Australia Orders 8 LST100 Heavy Landing Ships to Move Tanks and Troops Across Indo-Pacific.

Australia has awarded Austal an approximately $4 billion contract to build eight 100-meter Landing Craft Heavy ships based on Damen’s LST100 design at Henderson, Western Australia, with deliveries running through 2038. The program restores Australia’s heavy sealift and beach-landing capability and strengthens Indo-Pacific logistics capacity at a time of growing regional security competition.

Austal’s February 20, 2026, announcement confirms that Canberra has now locked in a major amphibious logistics investment, awarding the shipbuilder an approximately 4 billion contract from the Commonwealth Department of Defence to deliver eight Landing Craft Heavy vessels under the Strategic Shipbuilding Agreement. The 100 m ships, derived from Damen’s LST100 design, will be built in Henderson, Western Australia, using Austal facilities and the precinct’s Common User Facility. Work is scheduled to begin in 2026, with the final vessel planned for delivery in 2038, creating a long production drumbeat while restoring a heavy sealift and beach-landing capacity Australia has not possessed since the retirement of its earlier heavy landing craft fleet.
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Australia's 100 m Landing Craft Heavy (LST100-based) self-deploys over 4,000nm with 15-day endurance, lands 70-ton loads via bow and stern ramps, and carries 200+ troops with up to six Abrams tanks or nine redback IFVs, plus a medium-helicopter deck for resupply and medevac (Picture source: Austal).

The LST100 is closer to a compact landing ship than a traditional utility craft. Damen’s baseline specification lists a 100 m hull with 16 m beam and 3.5-3.9 m draft, optimized for unrestricted navigation rather than short coastal hops. The design is rated for 900-1400 t deadweight, with endurance of 15 days at sea, a published range of more than 4,000 nautical miles at 13 knots, and a top speed around 15 knots, putting it in a different operational category from well-dock landing craft that depend on a mothership. Propulsion is a diesel-mechanical arrangement with two Caterpillar 3516-C main engines driving controllable pitch propellers in high-performance nozzles, complemented by two bow thrusters for close handling in tight ports and shallow approaches.

The ship’s internal geometry is built around roll-on roll-off throughput. Damen’s product data describes 575 m² of RoRo space plus a 440 m² cargo deck, supported by dedicated areas for stores and ammunition, and the Australian program is explicitly framed around moving heavy Army payloads at scale. Austal’s contract announcement provides capacity examples of more than 200 soldiers embarked alongside either six M1A2 SEP v3 Abrams tanks or nine AS21 Redback infantry fighting vehicles, which is a useful reality check for how the ADF intends to load the ship in wartime, not just on paper. The LST100’s beaching features are also central: the baseline fit includes a 70 t-capable bow door and bow ramp, and a 70 t-capable stern ramp, enabling both over-the-beach discharge and stern-to-wharf or stern-to-causeway transfer, depending on local hydrography and threat conditions.

That ramp architecture underwrites the tactical flexibility Australia is buying. In permissive environments, the Landing Craft Heavy can simply beach, drop the bow ramp, and push armor, trucks, engineering plant, fuel, and palletized munitions straight onto sand or a prepared shoreline. In a more contested littoral, the same ship can remain outside the highest-risk surf zone and use stern-ramp interfaces, craft carried or supported alongside, and port-side logistics nodes to reduce exposure time. Damen lists optional equipment such as a 25 t cargo crane and davit arrangements for carried craft, and even in a minimal configuration the ship’s role as a mobile transfer point is obvious: it is large enough to be a connector between strategic sealift and the last tactical mile, but small enough to disperse across multiple anchorages rather than concentrate everything on a single amphibious flagship.

The baseline LST100 includes a flight deck sized for a medium helicopter such as the NH90, which matters less for assault landings than for tempo: casualty evacuation, vertical replenishment of critical spares, moving small command elements forward, and keeping distributed lodgements supplied when roads, bridges, and ports are damaged or mined. Damen also advertises secondary missions ranging from maritime security operations to disaster relief and command support. Those roles align closely with Australian reality, where the ADF is routinely called on for rapid response in the Pacific after cyclones and earthquakes, and where logistics access is often the limiting factor, not the number of infantry on hand.

Australia’s need for this class of craft is rooted in geography and doctrine. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the 2024 National Defence Strategy drove the Army to optimize for littoral manoeuvre operations and to posture forces to deny an adversary freedom of action across the approaches to northern Australia. Army restructuring is intended to emphasize amphibious and littoral capability, enabling forward deployment along sea lanes and supporting long-range strike concepts. Austal’s own Strategic Shipbuilding Agreement material makes the link explicit, framing Landing Craft Heavy as an enabler for deploying and sustaining land forces with long-range land and maritime strike in littoral environments, which is the practical meaning of the strategy of denial when your coastline is vast, and your bases are dispersed.

The ADF will not use these ships as a standalone amphibious fleet in the old sense. Their value is as connective tissue between the Navy’s high-end amphibs and the Army’s new littoral posture. Today, the Canberra-class LHDs operate LCM-1E landing craft that are fast and well-suited for ship-to-shore work, but they are short-legged by design, with published range around 190 nautical miles and a performance envelope optimized for well-deck operations rather than independent regional transits. In parallel, the Army still operates 15 Vietnam-era LCM-8 craft, which Defence has already acknowledged must be replaced under LAND 8710 Phase 1, while Phase 2 reintroduces heavy lift that Australia lost when the Balikpapan-class LCHs were retired.

That comparison explains the real advantage of the new Landing Craft Heavy. The Balikpapan-class could haul about 180 t of cargo at roughly 10 knots, but it was a small, boxy craft with limited seakeeping and modest onboard systems by modern standards, good at honest work but not designed for distributed, longer-range, missile-age manoeuvre. The LST100-based ships bring higher speed, far greater endurance, true regional self-deployment, aviation support, and a payload model calibrated to the Army’s heaviest combat systems and the munitions that feed them. In a crisis, that means Australia can move vehicles, troops, and increasingly, long-range strike packages by sea without betting everything on a few high-value hulls or on vulnerable airlift. It is the kind of capability that wins campaigns by ensuring the force that arrives is the force that can be sustained.

On the procurement side, the contract is the culmination of a deliberately sequenced industrial plan. Defence flagged continuous naval shipbuilding at Henderson in late 2023 and spoke publicly about accelerating landing craft delivery. In November 2024, reporting indicated the Commonwealth selected Damen’s LST100 as the basis for the heavy landing craft program, and Austal’s Strategic Shipbuilding Agreement framework matured into signed contracts for both medium and heavy segments. The February 2026 agreement includes an Australian contract expenditure reported at over 60 percent, with initial construction at the Common User Facility before a move to a permanent location, and even a 30 million allocation to support interim facilities for non-Defence users affected by the industrial uplift. In short, Australia is not just buying ships; it is buying time, workforce, and a sovereign production rhythm that can be expanded when the strategic warning time shrinks.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.