L3Harris will open a service centre in Brisbane, Australia, in early 2025 to support the sustainment of radios operated by regional militaries. (Janes/Andrew White)
L3Harris Technologies is set to open its first regional support centre (RSC) outside the United States as it gears up to provide maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) services for tactical communication devices in operation by Australian, international, and US forces across the Indo-Pacific.
Speaking to Janes on 12 September at the Land Forces 2024 exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, company executives confirmed the RSC will be located at the company's existing Integration and Sustainment Centre at Pinkenba near Brisbane airport in the first quarter of 2025.
Initially, the RSC will support Australian and New Zealand defence forces, negating any requirement to ship unserviceable radios back to L3Harris's facility in Rochester, New York, where MRO traditionally takes place.
Instead, radios will be shipped directly to the Brisbane facility for repair, reducing the amount of time it takes to fix and return a radio from six months to just one month, the company said.
According to L3Harris Australia's managing director Andrew Rushbrook, the company is also looking to expand the RSC's remit to include MRO of L3Harris radios used by international customers across the wider Indo-Pacific region. These include Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Taiwan, he said.
A third phase will also see the RSC providing MRO services for US forces deployed across the Indo-Pacific. In August L3Harris conducted a ‘fly-in/fly-out proof of principle' with the US Marine Corps (USMC) to repair four of the USMC AN/PRC-117G manpack radios.
The Marine Rotational Force-Darwin at Robertson Barracks, Northern Territory, took part in the proof of principle to confirm “advantages of in-region equipment repairs”, according to the USMC.
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