The New Zealand government’s decision to commit an extra A$95m per year to defence for the next five years would scarcely rate a mention if the same had happened in Australia. The total of that …
Everyone seemed to miss it—a statement in public (at ASPI’s Submarine Choice conference) from the chairman of the Western world’s largest and most successful builder of conventional submarines: a fleet of 12 large state-of-the-art boats …
Over the past two decades, Defence has staggered from one budget crisis to the next, trying to afford the unaffordable. Of the five White Papers issued between 1976 and 2009 for which ex post fact …
The government looks set to spend somewhere between $8 and $10 billion on F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which would then constitute the bulk of the RAAF’s air-combat capability for decades to come. The aircraft has …
China has once again raised its defence spending by a double digit percentage. There’s nothing new about that; the average rate of growth since 2002 has been 14.6% according to official figures. Usually, the annual …




