Located at Puckapunyal Military Area, Lavarack Barracks and Edinburgh Defence Precinct, the new facilities will support Projects LAND400, LAND907 Phase 2 and LAND8160 Phase 1 until 2050. It’d be great if that ‘something’ isn’t a vehicle that the ADF already has in numbers. In an August 2018 article in The Australian, Hellyer suggested that AFVs might be ‘ill-suited to tasks that feature heavily in modern counterinsurgency operations, such as route clearance and patrolling’, and highlighted their vulnerabilities on the conventional battlefield. At the same time, however, tactics should not be the sole driver of policy and strategy decisions. We’ll look more at those in future posts. Logistically, the vehicle is capable of rapid deployment by road, rail, sea or air. The $10–15 billion project aims to replace the army’s ageing M113 armoured personnel carriers with a fleet of up to 450 state-of-the-art IFVs and 17 manoeuvre support vehicles. The Australian Army has begun training on the new Rheinmetall Defence Boxer 8×8 armoured vehicles being delivered under the Land 400 Phase 2 programme. The Australian Army has demonstrated a pair of autonomous armored vehicles that it will use to study how robots will impact the battlefield of the future. Vehicles for training purposes are also held by the School of Armour in Puckapunyal, and the Army Logistic Training Centre at Bandiana. Queensland ran out the winner in a vicious cage fight with Victoria to land the combat reconnaissance vehicle project and its 1,450 jobs. The M1 Abrams main battle tank will remain the hardened [2] Marcus Hellyer is ASPI’s senior analyst for defence economics and capability. Unfortunately, expedience seems to be trumping strategy. The army will be equipped with 1,000 new armoured vehicles under a $1.5bn deal to be announced by the federal government. The army's deteriorating fleet is to receive a boost thanks to the purchase of 43 new armoured vehicles. The Federal Government has announced it will spend $1.3 billion on new light armoured personnel carriers for the Army. Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds said the commencement of training brings the army “a step closer to … The Australian Army has begun training on the new Rheinmetall Defence Boxer 8×8 armoured vehicles being delivered under the Land 400 Phase 2 programme. Having won a big slice of the Navy's multi-billion-dollar frigate and submarine contracts, South Australia is now setting its sights on building the Army's new armoured vehicles. And that’s the challenge in building quantities of traditional manned vehicles and other platforms that match the size of the Australian Defence Force—either you build at the most efficient rate and get the capability into service quickly but face the prospect of jobs ending, as with the Hawkei, or you stretch out production to create a sustainable industrial drumbeat, as with the Hunter-class frigates, which we’re paying $10 billion more to get at a much slower rate. The Australian government continues its modernization program with the acquisition of new armored personnel carriers to replace 431 M113AS4s currently in service. Image: Department of Defence. Since the force structure plan suggests that the army will have only armoured and protected vehicles because unprotected vehicles won’t be deployable (pages 76–77), all of its vehicles are now a strategic priority. The vehicle fleet consists of combat reconnaissance, infantry fighting, main battle tank and armoured engineering vehicles. … The Staghound Armoured Car entered service with the Australian Army in 1943, and the last of the vehicles were retired in the late 1960s. The Strategist — The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Blog. The army is more cognisant than ever that even in low-threat environments, non-state actors like insurgent groups and terrorists have the technology to seriously threaten Australia’s current armoured capabilities. It will prove a time of step changes in capability. Of course, there’s the issue of whether having SPHs aligns with the strategic update’s telling judgements in the first place. The prospect of building off into the distant future to avoid losing the jobs you initially created brings us to the third development, the announcement that the Hawkei protected mobility vehicle light is finally going into full-rate production. If we pick the median point of that price range and assume the same 30% local premium, we’re paying a $1.3 billion premium to sustain those jobs. And if the capability is urgent, setting up a production line to deliver a handful of vehicles each year is the definition of gradual—particularly when Hanwha, having built more than 1,000 SPHs for the South Korean army, could deliver 30 from Korea without breaking a sweat. Australian Government request for up to six additional M88A2 THE AUSTRALIAN ARMY is undergoing an unprecedented modernisation of its armoured vehicle fleets that will peak in the early 2020s and continue out to 2030. Which gets us back to the point above—with so many strategic priorities, why are we paying big premiums to inefficiently build things here that we can quickly acquire off the shelf overseas? The Staghound was best known in Australia for its post-Second World War service with Citizen Military Forces (CMF) armoured units. If wet season factors are driving any plans to divert 1st Brigade’s IFVs to Adelaide from Darwin, it must be asked whether the vehicles themselves are fit for purpose. Located at Puckapunyal Military Area, Lavarack Barracks and Edinburgh Defence Precinct, the new facilities will support Projects LAND400, LAND907 Phase 2 and LAND8160 Phase 1 until 2050. There are only 700 jobs in the acquisition phase—and Queensland gets only 330 of them anyway. These arguments are particularly relevant now as two contenders will soon be shortlisted for the army’s new infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs). But if everything is a priority, then nothing is. The government first announced it would build howitzers in Geelong during the 2019 election campaign, creating 350 jobs. So, along with tanks, combat reconnaissance vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles and armoured recovery vehicles are Hawkei and Bushmaster protected mobility vehicles, protected trucks and, last but not least, self-propelled howitzers (SPHs). LAND 400 Phase 3 Armoured Fighting Vehicles. In July 1949, the remaining members of the unit were formed into a new unit, the 1st Armoured Regiment, to become the first armoured unit of the new Australian Regular Army. So, Geelong probably shouldn’t count on 350 howitzer jobs. The Australian Army is a modern, mobile fighting force fielding the proven American M1 Abrams as its armored centerpiece. One is that we need new capabilities that ‘hold adversary forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia, such as longer-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area denial systems’. Rheinmetall Defence has delivered first of 211 Boxer 8×8 armoured vehicles to the Australian Army at a ceremony at Gallipoli Barracks Brisbane. The second is that we can no longer rely on warning time and don’t have time to ‘gradually adjust capabilities’. Each brigade was to comprise two infantry battalions and an armoured cavalry regiment, ‘with organic armoured, cavalry and mounted combat lift capabilities along with the usual supporting element of artillery, signals, combat engineers and combat service support units’. The addition of these new vehicles is expected to enhance the land forces’ combat reconnaissance capabilities. They also highlight the problems that can arise when the industry tail wags the capability dog. The LAND 400 program will provide the Australian Army with the means to reshape and reorganise its combat formation. It’s surprising that, three decades later, the unchanged environmental challenge of ‘the wet’ has become a justification for moving whole units and capabilities—such as the tanks of the 1st Armoured Regiment—south to Adelaide. But nowhere does the plan say that local production or assembly of vehicles is a strategic priority. Former defence minister Marise Payne opened a request for tender for phase 3 of the LAND 400 program in August last year. Also, what happens to those 350(-ish) jobs once the 30 howitzers are built? In today’s increasingly unpredictable strategic environment, we are more likely to find ourselves operating throughout our region than defending our nation from within our own borders. Mud & Dust: Australian Army Vehicles & Artillery in Vietnam. The Staghound was best known in Australia for its post-Second World War service with Citizen Military Forces (CMF) armoured units. Cecil, Michael K. (2009). Now commencing the construction phase for Stage 1, the new facilities will support the maintenance and training requirements of the most advanced and capable fleet vehicles the Australian Army has ever acquired. 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