Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

58 SEAPOWER AEGIS
MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
AEGIS BEYOND BASELINE 8
When the final Hunter-class frigate is delivered to the Royal Australian Navy in the early 2040s, Australia will have one of the largest fleets of surface combatants outside the United States Navy equipped with Lockheed Martin’s Aegis Combat System.
NIGEL PITTAWAY | MELBOURNE
THE Aegis Combat System is already installed in Navy’s three Hobart-class DDGs and, together with an Australian interface to be developed by Saab Australia based upon its successful 9LV combat system, it has also been mandated for the nine Hunter-class FFGs.
At the moment the Hobart-class destroyers have what is known as Aegis Baseline 8, but they will be upgraded to Baseline 9 configuration under Project Sea 4000 Phase 6. The Hunter-class frigates will have Baseline 9 from the outset and Sea 4000/6 will enable a common configura- tion of combat system, albeit with different sensors – and possibly effectors – across the RAN’s surface combatants.
While the DDGs will retain their US SPY-1D(v) radar as their primary sensor, the FFGs will have an Australian radar developed by CEA Technologies but, from a combat systems operator perspective, the two classes of ship will be almost identical. Not surprisingly, Lockheed Martin also sees the Ae- gis system as an important part of its thinking for Defence’s future Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) program being delivered under Projects Air 6500 and Air 6502.
Baseline 9 will deliver a number of improvements over the earlier version of Aegis, most notably a Ballistic Mis- sile Defence (BMD) capability. While the Commonwealth is yet to specify such a capability for the ADF, the RAN’s