The concern I have is that absent on-going or continued work, production facilities will close and decay, whilst the trained workforce will disperse (or retire) and with the currently known work, it will not take all that long for these conditions to be met.
For those that argue more orders might get placed... I agree, that might happen. However, one really cannot create and execute plans (particularly ones as resource and capital intensive) on mere possibilities. IMO this is especially true for the Hanwha facilities in Geelong because of how small I suspect the order really is, to keep the facility going.
As we already know, the (current) last AS21 Redback produced should come out of Geelong sometime in 2028, though it does not appear to be available publicly when in 2028 that is expected. If one estimates a fairly low/slow rate of production going from 2027 until nearly the end of 2028, then one is looking at slightly more than one vehicle produced per week. Further, if the long lead items take about six months (could be less, could easily be much longer) from time of order to delivery at the facility, then orders of long lead items for new production to keep the facilities going would need to be placed beforehand. Further, AFAIK there is no contract in place where Australia could 'just' order a few more from time to time, meaning that there would likely need to be some kind of contracting work to be done, ahead of any signatures for new orders, and this contract work could easily take months (or longer). Might not take as long as some of the contracts for new warship orders, which can easily top two years, but it would still induce a time crunch.
Right now, it appears that the Hanwha facility in Geelong might have production plans and orders in place for up to the next ~40 months with current orders. It could easily be less though, if the planned production rate is higher than ~five vehicles monthly, and/or the production run had been planned to end earlier in 2028, like Jan/Feb rather than Nov/Dec. If the window of opportunity to place more orders closes nine to twelve months before the end of a production run (and again, this just a guess on my part, it could be wildly off in either direction), then we could be looking at a order window closing sometime between the beginning of 2027 and the first month of 2028. This in turn means that Australia would need to make the decision to order more production and commit to it within the next two or three years.
One personal wish if mine, would be for Australia to work harder to take the politics out of the procurement decisions, particularly for major facilities which keep getting built at new sites in different states. Given the comparatively small size of the ADF, where the order volumes really will never reach those of countries like the US, it might make more sense for there to be Commonwealth-owned common user facilities for things like armoured vehicle production. Such facilities could be contracted out based upon contracts and orders placed for the ADF, and keep the need for different companies bidding on ADF programmes from needing to waste coin establish newly built facilities and work forces, only to have those investments be made redundant after a couple of years. Of course this would also require pollies from different states stop trying to get defence work for their states, at the expense of existing facilities elsewhere within the Commonwealth.
