Naval Directory Case Study: Royal Australian Navy's Type 26 GCS

The Hunter-class Type 26 GCS-A brings capability spread for Australia.

- Dr Lee Willett

In June 2018, the Commonwealth of Australia announced that the United Kingdom’s BAE Systems-built, anti-submarine warfare (ASW) focused Type 26 Global Combat Ship (GCS) had been downselected as the baseline design to provide the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN’s) Sea 5000 Future Frigate capability.

Australia is purchasing nine Global Combat Ship-Australia (GCS-A) vessels to replace the RAN’s eight in-service MEKO 200 ANZAC-class frigates. The ships will be called the Hunter class. The lead ship is scheduled for delivery to the navy in the mid- 2020s, prior to entering operational service in the late 2020s.

In UK Royal Navy (RN) service, the Type 26 has been procured primarily as an ASW platform, with the RN receiving eight Type 26s (called the City class) to replace its eight ASWroled Type 23 frigates. The return to state-based competition in the underwater domain across the European and North Atlantic theatre underlines the importance of ASW for the RN.

For the RAN, the increase in sub-surface activity across the Indo-Pacific region over the last decade also underlines the importance of introducing improved ASW capability. “The proliferation of submarines in the Indo-Pacific region and the increasingly complex strategic situation create a new priority for ASW capabilities,” retired RAN rear admiral James Goldrick told AMR. Noting that over 50 percent of the world’s submarines will be operating in the Indo-Pacific region by 2030, the RAN itself has stated that “the primary purpose of the Future Frigate is to detect, track and, if required, destroy enemy submarines.”