturing centre of excellence, which already has a workforce of 780 workers.
Ironically, Rheinmetall, a German firm, is building some of its armoured buggies here and re-exporting them to Deutschland in a $3 billion deal to top-up reserves after its older stock started being snapped up because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But the company also builds systems to protect boats from missiles by essentially trying to daze and confuse sensor-based guidance system to throw the deadly rockets off their target. Sometimes journalists too.
Not one for the military’s predilection for using acronyms and systems-speak, Conroy valiantly tried to avoid the Navy vernacular when pushed for answers in “simple terms” as to how the $180 million MASS system worked at the press conference.
“I am aware there are great people from the Navy here, I am a layman,” Conroy humbly offered. “There are three sorts of most common missiles. I’m going to simplify because I’m a politician.”
“There are heat-seeking missiles, they hone in on heat, you fire flares, which is a heat source, to distract them. We’ve all seen Top Gun, where they fire the flares out the bottom of the jet — this has that ability,” Conroy continued.
“There are radar-guided missiles. So they hone in on a big piece of metal, you fire the aluminium chaff, which is tin foil to distract the radar,” the minister offered.
“There’s a third sort that uses optical guidance, so they use lasers and things. That’s where the smoke comes into play to obscure the target. So there are three ones. I’ve grossly simplified it, and I apologise for that.”
Mesmerised by the $180 million tin foil-firing, smoke-spewing and Top Gun-grade flare shooter, the press demanded to know if it could really do all three things at once, prompting Rheinmetall Defence Australia managing director Nathan Poyner to back Conroy up that it sure could.
“So if a missile was heading towards a ship, you fire off this? Where does it go? Does it just get a bit confused? Like into the water?,” asked a journalist, figuring a missile would have to go somewhere if it didn’t hit the ship.
“Yeah, no, it confuses and disables it. And most of these have a kill switch on them,” Poyner offered. “And then once it has a target and it gets confused, then it will do some classified things around the exact mechanism. But yeah”.
There were also a few more ‘classified things’ in terms of what boats get the weapon of MASS distraction, so it was fortunate Defence had earlier publicly announced it will be Anzac Class Frigates and Hobart Class Destroyers.
But what is good news in that the new MASS system will be manufactured locally for approved export overseas, though who to and whether those boats will be in the Pacific or Australian waters was, Poyner said, “unfortunately, also a classified piece of information on exactly which ships and how this system will be deployed.”
Tin foil. So many uses.
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