Australia Makes Missile Production a 2026 Defense Priority for Indo-Pacific Deterrence.

Australia is moving to make guided weapons and munitions a core part of its domestic defence base, with the 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy naming local missile and ammunition production as one of Canberra’s seven Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities for the next two to five years. The shift matters because it ties Australian-made weapons directly to deterrence, deeper stockpiles, allied interoperability, and the ability to sustain combat operations if overseas supply lines are disrupted.

The policy gives stronger direction to production already taking shape, including Kongsberg’s planned Naval Strike Missile and Joint Strike Missile factory in New South Wales and Lockheed Martin Australia’s GMLRS missile work in South Australia. For Australia and its allies, the result is a more resilient Indo-Pacific weapons supply chain and a stronger base for long-range strike, maritime denial, and sustained operations in a contested region.

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Australia's 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy makes domestic guided weapons, explosive ordnance and munitions production a priority to strengthen missile stockpiles and reduce supply-chain dependence, and support interoperable long-range strike capabilities with allied forces (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

The significance of the 2026 strategy is that it treats guided weapons and munitions as an industrial readiness problem, not simply as an acquisition requirement. Australia’s geography requires long-range fires, maritime strike, air-launched weapons, and resilient ammunition stocks to cover approaches across the northern and western maritime arc. In practical terms, a missile inventory without local assembly, component production, testing, storage, and recertification capacity leaves the Australian Defence Force dependent on allied production queues during the same crisis in which allies would also be drawing heavily on their own stocks.

The technical content of the priority is broader than final missile assembly. A domestic guided weapons base requires work on control actuation systems, canards, warhead sections, fuzes, rocket motors, launch canisters, electrical harnesses, mission software, inertial navigation, protected positioning and timing, and test equipment. The May 2026 Lockheed Martin Australia contract is a useful example: Moog Australia was selected to design and build the GMLRS Control Actuation System, which steers the missile in flight, while AW Bell was selected to manufacture canards and control-system housings. The $120 million contract is a concrete step from assembling foreign-supplied kits toward Australian manufacture of flight-critical missile components.

GMLRS is relevant because it is tied to the Australian Army’s HIMARS long-range fires capability. The standard GMLRS family gives HIMARS a precision surface-to-surface strike role beyond conventional tube artillery, while Extended-Range GMLRS is designed to push that reach beyond 150 km. Australia has also committed to acquiring the Precision Strike Missile, which can engage targets out to 500 km and can be fired from HIMARS launchers. That creates a land-based fires architecture in which the same launcher family can support tactical precision fires, deeper operational strikes, and, depending on missile variant and targeting chain, anti-access effects against an adversary’s staging areas, air-defense nodes, logistics concentrations, and command posts.

The Kongsberg line addresses a different but complementary requirement. The Naval Strike Missile is a high-subsonic anti-ship and land-attack missile weighing 407 kg, measuring 3.96 m in length, and reaching more than 300 km. Its tactical value comes from passive targeting, sea-skimming flight, autonomous target recognition, and terminal manoeuvring, which complicate detection and interception by shipborne air-defense systems. The Joint Strike Missile adapts this family for combat aircraft, and Australia’s September 2024 contract with Kongsberg, valued at $142 million, covers acquisition of the JSM from 2025 for the ADF; the weapon fits inside the F-35A internal weapons bay, preserving the aircraft’s low-observable characteristics, and has a range of more than 275 km.

Interoperability is therefore not a bureaucratic detail. If Australia manufactures missiles or critical subsystems locally, those items must still be certifiable on allied combat aircraft, surface combatants, land launchers, magazines, and test ranges. That requires compliance with safety, environmental, electromagnetic, software, carriage, separation, and weapons-release standards. For an F-35A-launched JSM, certification affects aircraft survivability and mission planning; for NSM, it affects maritime strike integration; for GMLRS and PrSM, it affects HIMARS compatibility and coalition fire-control procedures. This is why the strategy’s language on allied certification matters more than the usual industrial-policy language: a locally produced weapon that cannot be accepted into allied operational and sustainment systems has limited wartime utility.

Australia is also addressing the component-level weakness exposed by Ukraine and the Middle East. Modern warfare is consuming missiles, artillery rounds, air-defense interceptors, and precision munitions at rates that exceed peacetime planning assumptions. The 2026 strategy draws the obvious lesson: industrial capability must be in place before conflict begins. In the Australian case, the objective is not autarky. It is the ability to produce selected weapons and subsystems at home, diversify supply chains with the United States, Norway, Germany, and other trusted partners, and reduce the risk that a single overseas bottleneck delays ADF operations.

The financial architecture is still distributed across several announcements rather than a single production figure. The 2024 GWEO Plan was linked to $16–21 billion over the decade, while a May 2026 Defence release referred to up to $36 billion over the decade to accelerate acquisition and manufacture of longer-range munitions. The 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy itself does not provide missile quantities, production rates, or a dedicated factory-by-factory budget line in the extracted sections, so the safest reading is that Canberra is providing a policy priority and demand signal rather than a complete industrial production schedule.

The industrial base indicators in the strategy show why exports are part of the model. Defence-supported companies generated $19.6 billion in materiel exports from 2019 to 2025, and the Global Supply Chain Program has generated more than $2.58 billion in contracts for 360 Australian defence suppliers since the 2024 strategy. For missile components, export access is not an optional commercial benefit; it helps sustain production between Australian orders, creates repeat work for Tier 2 suppliers, and gives firms a reason to invest in quality systems, security clearances, energetics handling, precision machining, and specialist engineering.

Advanced Navigation illustrates the dual-use technology layer behind the munitions priority. The company’s positioning, navigation, and timing technology is relevant to guided weapons, autonomous systems, and battlespace awareness, particularly where GPS is degraded or spoofed. The strategy notes that Advanced Navigation has received 14 Defence industry grants worth more than $2.5 million since 2020 and a $50 million National Reconstruction Fund preferred equity investment in March 2026. For missile operations, this matters because resilient inertial navigation and timing systems affect accuracy when satellite navigation is contested.

The policy direction also changes the role of Australian industry in allied missile supply chains. Kongsberg Australia was appointed in August 2024 to deliver domestic manufacturing and maintenance capability for NSM and JSM, aiming for full-rate production by 2028, while Lockheed Martin Australia was appointed in 2022 to develop domestic GMLRS manufacturing. Raytheon Australia remains associated with ADF guided weapons, including AMRAAM, AIM-9X, Standard Missile II, and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile, and Thales Australia operates the Commonwealth-owned munitions factories at Mulwala and Benalla.

Australia wants enough precision weapons to deter by denial, enough industrial capacity to replenish selected stocks, and enough allied integration to avoid building an isolated national supply chain that cannot scale. The main execution risks are also clear: certification delays, shortage of skilled energetics workers, dependence on imported motors and warhead materials, limited test-range capacity, and the need to turn political demand signals into recurring orders. The 2026 strategy does not solve those problems by itself, but it makes guided weapons production a measurable test of whether Australia’s defence industrial policy can support wartime endurance rather than only peacetime acquisition.

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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.