NZ soldiers leave for Southern Hemisphere's leading military exercise

New Zealand soldiers are leaving for the Southern Hemisphere's leading military exercise, the first since the government announced ramped up defence spending.

The 35,000-strong exercise Talisman Sabre is a bilateral Australia and US military exercise with 17 other nations taking part.

The Defence Force is sending about 700 personnel to northern Australia.

Ahead of new defence funding the NZDF is taking some light armoured vehicles over 20 years old, which are likely vulnerable to the latest killer drones.

Meanwhile, the Australians will be field-testing an uncrewed machine-gun double-track, and the Americans will be shooting precision missiles and deploying space-age data networks.

Talisman Sabre aligns with US efforts to build a vast network of sensors and shooters across the Indo-Pacific, called Combined Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control (CJADC2).

The Defence Force said a key goal is to be able to integrate its capabilities into Australian and US command relationships.

The objective was to prepare, project and exercise NZDF capabilities integrated into the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and INDOPACOM - America's largest military command in the Indo-Pacific. That included command and control (C2) elements.

INDOPACOM has recently deployed precision missiles that can be fired from land against naval targets, in the Philippines near a strategic chokepoint south of Taiwan.

Talisman Sabre has become a testing ground for new missiles and drones. Australia is poised to co-produce missiles for the US, and Defence Minister Judith Collins has said New Zealand would get missiles, though Budget 2025 had no funding for that.

Defence consultant and NZDF veteran Josh Wineera said Talisman Sabre was uniquely large Down Under and allowed the partners real-world "benchmarking of tactics and capabilities".

"It will be really interesting to see whether the capabilities intended to be purchased still fit neatly into what the Australians are doing because that's what the Defence Capability Plan is about," he said.

However, the partner countries were confronted with US networking goals aiming to step up warfighting to "fibreoptic" speed.

"Because of this being automated, and it's in the information space where decisions and sensors are acting so quickly, this will be a real challenge, I think, for those decision-making levels to make sure that sovereignty is not being compromised," said Wineera.

The first 150 New Zealand military personnel leave on Thursday for the exercise which rins from 13 July to 4 August.

They are taking several new Bushmasters, but also some Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) that in 2003 were given a 25-year lifespan, and were yet to be revived under the $12 billion defence capability plan with new turrets and networked comms.

The military exercise is also drawing in AI companies, such as Virginia's billion-dollar BigBear.ai that said it was going along to "help military forces act faster by updating AI models in real-time, improving coordination between sensors and shooters".

The Australian military said the exercise was to build combined joint warfighting capabilities.

At Talisman 2023, the Australians tested their field drone, ironically called an armoured "personnel" carrier, the M113AS4.

The carrier runs autonomously but requires a human to aim and shoot its gun. It is expected to feature again this time in experiments majoring in human-machine-integration, or HMI as the Pentagon has dubbed it.

All sorts of drones, but especially aerial ones, have dominated Ukraine's war with Russia since 2022.

The exercise in northern Australia is the biggest ever, and the stakes are higher than ever, too.

US 'commitment to Indo-Pacific'

The Pentagon states that Talisman "reflects US, allies' commitment to Indo-Pacific". This is at a time when the Trump Administration's relations with Europe's NATO members are under huge strain, and US commanders have repeatedly stressed fears of a growing conventional and nuclear threat from China.

America sees itself in a race to bring advanced technology, and its allies, on board its evolving battlefield network, though even before Trump began his second term, some lawmakers expressed concern the Pentagon had bitten off more than it can chew with the scale of CJADC2.

"We seek to network our efforts across domains, theatres, and the spectrum of conflict to ensure that the US military, in close cooperation with the rest of the US government and our Allies and partners, makes the folly and costs of aggression very clear," Joe Biden's Deputy Secretary of Defence Dr Kathleen Hicks in 2022.

Joint exercises like Talisman Sabre tap into US$2 billion annual funding from within US$17 billion 'Pacific Deterrence Initiative'.

The NZDF is already active in two cornerstone Combined Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control (CJADC2) efforts - the US Army's Project Convergence Capstone, and the US Navy's Project Overmatch, which NZ signed on to in February. The government said it was usual to sign on like this, unannounced to the public.

Several dozen New Zealand personnel went to Convergence's annual exercise in March in the Mojave Desert, looking to identify "potential experimentation", newly released OIA documents showed.

The records mentioned experiments with targeting sensors and electromagnetic warfare, and ensuring NZ Army software could "effectively interface" with partners. Two capability demonstrations had "particular relevance" to NZDF - but these were blanked out.

Wineera said Project Convergence and Talisman Sabre gave insight about autonomy of decision-making.

"Some of our legal staff need to be thinking about all of that flow that's happening at the same time, to ensure that our New Zealand contribution sticks within what would be our national rules of engagement."

The Project Convergence records also showed the NZDF was so strapped for resources there was talk of having to pull out, but that then it would the miss out as it did not have these capabilities itself.

The technology at hand includes, for example, Maven, a software system from Palantir that in recent US Army tests was 100 times faster than the most efficient targeting team in the Iraq war.

One US unit working with this, known as Shadow Operations Centre, is linked to the NZDF. "We are partnering with Australia and New Zealand Battle Labs to connect" to the Combined Federated Battle Laboratories Network in 2025, Shadow Operations Centre said last year.

NZ defence funding

Resources for more exercises like Talisman Sabre are on their way.

Budget 2025 made millions more available for them, alongside millions more for advanced technology or upgrading old tech though there was no mention in it of new turrets for the LAVs.

Some amounts were not specified, but $80m over four years was set aside for overseas deployments, $11m for interoperability and $8m for increasing engagement with security partners overseas.

"It can be expected that as new capabilities prioritised in the DCP are released in time, these would be incorporated into future iterations of Talisman Sabre as our contribution to this important multinational, multi-domain exercise grows," the NZDF said in a statement.

As for taking the LAVS along, "regardless of future programmes the LAVs are still a key combat vehicle for the NZ Army and form a crucial part of the NZ Army's current combat system", it said.

Twenty of the LAVs were sold to Chile for just under $1 million each two years ago.

A recent online discussion of the LAVs said they had some limited uses but were very vulnerable to the type of drones now common in the Ukraine-Russia war, including one that can hit 110kmh and destroy a tank.

Six Bushmasters heading to Talisman Sabre have had their comms upgrade completed, Defence said.

The project to upgrade all 43 Bushmasters has been delayed, and Budget 2025 signalled operational savings of $13m from "rephasing" the project.