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Australia has signed off on three new warships from Japan, the first batch of an 11-ship order worth billions of dollars.
Getting into it: Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and Japanese Defense Minister Koizumi Shinjiro signed the deal Saturday aboard the JS Kumano, a Mogami-class frigate docked in Melbourne. They also signed what they called the “Mogami Memorandum” (which locks both sides into the frigate program and cuts red tape so their defense industries can work together more easily).
Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries got picked for the job back in August, beating out Germany’s ThyssenKrupp, and the deal marks the first time Japan has ever sold a warship overseas. The ships are built on an upgraded Mogami-class design, carrying a 32-cell vertical launch system plus anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles, and they only need 90 sailors to run. Mitsubishi is building the first three in Japan, with the first ship set to arrive in Australia by December 2029 and hitting active service the following year. The other eight get built at Austal’s yards in Perth over in Western Australia. They’ll take over from the Navy’s Anzac-class frigates, which have been kicking around since the ’80s.
“There is no country in the world with whom we have a greater strategic alignment than Japan. And that in turn is underpinned by complete trust,” Marles said. Koizumi called the agreement “a major step that was finally being taken to elevate our defense relationship to a greater height.”
The price tag on the program has gone up. What Australia pegged at $10 billion AUD back in 2024 now sits at $20 billion AUD in the latest defense strategy. The deal is part of Australia’s record $305 billion military spending commitment over the next decade, with defense spending set to rise to 3% of GDP by 2033.
This all comes as Australia’s national defense strategy, which dropped the same week, flagged China’s “growing national power and increasingly potent military capabilities” as the biggest force shaping security across the Indo-Pacific.
