Inside the Australian mission to track Iranian missiles

Deployment to the Middle East felt truly real for RAAF pilot “H” a few weeks back when he saw missiles shooting across the sky in front of his hi-tech surveillance plane.

“A little confronting,” he told this masthead. “Definitely a sight that I never really thought I would see.”

We are sitting in the cockpit of his E-7A Wedgetail, parked on the apron of an airstrip at a secret location in the Middle East.

“Out the window, up the front here, as we were flying some of those missions, we were seeing some of those ballistic missiles coming out of Iran.

“They are quite bright, and they go very high in the sky – very surreal seeing that from the air.”

About 80 Defence personnel have been based here since early March, conducting more than 40 missions to detect Iranian drones and missiles to help protect the United Arab Emirates.

Squadron Leader “H”, as we have been asked to call him, is the commander of the task unit.

He always wanted to be a pilot and he has the quiet confidence of a man who must have sensed he’d always get to live his dream.

Perhaps that’s what gives him maturity beyond his years. With a fetching charm and an Errol Flynn moustache, H has a family back home — a wife and two kids — but for the past 10 weeks or so, his family has been a crew of young professionals who are having the adventure of their lives.

Two-thirds are on their first deployment and most are in their 20s and 30s.

They have job titles that reflect the lingo of clinical modern warfare: air battle managers, mission aircrew, force protection and air surveillance operators. Others simply call themselves IT experts or electricians, but one nuggety fellow describes himself as an expert in survival, should there be an emergency on the ground or in the air.

The E-7A Wedgetail is at the heart of this deployment. A mission can be as long as 12 hours, with air-to-air refuelling.

But the surveillance secret of the plane is the ludicrously shaped dorsal fin on top of the modified Boeing 737.

Its technical name is a Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array, or MESA, but it looks like a giant surfboard connected to the fuselage by a near full-length fin.

The genius radar embedded in the surfboard and broadside fin can see 360 degrees both out and down, allowing air and surface threats to be quickly observed by the 10 specialists monitoring the signal on 10 consoles inside the plane.

As one of them puts it, the Wedgetail “doesn’t get wet feet”; its missions in the Middle East are largely confined to those above land on the southern side of the Arabian Gulf.

That’s the operational strength of the E-7A Wedgetail: the aircraft doesn’t have to venture across the water or over the Strait of Hormuz to see hundreds of kilometres into Iran.

“The radar’s incredibly powerful, so it gives us really good coverage across the Arabian Gulf,” Flight Lieutenant “C” says.

Defence Minister Richard Marles, who visited ADF personnel at their secret Middle East base, says the Wedgetail will be Australia’s key commitment to a future multi-nation mission to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, but says that other assets may be promised.

“We have said that we will commit the E-7 and we will also work with France and the UK who are leading that, as to what other contributions we can make,” Marles says.

“We are a maritime nation where an increasing part of our national prosperity is derived from seaborne trade – this waterway really matters to Australia, it matters to the world.”

Australia’s Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates Ridwaan Jadwat says he has been very impressed by the UAE’s resilience in the face of unprovoked attacks.

“Almost 3000 drones and missiles have been fired at the UAE, and about 95 per cent of them were intercepted, so the UAE armed forces did an incredible job in defending the country.”

He said restoring stability to the region is in everyone’s interest.

“You ignore the Middle East at your peril,” he said. “The fuel crisis around the world has shown why the Middle East remains so important to average Australians.”

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