Royal Australian Navy moves forward with Plan Galileo

The Royal Australian Navy is making progress with Plan Galileo, an innovative project that delivers the capability to sustain the navy’s growing fleet to ensure it can fight and win at sea.

Launching the Plan Galileo website recently, Rear Admiral Wendy Malcolm, Head Maritime Systems reiterated her vision as a new way of thinking that fundamentally changes how the navy carries out sustainment of the fleet.

“The aim of Plan Galileo is that in 2025, defence will operate in a nationally integrated sustainment environment that consistently provides affordable, reliable and fit for purpose systems and ships to navy,” Rear Admiral Malcolm said.

“That means ensuring we can provide certainty and work for our uniformed personnel and industry, as we need them working cooperatively, continuing what they do, and helping to prepare our navy for the new ships that will be delivered in an era of continuous shipbuilding.”

As explained, the project is also focused on effective utilisation, growth and support of navy’s technical and logistics mastery, including ongoing involvement of fleet support units throughout Australia in the delivery of maintenance and its maritime logistics personnel in the provision of integrated logistics support and 21st century supply chain development and management.

“We must optimise workforce development and leadership programs to increase technical and logistics, leadership and supervisory proficiency, facilitate career progression and enable the personal and professional growth of our workforce,” Rear Admiral Malcolm added.

The size and complexity of the fleet is expected to grow by more than 50 per cent over the next two decades requiring additional highly skilled personnel.

Specifically, Plan Galileo incorporates a national, integrated approach to sustainment of navy assets that supports the Naval Shipbuilding Plan and aligns with the navy’s Plan Pelorus and Plan Mercator.

Plan Galileo will build on the Australian Industry Capability Program by incentivising industry to build regional and local capacity.

A core component of Plan Galileo is the regional maintenance centres (RMCs). These are self-contained sustainment centres at navy home ports comprising defence, primes and small businesses that will be able to sustain Australian vessels and then return them to sea utilising domestic workforce and focused on local supply chains. These centres are currently planned for Cairns, Darwin, Perth and Sydney.

“While Plan Galileo is a long-term project out to 2025, we are already implementing a number of its elements as a ‘proof of concept’ within our Arafura-class offshore patrol vessel (OPV) program,” Rear Admiral Malcolm further said.

“Defence will test ideas, learn from our mistakes – and our successes – and work these into the overall plan as it is rolled out on a national scale.”