Page 39 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2020

YOU WANT US IN YOUR CORNER.
When you’re dealing with an 800 pound gorilla, it pays to have a team with the size and reach to go the distance.
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to be found in the RAN’s most likely areas of operation.
The single-line UE-ISS 800 incorpo- rates an active dual frequency towed ar- ray, a quad-directional passive receive array and a torpedo defence system. The design removes the need for large, expensive and complex handling systems for the hard-body transmit array, and the UE-ISS 800 deploys from a lightweight single-drum winch.
Ultra says the system reduces platform impact, allows greater freedom of manoeu- vrability in confined and shallow waters, and provides for safe launch and recovery in higher sea states, and at higher speeds.
Importantly, information from the ship’s Ultra Electronics hull-mounted sonar to- gether with that received from the towed array is processed within a genuinely inte- grated onboard system. This provides more robust, correlated and actionable data to the combat management system and ship’s crew than traditional sonar systems which only fuse data sets at display level.
UPGRADE PATH
Upgrades to the three AWDs are out to- wards 2028 under Project Sea 4000 Phase 6 at a cost of $4-5 billion.
These will upgrade Aegis to the latest Baseline 9 configuration, which in con- junction with more capable effectors will give the AWDs a terminal phase ballistic missile defence capability.
The 2016 Defence White Paper stated simply that the AWDs would be equipped with “new advanced surface to air missiles’ by the middle of the next decade and $2-3 billion is allocated in the Integrated Invest- ment Plan for area air defence weapons – presumably the SM-6 Dual 1 with a range of about 370km – between 2018 and 2028.
A January 2020 media release by the US Defence Security Cooperation Agen- cy referred to a possible FMS sale to Australia of “defence services for devel- opment and integration of a capability upgrade for the installed Aegis combat system on the Hobart destroyer, includ- ing Integrated Air and Missile Defence capability and growth capability for Bal- listic Missile Defence”.
Speaking on the focs’tle of NUSHIP Sydney on 28 February, VADM Noonan told ADM that Aegis upgrades would be implemented as required to ensure con- tinuing compatibility with the USN. Deci- sions on advanced weapon systems “will come later”. ■
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