Chinese military exports to other countries
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Jura The idiot
General
(Does an export to military customers counts as "military export" ? Shame the AUS army didn't wait for the new Mavic 2 series)
Australian Army acquires DJI Phantom 4 UAVs
Gabriel Dominguez, London - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
20 August 2018
The Australian Army (AA) has acquired the DJI Phantom 4 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as the service seeks to broaden its reconnaissance and situational awareness capabilities.
The Department of Defence (DoD) in Canberra announced in a statement that Sydney-based personnel of the 17th Combat Service Support Brigade (17 CSS BDE) received on 20 August a DJI Phantom 4 as part of the AA’s plan to issue some 350 of the UAVs, with each unit receiving up to three systems.
Colonel Gabby Follet, Acting Commander of the 17 CSS BDE, was quoted by the DoD as saying that the DJI Phantom 4 UAVs will greatly increase the AA’s capability to gather information and successfully complete tasks.
Kind of odd that Australian military would not mind getting product from DJI, when the government is having issues with Huawei and ZTE
plawolf
Lieutenant General
They would have to completely strip and test the drones, and thoroughly test the software before they are happy to use them for the military.
They may even have developed custome replacement parts (to add jamming resistance and secure data links etc) and/or software to load into the drones. So switching to the Mavic 2 may add years and millions to the procurement process.
Well, that’s what they should do if they were seriously concerned about the security of Chinese kit.
Although I have always suspected that the real reason countries who are party of the US dominated Five Eyes spy club find ‘security’ issues with Chinese telecoms gear is more to do with Chinese kit being more secure rather than less (since Chinese companies cannot be approached and incentivised and/or coerced into building backdoors and installing spyware like western firms could be), making it harder for them to do their own spying.
It was on the news that these drones were meant for training only.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I am dubious of that, but it may actually be true, since western military drones of similar capabilities, like the desert hawk III would probably cost as much per unit as the entire Australian military 350 DJI order (the UK bought 300 Desert Hawk IIIs for £70million!)
So, the Australians are using DJIs to get their troops used to drone tactics in training, so they don’t stupidity crash US made similar drones that cost several hundred times as much in training or use up all their useful lives in training.
It does makes sense, but the point about them not being concerned about the security of Chinese kit still stands. As the Australian military would not be using compromised kit even for training.
Yes, that was what had been reported in the local news, the DJI drones are to be used for training of military drone operators only. Australia as member of the 5 eyes partnership is paranoid about using a Chinese equipment military or otherwise i.e the banning of Huawei and ZTE from the 5G roll out even though Huawei provided most of the 4G equipment.
