Australia Orders Heavy Landing Craft to Move Tanks and HIMARS Launchers Across Littorals.

Austal Defence Australia has secured a 1.029 billion Australian dollar contract to build 18 steel-hulled Landing Craft Medium for the Australian Army, with construction beginning in 2026. The program signals Canberra’s shift toward treating amphibious lift as a core warfighting capability, not just a logistics enabler, with clear implications for Indo-Pacific deterrence.

Austal Defence Australia announced on December 18, 2025, that it has been awarded a 1.029 billion Australian dollar Design and Build contract to deliver 18 Landing Craft Medium vessels for the Australian Army under the Strategic Shipbuilding Agreement. Construction of the first steel hull is scheduled to begin in 2026 at Henderson, Western Australia, with deliveries extending through 2032, establishing a sustained production run focused on strengthening Australia’s ability to move heavy combat power across contested littoral environments.
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Australia's future Landing Craft Medium will provide the Army with steel-built, long-range amphibious vessels capable of projecting up to 80 tonnes of combat power, including main battle tanks and HIMARS launchers (Picture source: Austal).

Austal’s release is sparing on configuration, but it confirms two decisive technical signals. First, the craft will be built in steel, a material choice that points to repeated beaching cycles, heavy vehicle wheel loads, and higher tolerance for abrasion and impact than lighter alloys in harsh littoral work. Second, Austal states the class will be capable of projecting loads up to 80 tonnes, placing it in the bracket where a single sortie can shift the Army’s heaviest tactical building blocks, not just pallets and troops. In practical terms, that threshold opens the door to moving an Abrams tank, recovery assets, protected mobility trucks, and bulky engineer plant that cannot be pushed forward by small landing craft without breaking the load into multiple risky trips.

Canberra’s own public framing shows exactly how it intends to operationalise that payload. In July 2024, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy described the medium landing craft as part of a new littoral fleet designed to deploy and sustain modernised land forces across the region, explicitly tied to a strategy of denial. In that government description, the medium craft were presented as able to transport up to 90 tonnes, with examples including four HIMARS, or a main battle tank, or an infantry fighting vehicle plus Bushmasters, and with an advertised range up to 2,000 nautical miles when operating with the future heavy landing craft. The difference between 90 tonnes in earlier government messaging and 80 tonnes in Austal’s contract wording likely reflects how payload versus projected load is defined during design maturation, but the tactical intent is consistent: to move serious combat power by sea, independently of fixed ports.

The program will replace the Army’s ageing LCM 8 fleet, vessels that have provided decades of service but lack the endurance, payload flexibility, and survivability demanded by contemporary operations. Earlier preferred design concepts pointed to a roughly 50 metre class craft with true blue water capability, designed to carry an 80 tonne payload beyond 2,000 nautical miles while operating at the upper end of Sea State 4 with fuel reserve margins. Even if the final Austal detailed design evolves from those earlier industry briefings, the directional requirement remains clear. Australia is buying not merely ship-to-shore connectors, but a coastal and archipelagic lift tool that can reposition land forces inside contested littorals and keep them sustained.

Compared to what Australia fields today, that is a major step change in reach. The Royal Australian Navy’s LHD Landing Craft, the Navantia-built LCM-1E, is a fast and sophisticated connector optimised for Canberra-class amphibious assault ships, with over-the-horizon navigation, twin waterjets, and more than 20 knots unladen speed. It is a sharp tool for rapid offload, but its endurance is measured in tactical hops rather than long coastal transits. Meanwhile, the Navy’s smaller LCVP fleet carries light vehicles and troops, and HMAS Choules can embark older craft for disaster relief and lift, but this mix does not give the Army a purpose-built, heavy, long-range littoral shuttle. The ADF has already pushed its existing connectors hard, upgrading LCM-1E craft to safely embark Abrams tanks, recovery vehicles, and heavy trucks, underscoring both the demand signal and the limits of the current fleet.

Strategically, the program fits Australia’s geographic problem set, vast northern approaches, long internal sea lines, and an Indo-Pacific security environment where bases and ports can be threatened, monitored, or politically unavailable. It also fits the broader Henderson industrial picture, where medium landing craft sit alongside a future heavy landing craft program based on a 100 metre class design intended to deliver high payloads over inter-theatre distances. In wartime logic, the heavy craft becomes the logistics spine, while the new medium landing craft disperses loads from ship to shore, shore to shore, and along Australia’s coastline, giving commanders options when airlift is scarce and ports are denied.