Australia’s Ghost Bat: The Drone That Spooks China

News out of Woomera, South Australia

RAAF

Krikey!

Australia’s brand-new Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat combat drone has officially completed operational demonstrations, four months ahead of schedule. It’s the first homegrown Australian combat aircraft in over fifty years, and it’s already proving that kangaroo country knows how to build something scarier than a magpie in swooping season.

So today, let’s talk about what the Ghost Bat actually does, why it’s such a big deal, and how this very polite but very deadly Aussie drone could give Beijing nightmares if things heat up in the Pacific.

Hey friends, Wes here, multibranch veteran and forever banned from the city of Brisbane, Australia. It’s a long story that involves the Lord Mayor’s wife…

You know what? Let’s move on.

On September 5th, Boeing and the Royal Australian Air Force confirmed that the MQ-28 Ghost Bat wrapped up its Capability Demonstration 2025 program.

The trials proved the drone could perform the first four steps of the air combat chain: find, fix, track, and target.

In other words, it’s now officially a flying bloodhound with a radar.

During the tests, Ghost Bats worked alongside Australia’s E-7A Wedgetail early warning plane, shared targeting data between each other, and even proved that a single operator could manage two Ghost Bats in real time from the Wedgetail cockpit.

That’s the future of airpower: one human with a console, directing an entire squadron of uncrewed wingmen.

And because the Aussies love to do things properly, the Ghost Bat managed to complete all of this four months ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Ghost Bat would still be stuck in the ‘Concept’ stage of a 15-year acquisition plan.

The MQ-28 is a pragmatic predator engineered to be useful, flexible, and annoyingly survivable. At its core, the Ghost Bat embraces modularity as doctrine. The nose and mission bays are swap-ready: radar, EO/IR pods, electronic warfare packages, or SIGINT (signals intelligence) stacks can be bolted in like different toppings on a pizza.

That means the same basic airframe can be a long-endurance ISR (intelligence, surveillance, recon) scout one week, a forward sensor for a fighter pack the next, and later be repurposed as an EW (electronic warfare) node, without redesigning the whole airplane.

For a region like the Indo-Pacific, where mission requirements could change by the hour, that plug-and-play architecture is pure gold.

Under the skin, the designers prioritized endurance and payload efficiency rather than raw speed.

Expect an airframe optimized for high lift at subsonic speeds, reasonably long wings, and a clean fuselage to keep wing loading low so the platform can loiter, breathe, and buffer sensor time on target.

That’s why the engineers married a commercial turbofan with a large internal volume: you get the economic cruise of a civil jet but with internal bays sized for mission systems instead of extra latte cabinets.

Boeing

On signature control, they took the “less drama, more geometry” approach.

Instead of expensive radar-absorbing paints and secret sauce composites, the Ghost Bat uses planform alignment and shaping, aligning edges, hiding seams, and controlling reflections, to reduce frontal radar returns.

Combine that with internal carriage for key payloads and careful antenna placement, and you get a lower detectability profile without bankrupting the program. Radar stealth isn’t magically turned on, but the platform is harder to spot at a distance than a conventional business jet with a camera stuck on the nose.

But the real brains live in the software stack.

The platform’s autonomy suite is designed for distributed sensing and cooperative behavior: multiple vehicles fuse tracks, hand off targets, and reassign priorities without a pilot in a state of perpetual panic.

That means robust onboard sensor fusion, collision-avoidance logic, and a mission manager that tolerates degraded comms. Crucially, the architecture is built on an open, modular software backbone (like plug-in algorithms and secure APIs), so new sensor packages or AI models can be uploaded without changing flight controls.

In procurement terms: futureproofing the plane so it ages well, like a Sears Craftsman Wrench from 1975, instead of a paperweight.

Communications and datalinks are treated like mission lifeblood. Multiple redundant links, short-range line-of-sight, medium-range tactical datalinks, and beyond-line-of-sight satellite pipes are expected to be available so the Ghost Bat can act as a local node or a relay.

Secure, low-latency mesh networking between Ghost Bats and crewed platforms is what converts isolated sensors into a distributed combat picture.

That’s how a dozen cheap drones turn into a “thinking” wingman for an F-35 or a Growler, and why modern air combat is as much about bytes as it is about missiles.

