Australia opens a tender for medium-range army missile defence as it eyes China's arsenal

Australia's Department of Defence has opened a formal industry solicitation for a medium-range, ground-based air and missile defence system for the Australian Army, under a programme known as Project Land 6504. Defense News reported on Oct. 19 that the solicitation was issued on Oct. 13, and Aviation Week reported the same day that the government has begun the process of acquiring the equipment.

The tender is meant to close what Defense News described as a large gap in the country's defences. The army's ground-based air defence currently rests on a single regiment's worth of the Kongsberg-Raytheon NASAMS short-range system, which the outlet said is nowhere near enough to protect a continent. Janes, reporting from the Land Forces 2026 exhibition in Perth, said Land 6504 replaced the earlier Land 6502 Phase 1 effort and that defence officials gave industry a preliminary briefing at the show on Oct. 7.

According to Defense News, the new system must be able to shoot down ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their flight and also deal with subsonic air-breathing threats. The solicitation calls for a proven, off-the-shelf capability that will become part of a national integrated air and missile defence network. It must also work with radars made by Australia's CEA Technologies and with the Joint Air Battle Management System that Lockheed Martin Australia is developing.

China's growing military power is a primary driver of the project, Defense News said, pointing to a People's Liberation Army naval task group that sailed around Australia in early 2025 and to China's intercontinental ballistic missile shot into the South Pacific in July. The outlet noted that China has the most diverse missile arsenal in the world. Australia's National Defence Strategy 2026 named medium-range, ground-based active missile defence as a priority, and Janes said the 2026 Integrated Investment Program is expected to devote a large part of the 7.2 billion to 10 billion Australian dollars earmarked for air defence over the coming decade to this capability.

The schedule is tight. Defense News said Canberra wants to choose a supplier by the end of 2027, conduct live firings during Exercise Talisman Sabre in mid-2029 and reach initial operational capability in the early 2030s. To save time, Defence is pursuing a direct commercial purchase and the US Foreign Military Sales route at the same time.

The requirement has already drawn interest from companies in Europe, Israel, South Korea, Turkey and the United States. South Korea's Hanwha promoted its L-SAM long-range interceptor at the Perth exhibition earlier this month, while the head of Kongsberg Australia told Defense News that his company is interested and that the NASAMS family is being developed toward full-spectrum air defence. One option would be to add extended-range AMRAAM-ER missiles to the NASAMS units Australia already operates. Lockheed Martin Australia, for its part, fired an SM-2 missile from a trailer-mounted launcher earlier this year, using the Aegis combat system and a CEA radar to show how locally available parts could be combined.

Funding and supply remain the main risks. Defense News said the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine programme is absorbing much of the money available for new equipment. It added that the timing could help non-American bidders, because the United States is trying to rebuild missile stocks it drew down during its conflict with Iran, and it cited a recent Congressional Research Service report warning that limited US industrial capacity forces trade-offs between foreign orders and American stockpiles, and that delays could lead buyers to cancel.