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New Dawn of Innovation

Soldiers, students and some sharp minds from defence industry came together for six weeks in Perth recently to deliver an innovation exercise that had been three years in the making.

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Exercise Western Dawn participants experience ‘The 90° Wedge’, a 3.8m diagonal 3D display at the HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch) at Curtin University, Perth. Story by Major Dean Benson. Photos by Corporal Nakia Chapman.
Exercise Western Dawn 2024 was a concept drawn up over some informal chats between Perth’s 13th Brigade and WA’s renowned Curtin University three years ago.
That concept became a reality at the end of 2024, culminating in an innovation pitch day judged by a panel of experts from across Defence, industry and academia.

One of the judges was Brigadier Malcolm Wells, of Headquarters Joint Operations Command, who said six teams had to work across several weeks to address three key themes: persistent situational awareness, protracted sustainment and decision advantage.

“We know these three things represent huge challenges for the Australian Defence Force,” Brigadier Wells said.

“By approaching these themes with new ideas, new thinking, with really innovative people, we know that we can deliver a really powerful set of results.

“Through Western Dawn, we’ve seen people who have brought together years of operational experience, people with incredibly impressive research and academic backgrounds, and from industry who are very invested in making sure that they can provide the systems, capabilities and perspectives we need to execute our mission.”

The winning concept played to the persistent situational awareness theme. It was a system called ‘tripwire’, an undersea meshed communication system capable of transmitting sensed undersea data at high speeds.
Curtin University’s Director of National Resilience and Security Program Office, Garry Hale, said the winning concept was just one selection from an impressive field.
“The challenging problems that Defence faces are great things for universities to be involved in, particularly where we’ve got collaboration involving industry, Defence and academia producing some amazing results,” Mr Hale said.
“One of the key outcomes that we wanted to get from Exercise Western Dawn was that ability to innovate under pressure.
“The different ideas, thinking and diversity of the groups produced some pretty exciting outcomes as far as potential technologies that Defence could use in the future.”

Commander 13th Brigade, Brigadier Amanda Williamson, said the innovation exercise had been a long time coming for the STEM experts of the 13th Engineer Regiment and that she hoped for it to become an annual exercise.

“We ran Exercise Western Dawn as a pilot concept to see what we could achieve with our partners in academia and industry,” she said.

“What we’ve seen really blew us away and so we’re hopeful that this will now become an annual feature on the 13th Brigade calendar.”

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