The Ghost Bat’s systems are designed with redundancy and graceful degradation in mind: if one sensor or link goes dark, the mission manager reshuffles tasks rather than aborting the sortie. Thermal management and signature control focus on reducing infrared cues to make the platform less appetizing to heat-seeking missiles. And because they expect attrition in a high-threat environment, the airframe is intentionally cheap to produce relative to a manned fighter, expendable in doctrine, not in waste.

Finally, maintainability and industrial logic were baked into the design.

Modern militaries don’t want black-box unicorns that only the manufacturer can fix.

The Ghost Bat’s architecture favors line-replaceable units, standard avionics interfaces, and straightforward ground support requirements so that allied industry partners can repair and upgrade units locally.

You don’t need a sovereign aerospace kingdom to keep these flying, just competent maintainers, a laptop, and a spare sensor pod.

So, Ghost Bat is a flexible, networked, cheap-to-operate sensor/relay that plays to Australian strengths: smart software, good systems integration, and a practical appetite for solving theater problems without theatrics.

If you want a hunter that helps your big jets see farther and survive longer, this is exactly the kind of smart tool you want on the team.

Australia is not trying to match China plane for plane. That would be like challenging a sumo wrestler to an eating contest. Instead, Australia is going asymmetric: buying fewer manned jets but pairing them with Ghost Bats to stretch their effectiveness.

Imagine four F-35s flying into contested airspace. Each one brings along two or three Ghost Bats. Suddenly, that’s a swarm of a dozen aircraft, with the drones out front absorbing risk, hunting targets, and feeding data back to the manned jets.

If China launches J-20 stealth fighters or long-range SAMs, it’s the Ghost Bats that get lit up first, not the human pilots.

RAAF

That’s the definition of combat mass, using uncrewed assets to multiply your force without multiplying the body bags.

Only Australia could build a killer drone and give it a name like Ghost Bat. Americans would’ve called it the “Reaper II” or “Doomstrike 9000.” The Brits would’ve gone with something like “Her Majesty’s Displeasure.”

But Australia? They name it after a spooky little bat that lives in the outback, a little bugger that will kick your ass and ask for seconds, and then build it with enough range to patrol the entire South China Sea.

It’s the most Australian thing ever: tough, lethal, and probably accompanied by a cold beer and a side of snark.

If conflict ever breaks out over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, China will try to overwhelm its adversaries with numbers: more ships, more planes, more missiles. But Ghost Bat tips that balance.

With a range of 3,700 kilometers, Australia can forward-deploy Ghost Bats from bases like Tindal or even northern Queensland, and suddenly the drones are covering choke points in the Indo-Pacific.

They can extend radar coverage for E-7 Wedgetails, act as decoys to lure Chinese SAMs, or even carry weapons themselves once the “engage and assess” phase of the program comes online.

China’s military planners hate uncertainty. And Ghost Bat is built to create uncertainty.

Is that contact on the radar a manned F-35 or just a Ghost Bat?

Is it carrying sensors or a missile?

Do you waste a $5 million missile shooting it down, or hold your fire and risk getting hit?

Those are the kinds of dilemmas Beijing does not want at 3 a.m. in a crisis.

Here’s another reason Ghost Bat matters: it’s built in Australia. Over 200 local suppliers are contributing parts, from avionics to landing gear to composite wings. Boeing even set up a final assembly plant in Toowoomba, Queensland.

This is an industrial renaissance.

Australia hasn’t built its own combat aircraft since the 1960s, and now it’s back in the game with a $10 billion investment in uncrewed systems. For Canberra, that means jobs, sovereignty, and the ability to say, “We don’t need to wait for Washington to build everything.”

So, what do we have? The MQ-28 Ghost Bat is fast, flexible, modular, and already proving itself ahead of schedule. It doesn’t just help Australia punch above its weight; it makes sure China knows that every move in the Pacific will be watched, tracked, and maybe targeted by a drone named after a bat.

This is the future of air combat, and Australia has just staked its claim.

That’s it for today, friends. When you subscribe, it convinces one more Russian conscript that maybe he should’ve gone to trade school.

Advance Australia. Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes. Crimea is Ukraine.