Servicemen from an artillery unit of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces train to use a drone in combat. Photo: Dmytro Smolienko / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP
Analysis: The accelerating and dangerous world of advanced military technology is sparking more talks between governments, and more drones on the battlefield.
Newly released figures show top New Zealand government officials have had 23 meetings about the Aukus advanced-tech sharing agreement since the start of last year.
This included the director of defence policy meeting with officials from the three Aukus Pillar One countries - the US, Australia and the UK - three times since February 2024.
New Zealand has spent three years considering whether to join the Aukus Pillar Two, which exists to boost advanced weaponry.
But an influential US thinktank has now hit out at Pillar Two for being too slow.
"Though regarded as Washington's flagship defence industrial cooperation effort in the IndoPacific", the fact it had not expanded yet beyond the core three countries was actually "restricting its impact", the Atlantic Council said.
It pushed for a new innovation network across the region to speed things up.
"This network should not be overly restrictive, stretching across the Aukus nations and extending to other important industrial partners in the IndoPacific - especially Japan, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, and India."
Its new report was about ways Washington could achieve its "ambitions to design a 'hellscape' for China in the region".
The US Navy has said it wanted a "hellscape" battlefield filled with tens of thousands of unmanned ships, aircraft and submarines.
The first of this drone fleet was due in August.
Meanwhile, New Zealand has continued with talks around Pillar Two, without any signs of any actual movement.
Meetings have ramped up between defence ministry and Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade officials. There were five through 2024, but three already this year, while a group of senior officials had met five times since January 2024, and a technical group seven times.
The officials have been looking at how New Zealand could benefit and aid Pillar Two, papers show.
Lower trade barriers was one benefit.
Pillar Two has made a start on cutting formerly high military trade barriers, as well as greasing the sharing of sensitive tech between the inner three - the US, UK and Australia - which says this has been worth tens of millions of dollars so far.
It covers the likes of a laser that can destroy drones from 1.5km away, which the Australian government is funding.
In the wider wings is the US Navy's 'Replicator' drone programme, inspired by Ukraine using more than a million drones against Russia last year.
"I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so I can make their [China's] lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything," said the US commander of the Indopacific, who was in Canberra last month when Chinese warships sailed into the Tasman Sea.
New Zealand is keeping up on the tech front largely by riding on Australia's coat-tails, internal papers show.
But the country is already in a favoured place aligned with new US military industrial strategies that the Biden Administration told allies last year were focused on "breaking down national barriers and better integrating our defence industries". Donald Trump's plans have yet to be spelt out.
New Zealand signed up last year to PIPIR (Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience) and was included in 2022 in America's NTIB (National Technology Industrial Base).
Pentagon advisers recently said the NTIB group - the same five nations as in Five Eyes - should contribute to a "hotline with a select group of trusted nations" to exchange defence innovation information.
PIPIR's aim was "to better integrate defence industries to fortify the shared capacity of the defence industrial bases of US allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region", New Zealand ministers were told last July.
Briefings in the second half of 2024 to ministers, released to RNZ under the OIA, said:
"There is significant value for New Zealand to support an initiative that not only builds regional defence industrial resilience, but also supports industrial capacity, creates opportunities for new entrants, and reduces barriers to the flow of knowledge, goods and services that will benefit New Zealand."
The risks of joining PIPIR - which ran to two full pages - were blanked out entirely in the OIA.
The government did not announce to the public that it had joined, although the briefings said: "Officials will prepare reactive media lines for your offices, should any enquiries about New Zealand's involvement in this activity be publicised."
The Atlantic Council said PIPIR was seeking "to unite the region's national armaments directors" but its efforts could be dissipated if concrete investments "in immediately fieldable capabilities" did not quickly eventuate.
Urgency to match China is now one of the primary messages from the US.
The big picture is of the Pentagon spending more than $US1.2 billion on partner capacity-building efforts in the IndoPacific in 2023, nearly a third of its entire international security cooperation budget, and putting a record $US9.1 billion into the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, $US3 billion more than the original request to Congress.
This was before Trump and his defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and vice-president J D Vance in a speech that shocked Europe, doubled down on the pivot to the Indo-Pacific last month.
The Atlantic Council noted a payoff.
"Buttressed by record-high foreign military sales driven by the war in Ukraine, US armaments cooperation in the IndoPacific has expanded accordingly."
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