Detect to Engage (DTE)

Building a sovereign mesh of autonomous systems — to deny, disrupt, and overwhelm. Making Australia a hard target across every domain.

Our Purpose

A2AD exists to close the gap between strategic ambition and operational capability.

We build what Australia’s warfighters need next: sovereign, autonomous systems that scale fast, strike first, and endure in contested environments.

Our mission is to strengthen Australia’s deterrence posture with the asymmetric capabilities required to impose cost on any adversary — not in years, but now.

In an era where threats evolve faster than traditional acquisition cycles, we are focused on delivering deployable, scalable capability at the speed of relevance.
We believe that sovereign innovation — designed and built in Australia — is critical to ensuring the nation remains a hard target.

How we build

A2AD is built around a core principle: speed matters — in both the kill chain and the capability chain.
If we cannot field faster than threats evolve, we fail.

At the heart of A2AD is our Detect-to-Engage (DTE) pipeline — a deliberately accelerated development model designed to compress the path from concept to capability from years to months.

Traditional multi-year acquisition cycles cannot deliver the asymmetric mass and agility required to deter, and if necessary defeat, emerging threats.

A2AD exists to ensure Australia — and its allies — can field what is needed, when it is needed, and at scale.

DTE Loop

1. Detect Needs — We source real-world problem statements from warfighters, emerging threat intelligence, and operational analysis. We do not build speculative solutions — we build for the fight.

2. Prototype Fast — We design and fabricate modular, sovereign-first prototypes within weeks — not years — using a core architecture that supports rapid evolution and mass production.

3. Iterate Relentlessly — We test early and often, in the field and with operators. Every test is a data-gathering and warfighter feedback opportunity — because systems that aren’t refined through operational insight are systems that will fail in combat.

4. Field What Works — We scale what proves effective, working with prime partners and industry to enable rapid, sovereign production — not fragile prototypes trapped in perpetual development.

We believe that this model — fast, sovereign, iterative, warfighter-led — is not just an innovation advantage.
It is a strategic necessity.

Our systems are not standalone solutions — they are nodes in a distributed, resilient, sovereign mesh.This architecture is intentionally designed to enable:

Scalable mass — many autonomous units, not a few exquisite platforms.

Cross-domain resilience — sea, land, and air nodes that reinforce one another.

Mesh autonomy — individual units capable of operating alone, but most lethal when operating as part of an intelligent, coordinated network.

Rapid reconstitution — attritable by design, not precious — enabling bold employment.