On 9th December, Australia is expected to announce it is going to sign a A$1 billion (A$663.30 million) contract with Boeing Australia to take the “Ghost Bat” air drone to production, acquiring an initial six of the collaborative combat aircraft, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Boeing and the Royal Australian Air Force have completed an air-to-air missile firing using an MQ-28 Ghost Bat uncrewed aircraft during a live exercise in Australia, marking what the company describes as a first-of-its-kind autonomous engagement.https://t.co/TMPx9kifHb
— UK Defence Journal (@UKDefJournal) December 15, 2025
In Australia, the Ghost Bat or MQ-28A is a developmental aircraft engineering project by Boeing Australia, the first military-purpose aircraft designed in Australia in over 50 years. The defence force in Australia has announced this before.
The announcement comes along with discussions between the Australian and the United States defence and foreign ministers in Washington, where the U.S. urges its Indo-Pacific partner to put more resources into defence.
The Ghost Bat will have a range in excess of 3,700 kilometres, and it has been built to fly alongside crewed Air Force platforms.
In October, Australia announced it would allocate A$1.7 billion ($1.1 billion) to a fleet of autonomous undersea vehicles, the Ghost Shark, which was designed by its defence force and American start-up Anduril Industries.
The defence force of Australia has earlier indicated that it desired to implement autonomous technology to protect a long coastline and a maximum of 3 million square kilometres (1.2 million square miles) of northern ocean.
