Australia Awards Contract for 11 Frigates to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
On Tuesday, the Australian government announced that it has awarded Mitsubishi Heavy Industries a $6.5 billion deal to build its next generation of "general purpose" frigates, with first deliveries scheduled for 2029. The timetable is rapid for a naval shipbuilding program, but MHI will be using its existing Mogami-class frigate design as the basis for the new series, reducing up-front engineering hours compared to a clean-sheet design.
The Mogami-class is a modern multi-mission warship capable of air defense and surface warfare. It was designed to perform its tasks with a smaller crew - a common goal for modern navies facing cost and manpower limitations. With a high degree of automation, the vessels are designed to operate with about 90 people, about the same as the reported deployable crew size of the Littoral Combat Ship series. Australia's version of the Mogami-class will be an enlarged variant, and will have 32 full-size VLS cells for anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles.
The new warships will replace Australia's existing Anzac-class frigates, which were delivered in 1993-2003 and are beginning to decommission due to advancing age. Compared to the Anzacs, the Mogami-class has much greater range, much more firepower and about half as many people aboard. Its combat management system is interoperable with U.S. Navy-standard systems, a valuable advantage for the RAN, according to ASPI analyst Malcolm Davis.
The contract calls for building the first three hulls in Japan, then constructing the remaining eight in the series at the Austal yard in Western Australia. The shipyard site for the Australian-built hulls, BAE's Henderson complex, has recently downsized its workforce by 150 people due to a slowdown on other projects.
The price of the Mogami-class program has not yet been fully determined, and contract talks are under way. The outcome will be a disappointment for German defense shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (now TKMS), the other bidder in the process. TKMS had proposed a much smaller design, the Mako A-200; parent company ThyssenKrupp has announced plans to spin off the division.
Top image: Mogami-class frigate (Hiroshi Miyaji / CC BY SA 4.0)
