Supply Chain Anatomy Introduction and Case 1: Bushmasters

An introduction, and how interpretations of sovereignty are critical.

Introduction to Supply Chain Anatomy Pieces?

Welcome to our new series on defence/national security hardware and their respective supply chains.

The conflict in Ukraine—and proxy wars in Sudan and across the Middle East—has shown that sustained attritive conflict is back, and so are a focus on supply chains. Hard power, along with its implications, has returned to fashion.

To appropriately assess how democracies—a number of whom remain wedded to soft power principles that struggle to find purchase—might navigate a world where increasingly ‘the strong do as they will’, we need to go to the simple building blocks of how democracies can sustain their own hard power. And that means going right down to the level of components and materiel.

Throughout this series we will consider the roles that specific pieces of hardware play, as well as how growing non-conventional considerations may be shaping elements moving forward—for example, the role, manufacture and evolving capability of drones¹.

Frameworks

We will also be using a couple of frameworks to assess supply chain resilience. These are not the existing NATO or NIST-based frameworks. We are interested in aspects not strictly covered by those focussed frameworks: for example, degrees of autonomy, from complete interdependence to independence; the prospect of disruption to parts or the whole of the supply chain; and civilian/military interdependence.

These, we believe, better address the strategic consequences of supply chain resilience in an increasingly disrupted world. If we take the Ukraine was as a likely indicator of supply and adaptation in war, we can see how these may play out. Take drones. The drones used are, or were based on, civilian drones—often consumer, recreational purposes—primarily from China. There are critical constraints in the supply of components that may make production and adaptation more difficult, such as motor parts, sensors, etc. Adaptation and fabrication of drones and drone parts is undertaken largely in many, dispersed, small civilian workshops across the country. Such circumstance is not readily recognised in the conventional or military frameworks of the western nations, which closely adhere to the notion of a separate, military whole.

Further, we want frameworks that are lightweight and easily accessible.

The two frameworks for supply chain resilience we are using are

1. The Resilience Triangle; and

2. A ‘Degrees of Autonomy’ spectrum.

The Resilience Triangle² is now common parlance in the business and academic literature. It looks at three different perspectives to assess how vulnerable the supply chain is to disruption:

• The Drop – The immediate loss in performance or production once a disruption hits.

• The Dampening – What is the depth of existing supply—or easy alternates—using existing stockpiles before the disruption limits even those and genuinely inhibits delivery?

• The Recovery Time – How long it takes for new components to be developed or an alternative domestic source to be spun up.

We’ve also borrowed from several sources for a slimmed down, five-layer Degrees of Autonomy spectrum:

1. Full Autonomy – Where Australia has a completely independent and sovereign element.

2. Strategic Autonomy – Australia can choose to act independently but often chooses to cooperate with partner nations.

3. Shared Autonomy – We rely on allies for these elements, but as an equal partner with reciprocal influence over the supply chain.

4. Dependence – The larger platform cannot function, or be maintained, without explicit overseas support or permission.

5. Subordination – Where independent action on Australia’s part is actively constrained by a foreign power’s decisions or laws.

To some extent this first case is a test case for the frameworks; we’ll be writing more on analytical frameworks for supply chain resilience and their value against our objectives, and that may mean new ones down the track.

What are Bushmasters?

We’re going to start with the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle (PMV), not least because it has had considerable press courtesy of the war in Ukraine.

PMVs such as Bushmasters are essentially large, armoured wheeled (not tracked) trucks. They serve a range of functions on the battlefield: importantly, getting troop quickly into, and out of, the battlefield while protected from light arms fire. Each can carry 10 soldiers, including the driver, plus fuel and supplies for three days. Designed for Northern Australian operations, Bushmasters are comparatively fast with an operational range of 800km. Importantly, they are designed to help soldiers manage environmental stress, with split system air conditioning, chilled water and suspended seating.

The Bushmaster is also the first military vehicle to be built in Australia since World War II and promoted heavily as being truly sovereign in nature³.

