AUK-ward truth: the sinking feeling behind our subs pact
I’ve covered a lot of AUSMIN meetings over the decades and I can’t recall one in which the American principals, in this case Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, wanted to exit the room before taking a single question on the alliance.
As AUSMINs go, it was a snooze fest, like Jofra Archer turning up to an Ashes cricket Test with a pillow. It’s still an Ashes Test, but there’s something fundamentally wrong – a mismatch between pillows and ashes.
The Albanese government is showing itself to be quite good at alliance diplomacy. It manages to get the senior Americans in the room, at least briefly, and they don’t beat up on us, in fact they say nice things about us.
But although Richard Marles and Penny Wong joined Rubio and Hegseth in declaring AUKUS is “full steam ahead”, the facts supporting that proposition are extremely thin on the ground.
The simple arithmetic of AUKUS just doesn’t match the declaratory policy.
History has a pretty bitter lesson here. When reality contradicts the declaratory policy, it’s reality that prevails, not policy.
The only really substantial announcement out of this AUSMIN was that Australia would pay the US another billion dollars to contribute to its nuclear submarine manufacturing capability. This is the functional equivalent of the donations the Australian colonies used to collect to subsidise Britain’s Royal Navy, in the expectation that it would look after us.
AUKUS is adrift, and even if everyone on the planet says “full steam ahead”, it doesn’t change the underlying realities.
In the years leading up to World War II, Australia was convinced that the Singapore strategy – relying on Britain’s “impregnable” naval base in Singapore – provided for Australian security.
It was used by Australian politicians as an excuse for radically underspending on defence.
Australia entered World War II in much worse shape militarily than it entered World War I. Fortunately, the Americans saved us. The Singapore strategy worked superbly until it was exposed that policy didn’t match reality.
Something similar is happening with AUKUS today.
The US companies involved have been stubbornly unable to meaningfully lift the rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines. By 2032, when Australia is scheduled to get its first Virginia-class submarine, the US will be gravely short of such boats.
Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary for Policy at the Pentagon, is inclined to face that reality now and talk about it clearly. But doing that explodes the happy fantasies of AUKUS, which for now suit all the players. So Colby was overruled in the report he could write.
Britain, the third member of AUKUS, is in the midst of a shocking naval capability crisis.
Britain’s First Sea Lord, Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, declared this week that Britain was closer to losing control of the Atlantic to the Russians than it has been at any time since World War II. Despite the Ukraine war, he said, Russia had invested “billions” into its maritime capabilities, which Britain can’t match.
This follows a devastating intervention in the debate by Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, who was at one time head of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence.
He said the UK was no longer capable of running a fleet of nuclear submarines.
The latest British nuclear sub to enter service, HMS Agamemnon, took a catastrophic 13 years to build.
Admiral Mathias said: “The SSN-AUKUS is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.”
Acquiring nuclear submarines is prodigiously expensive, even for an economy as big as Britain’s.
The Albanese government’s defence budget is manifestly, wildly inadequate.
It’s also virtually inconceivable that the Brits will actually be building nuclear subs with Australia in Adelaide in the 2040s.
So why is the Trump administration appearing to be so relatively relaxed?
All that AUKUS provides for now is that we give the US several billion dollars for its submarine industry, send sailors to serve on their ships, create a maintenance base for them in Perth and slowly expand military co-operation in northern Australia.
All good, but nothing of a new capability of our own.
The US doesn’t even make a decision about providing a Virginia-class sub for us until 2031 or 2032 at the earliest.
Nothing much is happening in Pillar Two of AUKUS – defence technology co-operation.
Given how irrelevant we’ve become, the Americans are willing to continue to accept our money with good grace.
That’s the summit of Albanese defence achievement so far.
Pact to make nation more secure
This underwhelming AUSMIN meeting in Washington demonstrated a stark contradiction between the flim flam of happy talk, and the substance of nothing much happening.