These engagements will mark the 34th Australia-United States Ministerial Consultation, or AUSMIN, which is considered a key annual forum for deliberation between the long-standing allies.

During a call with reporters on Monday, two senior defense officials previewed the talks and spotlighted overarching aims to deepen the partnership between Washington and Canberra.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was first scheduled to meet bilaterally with Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles at the Pentagon. On Tuesday, they were slated to join their diplomatic counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong, for the AUSMIN gathering in Annapolis, Maryland, a senior defense official said.

“These engagements will advance the historic progress of the alliance, including on force posture, defense industrial base integration, and collaboration on advanced capabilities,” the official added.

Broadly, the American and Australian militaries have fought together in all major conflicts since World War I — and the two nations’ bilateral defense ties are increasingly and exceptionally close. More recently, they’ve been working together to deter China’s growing influence in the western Pacific region and collaboratively tackle military-related supply chain challenges.

“On defense industrial cooperation, we’re making significant progress with Australia,” a senior defense official told reporters during the call. 

“By this December, we will work to conclude an agreement on precision guided missiles, or PrSM, that covers cooperative production, sustainment and follow-on development activities — and we will also establish a joint programs office to advance these activities in 2025 in Huntsville, Alabama,” they confirmed.  

Also on the docket for discussion is solidifying the United States’ plan to support Australia’s production of guided multiple launch rocket system missiles (GMLRS). 

“The two announcements that we will be making are that we will be pursuing memorandums of understanding for both GMLRS, and then separately for PrSM. Those MOUs will outline the mechanisms for co-production, including the intent to produce viable volumes of GMLRS for global consumption — and then for PrSM, outlining more of our way forward in terms of cooperative production, post-sustainment and follow-on development. So at this time, we don’t have further information to report, but once we have those MOUs negotiated — those will outline kind of our next steps,” a second senior defense official told reporters.

They further hinted at the military partners’ joint plans to integrate new capabilities and test new operational concepts during the next iteration of the Talisman Sabre exercise in 2025 — including amphibious training at Shoalwater Bay.

“We’re also working collaboratively on cutting-edge hypersonic technologies that will provide critical advantage to the warfighter. Australia and the United States are making significant progress in design and ground testing to develop an air-launched hypersonic weapon under the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment, or SCIFiRE, which is supporting the bilateral flight test program of the hypersonic attack cruise missile,” the senior defense official said.

The two nations are also aiming to enhance their “force posture cooperation in unprecedented ways,” according to the official.

The militaries are continuing more regular rotations of warfighting platforms, they noted, as well as expanding their logistics cooperation, including by assessing places where the U.S. could locate an enduring logistics support area in Queensland, Australia.

“At AUSMIN, we’ll be announcing new and longer-term operating locations in Australia for force posture cooperation … building upon additional infrastructure upgrades that are already underway at Australia’s northern air bases,” the senior defense official said. 

This high-level meetup notably comes on the heels of a 10-day series of engagements that Austin conducted with multiple partners around Asia.

Extending some of those discussions, this week the U.S. and Australia plan to look into ways they can grow cooperative maritime activities together with the Philippines, another American ally which is involved in maritime disputes with China.

Additionally, “we’re fostering greater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, cooperation by establishing more trilateral exercises and activities between the United States, Australia and Japan in the Indo-Pacific region,” the senior defense official said.

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Multiple scheduled flight tests of the Dark Eagle have been called off, most recently one that was slated for Oct. 26. Now, officials are charting a new course.

A “big meeting” was held this past week, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Doug Bush told DefenseScoop on Saturday. It included his Navy counterpart Frederick “Jay” Stefany, their military deputies, and prime contractor Lockheed Martin.

The Army and Navy have been partnering on the development of hypersonics-related tech.

“It’s really a joint program. So it was myself, Mr. Stefany, the two three-stars and Lockheed working through, you know, finding out exactly what happened and then coming up at the same time with the new test schedule,” Bush said in an interview at the Reagan National Defense Forum.

He continued: “That’s gonna be several things in parallel. Fundamentally, there’s testing the launcher, which, frankly, is where the problems have been. Then there’s the missile itself, you know, the glide body and all that. So I think what we’re hoping to do is come up with a way to … not have to do everything in step function. We can simultaneously perhaps pursue some more aggressive missile tests to gain confidence with the missile while doing some additional testing stuff we would normally do to find exactly what happened with the launcher itself. And then, when we have confidence in the launcher and the missile, then we’ll reschedule a kind of operational test where it’s, you know, all the real equipment. That was what we were trying to do the last few tests” that didn’t go forward successfully.

