“This is the brains of air and missile defence,” Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy told AFR Weekend of this week’s announcement. “This is something that we haven’t had technically before, so this is a critical project that will give us better awareness of advanced air and missile threats and obviously lay the groundwork for being able to defend against them. “We’re seeing a huge proliferation of missiles in our region, so we need the means to detect and defeat missiles. “[The Defence Strategic Review] made clear we can no longer rely on the air-sea gap to our north. We’ve relied...