Invisible to those outside the paywall. Any chance of a few salient quotes to give the core of the report?
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by Brendon Nicholson, The Australian, December 17, 2015
As the troubled air warfare *destroyer project suffered delays and lost money, it was widely considered the toughest part of the program would be fitting the massively complex combat system that is the ship’s whole reason for existence.
In a remarkable turnaround, that system has just been fitted to the first destroyer, to be commissioned HMAS Hobart, on time and on budget.
On an exclusive visit to the warship, The Australian was shown the start of the activation process for the systems that will be used to fight in the sort of high-intensity warfare for which it was designed.
The ships will use a US-built defence system known as Aegis to provide a screen over the fleet, *especially the navy’s new troop carriers, or landing helicopter docks, or over forces on a hostile shore to protect them against missile and aircraft attack.
The decision to obtain them was made after the Australian Defence Force sought discreet support from the US and Britain when it found itself without protective cover during the intervention in East Timor in 1999.
Depending on a decision still to be made by an Australian government, the missile systems aboard the destroyers could be upgraded to allow them to be used as part of a ballistic missile defence system to protect Australia against nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles such as those on which North Korea is working.
The degree of difficultly involved in destroying a missile dropping out of space has been compared with hitting a rifle *bullet with another rifle bullet. This has been done repeatedly in tests carried out by the US and Japanese navies.
Costs have been reeled in as the first of the three ships nears completion but the federal government has had to put an extra $1.2 billion into the project, taking it to a total of about $9bn for the vessels.
Rod Equid, the regional general manager for the combat *system integrator Raytheon Australia, said about 90 per cent of the ship’s strategic value to the navy was in the combat system.
Effectively, the rest of the ship was there to get that highly sophisticated integration of radar systems, massive computers and protective missiles to where they’d be needed.
Loyd Beckett, an American appointed several months ago as general manager of the Air Warfare Destroyer Alliance, said that even with its problems the *destroyer project had progressed much more smoothly than many similar shipbuilding projects in the US and elsewhere.
By international benchmarks, the project was much more successful than many in Australia *believed, he said.
The second vessel in the fleet would be much closer to schedule and budget and with the benefit of the experience building the first two destroyers, the third ship was likely to come in ahead of schedule and under budget.
Mr Beckett said that as problems with the first ship were identified, they were able to be avoided in the second.
By the time the third was complete it was likely some of the lost time would have been made up and some of the cost overruns *balanced with savings. And as many other ships built in earlier projects were delivered fitted “for” their weapons and other key equipment rather than “with” it, all of the systems on Hobart and its sister ships would be fully functional and tested *before it was handed over to the navy.
The Australian visited the project as a guest of Raytheon