Hypersonic weapons — which are designed to fly faster than Mach 5, be highly maneuverable and overwhelm enemy air defenses — are a top acquisition priority for the U.S. military. The multibillion-dollar Dark Eagle program is a key element of the Army’s long-range fires modernization portfolio.

U.S. competitors China and Russia are also pursuing hypersonics and the Pentagon is trying to keep pace.

Bush noted that the Dark Eagle program had a lot of concurrency built into it because the Army was trying to move fast.

“Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t … but I’m confident that when the teams are fully synced and integrated, we’re going to find what’s wrong. We know how to do this. But we, as acquisition professionals, we need to do … perhaps subcomponent testing, for example, to just build confidence before you go spend a whole bunch of money and do another operational test. So [it will be] more of a normal test profile. So, it’ll delay us a bit. But we’re hopeful, you know, definitely in 2024 … we can get back to like a full-up operational test so we can thumbs-up on fielding,” he said. “Hopefully [it will be fielded] well before the end of calendar ’24 — hopefully summertime. But we’re still working on exactly what that schedule looks like.”

Officials had originally aimed to field the system before the end of fiscal 2023.

Meanwhile, the Army is working on a separate long-range fires modernization effort known as the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) program. For the second increment of PrSM, the service aims to equip the system with a multi-mode seeker that would enable the weapon to attack ships at sea. DefenseScoop asked Bush if down the road the Army could integrate that type of seeker technology into the Dark Eagle to give it an anti-ship capability.

“It certainly hasn’t been decided yet. I think we do expect working with the Navy to keep spending R&D money to improve Dark Eagle over time, just with future blocks … Especially the glide body. Because you know the enemy is gonna react when we have this capability, so we’re gonna have to continuously improve it,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I’ve got an order to go do that yet. But if the weapon works and then we get confident with it, and the military side decides that an anti-ship version of it is worth pursuing, it’s something that we could do … potentially.”

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The ongoing interservice disagreement over modernization investments was on display this week at Washington think tanks where military leaders spoke about the threats the Pentagon is facing in the Indo-Pacific and the technologies needed to counter them.

Developing new long-range fires technology is a top priority for the Army. The service is pursuing new Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) and a Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, among other capabilities.

“We are working very hard to bring forward major new weapon systems and capabilities that will, I think, very much underwrite our ability to deter coercion in the [Indo-Pacific] theater,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute.

“We are progressing really well” when it comes to long-range fires, she said. “We feel really good about where the Army is on in that part of our portfolio.”

The service’s top officer, Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, said those capabilities will give combatant commanders additional options for holding enemy targets at risk.

“We’ll be able to sink ships, you know, within a fairly good range” with missiles like PrSM, he said. That could enable the Army to set up “no-sail” zones against adversaries.

Hypersonics, which are expected to fly faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable, could be used to suppress an adversary’s integrated air-and-missile defense systems, McConville said.

The Army plans to spend billions of dollars on its long-range fires portfolio and intends to start fielding some of these capabilities in 2023. However, Air Force officials contend that some of that money could be better spent elsewhere, arguing that the Air Force already provides long-range strike capabilities with its bombers and other platforms.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of Pacific Air Forces, said air-and-missile defense should get more funding.

“What I’d like the Army to do is put some more dollars into that base defense and less on long-range fires, because I actually have access through Air Force Global Strike Command … to the long-range fires, but we don’t have access to all the base defense that we need,” he said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The Army’s Patriot and Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems have been deployed to the Indo-Pacific to protect key bases in places like Japan, South Korea and Guam. However, there aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t sufficiently “agile,” he said.

“Those are helpful for base defense but with the advent of newer threats, like maneuvering reentry vehicles, stealthy cruise missiles and hypersonics, we don’t have all the defenses that we would need to be able to do that,” he said.

“This is a mission that the Army has … been directed to do,” he said. “I think we ought to ask the Army to do it, which is what I have done is asked the Army to help us out with base defense,” he said.

The military needs systems that are more easily transportable than Patriot or THAAD, according to Wilsbach.

“It takes a lot of lift capability to move those assets around. So, what we actually need is something — it’s probably directed energy [weapons] — but we probably need something that is agile so that we can get after those threats … but it’s small,” he said. “Perhaps you can put it on the back of a small truck, move it by a C-130 [and] get it out to one of those islands” in the Indo-Pacific. “I’ve asked the Army to work on that for us.”

The Army isn’t disputing the need to invest in new air-and-missile defense capabilities. Wormuth said it is one of the service’s top modernization priorities, along with long-range fires and other technologies.

This week, Northrop Grumman announced that it had successfully completed two flights tests for the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System program, which is designed to help the military track and intercept missiles.

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