The Integrated Investment Program, announced by the federal government in August, is set to boost Defence spending by a staggering $330bn over the next decade. This is no small feat, and it’s clear that infrastructure is a major focus of the program.
Aside from being the largest in its 43-year history, Exercise Pitch Black 2024 was significant for highlighting the growing strategic focus on stability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.
The recent Defence Strategic Review calls for the army to be ‘transformed and optimised for littoral manoeuvre’. One of the key priorities mentioned is a long-range fires capability, including land-based maritime strike.
Space is not a serene sanctuary, it is an operational domain in its own right, which is contested as a result of the growing threat of Chinese and Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities
A credible warfighting capability only exists when backed by industrial capability and capacity. One could assume politicians, bureaucrats and ADF leaders don’t understand either the role of industry in defence policy, or of Australian industry in the broad.
Australia is enhancing regional maritime security for Pacific Island nations through the Pacific Maritime Security Program (PMSP): a package of capability-building, infrastructure development, sustainment, training, and co-ordination activities.
Supporting large, modern, complex naval platforms is no easy task. Finally, the long-awaited process of developing a second hub – and far larger than Garden Island – in Western Australia is under way.
The trend of building some of our warships locally is set to end with the build of the RAN’s first three General Purpose Frigates (GPFs) in a northern hemisphere shipyard.
Rapid technological change has wrought significant changes in how wars are fought and won. So, DSTG is a party to the reimagining and overhaul of Defence’s capability development and acquisition processes.
US company Anduril, which is better known for developing the Ghost Shark autonomous submarine for the Navy, is one of four companies that will respond to Defence’s request for establishing a rocket motor manufacturing complex in Australia.
AUKUS will not be defeated by its lack of any plausible policy foundation, its unsupported intelligence pronouncements, or the absence of any implementation plan. It will be defeated by its unachievability, as much in Britain and the US as in Australia.
If, as stated in the National Defence Strategy, the defence aim is to deter and hence reduce the risk of conflict, then we need to be doing different things, and doing them differently.
Defence and the government might have tried to dismantle the entire MRH90 Taipan fleet in secret, but information keeps dribbling out.
The time to build stockpiles of weapons and Australian industrial capacity is now.
Australia’s strategic landscape is shifting rapidly, with the country facing a range of evolving security threats and heightened tensions in the Indo-Pacific region.
Finding thousands of Australians with the right skills to deliver the SSN-AUKUS fleet is a formidable challenges that lie ahead for the nation’s next-generation submarine program.
Now the Royal Australian Navy has disclosed its plans to acquire two new classes of nuclear-powered submarines, all the dots are finally on the page.
Lockheed Martin Australia aims to deliver the core of the ADF’s Joint Air Battle Management System (JABMS), in a rapid-fire, nine-month drumbeat of capability ‘drops’ in Project AIR6500.
In an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific, Australia’s role in maintaining regional security is critical.
The ‘rules-based global order’ now wavers under intense pressure.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/special-reports/defence/page/3
