Articles

A TEST flight by a civilian plane landed on an island in the South China Sea, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said. It’s the first time the country has done so in the disputed Spratly Islands. Tensions are now high with neighbouring Vietnam and the Philippines.

News: Unmanned vessels: implications / Russian helos for Egyptian Mistral class ships / Shipping cybersecurity guidelines.

By Lieutenant Commander J A Edmondson* NAVAL warfare officers spend the majority of their early careers at sea in the RAN either in single naval units or in modestly sized naval task groups. They are extensively trained in naval tactical planning on Principal Warfare Officer (PWO) course and use this training operationally at sea. However, the majority only get a rudimentary exposure to Joint planning or tactical planning in the land environment.

We’ve been building ships the hard way for so long (start, stop, start, stop in small numbers of different designs) that the Australian collective understanding of what is possible is very limited. Can we now maintain the direction towards continuous ship-building that was set in 2015? Join the debate.

THE stealth capabilities of Russia’s new LADA-CLASS diesel-electric submarines far exceed those of their predecessors, Admiralty Shipyard’s CEO Alexander Buzakov told the Russian press.

Distributed lethality can offer versatile means for achieving political and military objectives in an era of lean budgets and evolving threats, according to Dmitry Filipoff.

THERE is a Goliath menacing the western Pacific. China’s construction of three huge artificial islands with obvious military capacity in the South China Sea has already destabilized the security equilibrium in the region. So we should arm David, Jerry Hendrix argues.

The British Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) responds to a new security environment in which major governments (Russia) are at least as threatening as insurgents (ISIL and its friends), Norman Friedman writes in his monthly review of world naval developments.

Former Defence Minister, Opposition Leader and retiring Australian Ambassador to the US, Kim Beazley, is to be the Australian Naval Institute's 2016 Vernon Parker Orator.

ANI president puts Defence White Paper into naval context and advocates the adoption of a common design philosophy across the future fleet.