Australia has historically taken a stop-start approach to naval shipbuilding, investing in a mixture of domestic- and foreign-sourced warships at uneven increments. The current Australian government is planning to invest tens of billions of dollars …
The Turnbull government has ramped up its push to train the specialised workforce needed to build $95 billion worth of warships in Australia over the next three decades and hinted that Australia will have a …
The 14 February piece by James Mugg and Andrew Davies was like the curate’s egg: good in parts. Much of what they wrote about the significance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and systems (UAS), especially about …
It seems like everyone’s getting a drone these days. The latest kid on the block is the Navy, which is about to start experimenting with the capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft. Last week, Schiebel announced …
While Australia and Canada are similar in many ways, their approaches to defence policy are quite different, not least when it comes to their defence budgets. While Australia’s GDP is about 18% smaller than that …
The US government’s largest contracted military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), recently opened an office in Canberra. It seems unlikely that HII would’ve done that without encouragement from the US government, via the US Navy. …
Yesterday the Australian government (with the PM and three cabinet ministers in attendance) announced that it’s going to split ASC into three separate but still government-owned companies, to ‘support the key capabilities of shipbuilding, submarine …
The Australian Army did pretty well post-INTERFET, gaining two extra battalions and some new tanks and artillery. But today the Army has pretty much taken a back seat to Air Force and Navy in the …
Sea State It has been a big month on the water for Lockheed Martin. Better known for building aircraft, the company delivered its eighth Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the LCS Detroit, to the US Navy …
Are modern-day frigates really cruisers, or is it just that the present-day needs of a frigate require the 6,000-plus tonnage of an old-fashioned cruiser? Alastair Cooper exchanged a polite broadside with ASPI’s Andrew Davies on …
A common refrain when discussing the future of airpower is that ‘the F-35 is the last manned fighter’ and the future belongs to unmanned systems. The expanding use of unmanned air systems (UAS) such as …
We need to consider the future position of ASC. The recent announcements on submarines and naval shipbuilding have resulted in a marked increase in the clamour around a potential sale of the Adelaide-based naval constructor. …