The Government has signed two key contracts for Landing Craft Heavy and Landing Craft Medium with Austal Defence Australia.<\/p>\n
The government is investing $4 billion into Army\u2019s future Landing Craft Heavy littoral fleet through a new contract covering the scope, timeline and material requirements that will see eight vessels built at WA\u2019s Henderson Shipyard.<\/p>\n
These vessels, designed by Damen Naval, will be capable of transporting more than 500 tonnes of long range precision strike weapons and other units by sea.<\/p>\n
The contract signed has an overall Australian Contract Expenditure of over 60 per cent \u2013 supporting local and regional businesses and incentivising industry investments in workforce, supply chains and infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The first tranche of these vessels will be constructed at the Common User Facility, before the program moves to a permanent location.<\/p>\n
As part of the Landing Craft Heavy program, the Government will also make available an initial $30 million for the Western Australian Government to commence early works for interim replacement facilities for non-Defence industries that utilise the Henderson Common User Facility (CUF) to ensure they are afforded ongoing access to infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The federal and WA state governments say they are committed to ‘minimising the impacts’ to non-Defence industries at the CUF as work continues to deliver the Defence Precinct at Henderson.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Landing Craft program will further strengthen our sovereign industry, supporting continuous shipbuilding in Western Australia and ensuring Australia has the industrial capability and depth to keep Australians safe,” Minister for Defence Industry, Pat Conroy, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe combined delivery of landing craft capabilities is expected to create more than 1,100 direct and 2,000 indirect jobs, providing a sustained pipeline of work that incentivises defence industry investment in skills, supply chains and infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
This follows the government and Austal Defence Australia having signed a $1 billion contract to design, build and deliver 18 Landing Craft Medium vessels.<\/p>\n
Together, these milestones for the Landing Craft Heavy and Landing Craft Medium represent the largest recapitalisation of Army\u2019s littoral capability since the Second World War.<\/p>\n
The expanded littoral fleet is central to Army\u2019s rapid transformation under the 2024 National Defence Strategy and aims to significantly enhance the ADF\u2019s ability to hold adversaries at risk, project and sustain capabilities and deny access to Australia\u2019s northern approaches.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese contracts will support thousands of direct and indirect jobs, while also equipping the Australian Army with the capabilities it needs for littoral manoeuvre and to undertake long range land and maritime strike,” Minister for Defence Richard Marles said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Government has signed two key contracts for Landing Craft Heavy and Landing Craft Medium with Austal Defence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-490696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}