Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that if a request is received, his country is ready to send its military to the mission to protect Ukraine and is “open to any proposals.”
This message was spread by the publication Bloomberg, and against this background, the question logically arises of what kind of ground forces Australia has, if it itself declares its readiness to send soldiers to our country.
In this case, we will only partially be able to build on the data of The Military Balance 2024, which indicates that at the beginning of last year, Australia had 24.8 thousand regular military personnel and 15.6 thousand reservists in the ground forces.
Units of the Australian Ground Forces are consolidated into one division (2nd), with four infantry regiments, two regiments of the Special Operations Forces, one artillery regiment and one regiment of support forces, and a training brigade.
The actual number of tanks in the ranks of the Australian Ground Forces is an open question, since the Australians wrote off the last available M1A1 Abrams for possible transfer to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in August 2024, and the new M1A2 SEPv3 from the United States should arrive this year.
As for other segments of armored vehicles, the Australian army has 50 Boxer wheeled armored fighting vehicles and 221 ASLAV-25 wheeled infantry fighting vehicles, 416 M113AS4 armored personnel carriers, 1000 Hawkei armored vehicles and approximately 950 Bushmasters. Available artillery – 48 M777A2 towed howitzers and 216 81 mm mortars; in February 2025, the first two K9 self-propelled guns were received. Army air defense – RBS-70 complexes (number not specified).
Interestingly, even 15 landing boats are formally subordinate to the Australian Ground Forces, each of them with a capacity of one MBT or 200 paratroopers. The army aviation consists of 22 Tiger attack helicopters, 14 CH-47F Chinook transport helicopters, three UH-60M, and two leased AW139s.
It is also worth making an allowance for the fact that Australia now keeps its contingents in Iraq (110 SOF fighters), Malaysia (120 infantry fighters), the UAE (400 troops) and has allocated 70 of its instructors to train soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine under the Interflex program.
Earlier, News Hub also wrote about what kind of army Switzerland has, which is now ready to send only 200 troops to Ukraine.
