(UPDATE) SYDNEY, Australia: Australia on Tuesday outlined a decadelong plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defense spending by an additional $7 billion, in the face of a quickening Asia-Pacific arms race.
Under the plan, Australia will get a navy with 26 major surface combatant ships, up from the current 11.
"It is the largest fleet that we will have since the end of the Second World War," Defense Minister Richard Marles said.
The announcement comes after a massive buildup of firepower by rivals China and Russia, and amid growing confrontation between nervous United States-led allies and increasingly bellicose authoritarian governments.
Australia will get six Hunter class frigates, 11 general-purpose frigates, three air warfare destroyers and six state-of-the-art surface warships that do not need to be crewed.
At least some of the fleet will be armed with Tomahawk missiles capable of long-range strikes on targets deep inside enemy territory — a major deterrent capability.
The plan would see Australia increase its defense spending to 2.4 percent of gross domestic product, above the 2-percent target set by its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies.
Some of the ships will be built in the southern Australian city of Adelaide, ensuring more than 3,000 jobs, but others will be sourced from US designs and a still-undecided design to come from Spain, Germany, South Korea or Japan.
In 2021, Australia announced plans to buy at least three US-designed nuclear-powered submarines, scrapping a yearslong plan to develop nonnuclear subs from France that had already cost billions of dollars.
While the Virginia-class submarines will be nuclear-powered, they will not be armed with atomic weapons and are, instead, expected to carry long-range cruise missiles. They represent a step-shift for the country's open water capabilities.
Experts say that, taken together, Australia is poised to develop significant naval capability.
But the country's major defense projects have long been beset by cost overruns, government U-turns, policy changes and project plans that make more sense for local job creation than defense.
Michael Shoebridge, a former senior security official and now independent analyst, said the government must overcome past errors and had "no more time to waste" as competition in the region heats up.
He said there must be a trimmed-down procurement process, otherwise it would be a "familiar path that leads to delays, construction troubles, cost blowouts — and at the end, ships that get into service too late with systems that are overtaken by events and technological change."
Wooing specific electorates with the promise of "continuous naval shipbuilding" cannot be the priority, the analyst said.
"This will just get in the way of the actual priority: reversing the collapse of our Navy's fleet," he added.
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