In 2009, Australia’s government decided that it would replace eight Anzac-class frigates with nine ships optimised for antisubmarine warfare (ASW). There was no justification in the Royal Australian Navy capstone doctrine for acquiring and optimising …
Since the British Type 26 was announced as the reference design for Royal Australian Navy’s nine Hunter-class frigates, the program has been controversial. The recent leaked report on the system design review was extremely negative, …
The latest revelations about the Royal Australian Navy’s Hunter-class frigates confirm much of what we knew about the problems besetting the program, but add a level of granularity far beyond the general admissions made by …
In the first part of this series, I looked at what we’ve learned recently about Defence’s naval shipbuilding enterprise. In this instalment and the next one, I’ll focus on what we’ve learned about individual projects, …
One of the pearls in my memory of working in a big bureaucracy showed how things that make sense inside it simply don’t in the outside world. It’s a corrosive dynamic that applies to how …
