The International Fleet Review that brought fifty nations’ warships into Sydney Harbour in October 2013 was officially a commemoration of the centenary of the Royal Australian Navy’s first fleet review, which took place in the same harbour in 1913 when the young Commonwealth’s naval force sailed in from its training in Britain and was welcomed by a crowd that lined the foreshore with the particular pride of a new country discovering it could project military power across an ocean. A hundred years on, the scale was different: forty warships, sixteen tall ships, a public holiday, and a programme of flypasts and simulated engagements that gave the firework display over the Opera House the unusual character of being also, technically, a reenactment of a Second World War aerial attack on the harbour bridge.
The Royal Australian Navy’s history tracks closely with Australia’s own evolution from British dominion to independent nation, the two processes never quite completing separately but running in parallel through the twentieth century. Australia sent ships to both World Wars under arrangements that involved complex negotiations between the Australian government and the British Admiralty about operational command, the same negotiations that characterised Australian participation in British imperial conflicts more broadly and that produced, over decades, the progressive assertion of Australian strategic independence that culminated in the defence policy frameworks of the 1970s. The fleet review was an occasion for celebrating what the navy had become, which is a genuinely capable force with regional responsibilities, without dwelling too much on the institutional history of how it got there, which is more complicated than centennial commemorations tend to find useful.
The ship's radar system can track multiple targets simultaneously at ranges of over 250 miles and maintain targeting on objects moving at twice the speed of sound.
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