Defence contractors and tertiary institutions are confident they can produce the 20,000 highly skilled workers required to deliver Australia’s nuclear-power submarine ambitions over the next decade. But they say they cannot set about closing the skills deficit without AUKUS contracts for people to work on.

A shortage of engineers, scientists, project managers and other key skills has been cited as the biggest risk to what Rear Admiral Lee Goddard calls “a period of mobilisation not seen since the Cold War”.