In the spectrum of Army vehicles, the next step down from the Bushmasters is the lightweight Hawkei PMV, also built by Thales in its Bendigo factory. Moving up a step from the Bushmaster in terms of protection and firepower, the ADF’s ASLAV armed reconnaissance vehicle will be replaced by the European Boxer—most of the ADF’s Boxers are built in Ipswich, Queensland. And in 2027, the Army will take delivery of Korean AS21 Redbacks, built in Geelong, to replace the M113 armoured personnel carrier. Each vehicle type serves critical roles in enabling Australian infantry deployments in operational theatres; each represents a different trade-off between speed, mobility, capacity, protection and firepower.

Manufacturers also offer differing configurations of each vehicle, depending on military needs: for example, ambulances, IED disposal, electronic warfare, direct or indirect fire support, air defence systems, bridging capabilities, and vehicle repair and retrieval.

Is the Bushmaster special?

Bushmasters have long held a special place in the heart of ministers as the sovereign product line of choice. Over 1300 have been manufactured in Australia, and it has proven popular with soldiers, because its blast protection and quality of life integrations.

The Bushmaster has also demonstrated form in the heat of battle. In Afghanistan, Australian—and later Dutch and British—forces used Bushmasters in the Oruzgan Province, where Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were a mainstay of the Taliban. In the war in Ukraine, its speed and protection matter in a battlefield dominated by surveillance, drones and mines⁴.

The Bushmaster has proven both resilient and adaptable. The Army is looking at additional modifications reflecting the Ukrainian experience: not simply battle-taxis and patrol, but long-range fire support for capabilities such as HIMARS. But these considerations of further adaptation still largely centre on conventional utilisation across an expanding range of roles, rather than change required due to emerging technologies across the battlefield.

Degrees of Autonomy: The Bushmaster’s key components

When we consider degrees of autonomy, we find the Bushmasters can be separated into two clusters across these five layers, to save extra explanation on this run through.

Full Autonomy

• The armour layers: Bisalloy Steel in New South Wales produces the armour steel plates; Craig International Ballistics (CIB) supplies the transparent and composite armour that supplements the steel.

• The electrical wiring, undertaken by the Victorian company, AME Systems.

• The broader assembly process and structural build at Thales Australia’s facility in Bendigo.

Strategic Autonomy

• The Remote Weapon Station (RWS) that sits atop each Bushmaster and allows gunners inside to fire remotely is produced by Canberra-based Electro Optic Systems (EOS).

  • Note: there are elements of the RWS systems that are supplied form overseas, such as sensors that are likely obtained via France or the United States⁵. Given EOS’s global reach, it should be able to find routes around potential obstructions.

Shared Autonomy

• Nil. (Shared autonomy comprise components and technologies that that are jointly developed, with no-one nation fully controlling component delivery, and relying on each other for continued production.)

Dependence

• The Caterpillar engine – either the 3126E or the more recent C7 – from the United States, is critical to the Bushmaster’s range, which is a core value proposition across the desolate Australian outback.

  • These are common engines, and can found in many civilian machines—trucks, buses, and farm equipment—so the level of critical is light.

• The German ZF Ecomat 6HP502S transmission – the systems that manages the delivery of the engine’s power to the wheels.

  • As with the engine, this is a common transmission system, often paired with the Caterpillar 3216E and C7, and commonly found in buses (and in Europe, trains).

• The axle and suspension system (a key design element) is the US-sourced Meritor 4000 ISAS, imported via Drivetrain Australia.

  • Designed for more rugged military requirements, it is well adapted to harsh, outback environment, and so may may also be found in the mining industry.

Subordination

• Australia is not being actively constrained from importing Bushmaster components.

Effectively, even with Bushmasters, Australia’s ‘sovereign’ capability, there remains a heavy reliance on imported components. That said, most are commercial-off-the-shelf, with broad commercial application, which helps mitigate the risk, even as the denotation of ‘fully sovereign’ is questionable.

That, of course, common: a nation that internally holds all the resources, skills, funding and production scalability it needs for advanced equipment, let alone cutting-edge equipment, doesn’t exist. Even during wartime, countries have had source components from enemy held areas, or find alternate sources⁶—working out those ahead of time would be prudent.

