Some of you might be wondering what you’re looking at, this is a capability assessment of the Australian Military conducted by the world-renowned open-source defence intelligence company Janes.
For those of you that have been following the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza closely you’ll immediately note some worrying capability gaps.
The first and most concerning of these is the bright yellow circle representing ground-based air defence. Currently the Australian army operates only one short range air defence system, the Norwegian designed NASAM.
The system has a lot of upsides mostly stemming from its use of Raytheon’s AMRAAM as its primary munition and has performed well in the Ukraine from all reports.
It is limited however by its nature, the NASAM is a SHORAD system designed to work within a network of other longer ranged launchers as part of an Integrated Air and Missile Defence.
A network that is thin in the Australian context lacking any form or Long to Medium range land-based SAM capability.
