jhungary
MILITARY PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2012
- Messages
- 19,295
- Reaction score
- 387
- Country
- Location
I think you need to focus more on naval aviation arm rather than a full blown air force. Being an island country, you guys need carriers more than land based fighters as that would extend your reach and enable your navy to ensure better safety in the IOR region along with other key stakeholders.
Has the Australian government considered acquiring a 30K ton class carrier?
The reason we have just a tiny navy is because we don't need to reach out to any country in our area, every country we have within us is within arms reach. And Australia is not an expandionist country, hence we don't need a big navy. Our navy main task is to keep the boat people out and deter sea priate operating in East Indian Ocean regions. That's it. We don't do port exchange, we don't do much oversea deployment nor even much oversea visiting.
that said, we have ordered 2 LHD and eventually they can be converted to Aircraft carrier if RAN decided to purchase F-35B, the ship itself ghave ski jump and all the accessories to opearte F-35B< we just don't have the aircraft yet.
We will have 2 Canberra Class LHD Eventually, 1 to indian ocean, and 1 to the pacific.