The Resilience Triangle: Bushmasters

What might happen should access to key component by cut off or restricted? Much is highly contextual, not least as the government and companies are not particularly forthcoming about stockpiles. However, commercial entities tend to adhere more to just-in-time supply chains, meaning that local stocks are likely to be low.

We could imagine several scenarios entailing disruption to supply—Australia is distant from most of its suppliers. Thus, at the very least, additional costs in transport (rerouting, for example), insurance and loss are likely to be incurred—and not just for Bushmaster production, sustainment and repair.

Because much of the Bushmaster is built from off-the-shelf commercial products, the main immediate concern has to do with the EOS Remote Weapon System (RWS) equipment, particularly components sourced from Europe and the United States. But we are also going to consider, in the context of the framework, the engine.

Assessment: Bushmasters are reasonably robust in terms of supply chain resilience. While Australia does not make key Bushmaster components (sensors, engines, transmissions, axle systems), those components are largely commercial-off-the-shelf, and in many cases common in industry and transport. And in extremis, existing manufacturers may be able to scale up/substitute for existing Bushmaster components.

In any case, it would be wise for Thales, and Defence, to consider alternate sources, and diversify supply, as well as ensuring sufficient availability should access be denied for two-to-three years (bearing in mind the difficulty in standing up defence industry capability).

One further consideration: the right to repair. One advantage of the Bushmasters is their used of commercially available components. In the case of the Caterpillar engines, that means a broad base of civilian engine mechanics who able to strip and refurbish an engine. Resilience will be diminished when exquisite, high-end capability is preferred over the easy to fix and to source both components and skills from the civil sector.

The US military has sought—and so far, failed—to gain the right to repair its own kit. For Australia, there are two levels of dependency: gaining access and the right-to-use high-end US kit; and then the right to repair, from both the US government and commercial interests. That’s not simply a matter of resilience, but also of readiness.

Conclusion

The Bushmaster serves as a reliable, adaptable base for the Australian military and defence industry to build from, especially while it continues service in the field. Given how it’s touted at the locally made, ‘sovereign’ capability, as well as the growing interest in adapting it to newer forms of conflict witnessed overseas, we’re unlikely to be parting with it any time soon.

But the Department of Defence and Thales Australia should invest some serious thought into alternate base supply chains or components for the Bushmaster; adaptations to HIMARS or long-range fire capability will mean little if the basic components cannot be reliably sourced even if the United States’ priorities might change.

Further, analysis also suggests there are benefits to be gained in building closer defence and industry arrangements with especially South Korea and Japan, not least given the erratic nature of decision-making from the White House over the last year, which should retain some wariness.

1. We’ve skipped this here as given that Bushmasters are relatively stable as a design, even with several mission-based variants, and primarily hardware focused. There may be a further cycle of adaptation to Bushmasters, but there’s not enough data to make an assessment as yet.

2. Widely used as a framework for disaster resilience, the Resilience Triangle also featured heavily in the development of the 4R (Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness and Rapidity) framework by Kathleen Tierney and Michel Bruneau. Both a climate disaster and a supply chain cut are events that must be adapted to.

3. The Bushmaster has proven reasonably popular overseas, too, with exports to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Jamaica. That’s not an inconsiderable achievement, given Australia’s past difficulties with building a defence export industry.

4. Not only have mines been widespread in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but all the European nations that border Russia—the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Poland and Finland—have begun to or withdrawn from the Ottawa Treaty. This is before we consider wider usage that can often be seen in non-state and guerilla war strategies, such as the IEDs of Afghanistan and Iraq, which we mentioned earlier. There is little reason to believe that such methods of inflicting damage will not grow in the years to come, as rules of military engagement likely deteriorate.

5. It is also of critical importance that we note these sensor capabilities and the use of the Remote Weapons systems are only to grow more critical in combatting drones, which are finding widespread use beyond the constant deployment by both sides in Ukraine and are now being rapidly adapted by non-state actors across the Middle East and Africa.

6. For example, the British Empire, which had been sourcing wood for the masts of its fleet from the Baltics—then part of the Russian Empire—had to search for alternative sources when the Baltic Sea was closed to them during the Napoleonic Wars. During World War II, German industry created synthetic rubber to overcome severe shortages due to lack of access to Southeast Asian-sourced natural rubber.