Bridging the air-defence gap

摘要

Australia's major Air Warfare Destroyer programme will redress the navy's lack of area air defence, but will the new ship be a bespoke solution or an existing design? Nick Brown looks at how the project is developing. Australia's Department of Defence (DoD) first set out its plans to build three new anti-air warfare (AAW) destroyers in the 2000 Defence White Paper, but as this was only released a year before the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) withdrew its third and final Perth-class destroyer from service in 2001, the navy has lacked an area air-defence capability for five years.