Now we’ve got Donald Trump as president, he’ll dominate all our lives, and the whole planet, for the next four years.
Let’s ask two questions: what does Trump mean for AUKUS? What does the AUKUS that will evolve under Trump mean for Australia?
I predict Trump and his administration will speak kindly of AUKUS. This will be highly deceptive for Australians.
The impressive Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, has already warmly endorsed AUKUS, as have lots of congressmen. That’s good – they like not only AUKUS but also Australia.
But let me give you the grim conclusion first, then the reasoning. There’s very little chance Australia will get any nuclear-powered submarines in the 2030s. We’ll probably never get any.
We’re supposed to buy our first Virginia-class nuclear sub in 2032, second in 2035, third in 2038. Then we buy another two Virginias, or if the Brits are ready with their new nuclear sub (not likely, they’re even more behind schedule than the Americans) we might be building one with them in Adelaide in the early 2040s. And if you believe that, Virginia …
I find myself in an odd position in the AUKUS debate. I sit outside the left-right divide. I’d be wildly in favour of it if I thought it amounted to anything.
Its only importance now is symbolism.
Its biggest effect is to provide an excuse for the Albanese government, following the path of its Coalition predecessors, to do nothing of substance on defence.
None of the three AUKUS nations is moving remotely fast enough to build up its military manufacturing base to the point where it can cope militarily with China or even Russia. Trump is infinitely more likely to try to fix this than Kamala Harris would have been.
Trump is thus AUKUS’s best hope, but it’s still forlorn. For all Joe Biden’s talk about AUKUS, he never proposed a US Navy budget that would come anywhere near building enough Virginias so America could sell them to Australia in the 2030s.
Equally, there’s almost no chance Australia would actually be able to crew, operate, house or maintain nuclear submarines – in eight years?
Beyond the subs, AUKUS is mostly baloney. AUKUS is more than four years old and Australia hasn’t exported a single widget under its auspices.
The Australian Defence Force doesn’t have one weapon it would not have had apart from AUKUS.
The only value in AUKUS is signalling – to Beijing that we’re with the Americans and they’re with us, and to the wider world that Washington can still mobilise allies.
The Trump administration will speak well of AUKUS partly because Australia is contributing $4bn to the US submarine manufacturing effort. Give anyone $4bn and you’ll get smiles for a while.
In many ways AUKUS is a typical conspiracy of Australia’s cosy politics.
The right pretends AUKUS is happening so they can pretend they’re doing something substantial on defence without actually doing anything or spending any more money. (Last year our defence budget didn’t even reach 2 per cent of GDP.)
The left pretends AUKUS is real so they can pretend they’re heroically resisting shocking militarism.
Left and right resemble Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, two workmates disguised as performers in an endless contest neither one must ever win or lose.
Many good folks know AUKUS is delivering nothing but support it anyway because it’s part of the US alliance, it might one day deliver something and they don’t want to be negative about any military effort. That attitude has many admirable qualities except one – it doesn’t deal with reality. I think I owe you, dear reader, the truth. AUKUS, so far at least, is a bust. The only area where net zero is likely to be achieved.
Don’t take my word for it. Read two documents.
On The Strategist, the online publication of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, retired rear admiral Peter Briggs lays out with devastating logic why the US cannot possibly produce enough Virginias to have any to spare for Australia in the 2030s.
You can see why the Albanese government has been so keen to intimidate, censor, muzzle and ultimately probably destroy ASPI. Australian defence policy exists in a kind of fantasy zone.
It’s very bad manners of people such as Briggs to introduce unwelcome facts. Briggs concludes: “Australia’s plan to acquire Virginia-class submarines from the US is looking increasingly improbable. The US building program is slipping too badly.”
Amid a plethora of dismal facts, Briggs writes: “The (US) industry laid down only one SSN (nuclear attack sub) in 2021. It delivered none from April 2020 to May 2022. The USN (navy) has requested funding for only one Virginia in fiscal year 2025, breaking the two-a-year drumbeat.” This was partly because of “the growing Virginia-class backlog”.
I don’t want to get too carried away with any criticism of the US. The US spends 3.38 per cent of its huge GDP on defence, whereas in the last completed budget year the Albanese government came in at less than 2 per cent.
The Albanese government won’t nominate the site of an east coast nuclear submarine base because it’s scared of local political reaction. Major infrastructure like that takes decades to build.
A serious government would start. There’s no sign we’ll be able to crew three Virginias by the 2030s. I don’t think the government is serious about this. AUKUS serves a political purpose for the moment. If it drags on forever and we miraculously get our first sub in 2050, that won’t bother anyone in the current cabinet.
The other document to read is the US Congressional Budget Office report earlier this month on the navy budget.
The CBO shows why the early 2030s will be exactly the time the US won’t be willing to give up any Virginias. Its report is a blandly written but devastating indictment of military policy under Biden.
The CBO observes: “The (US) fleet’s firepower will be reduced over the next decade.”
It details the logjam in building the Virginias. One-third of the fleet is awaiting maintenance, whereas it’s never meant to be more than 20 per cent sidelined for that reason.
US nuclear sub builders have prioritised the much bigger Columbia-class guided missile submarines.
It’s physically impossible for the US shipyards to increase production at the rate required. The CBO comments that if AUKUS goes ahead as planned, the US Navy will have three to five fewer nuclear attack subs from 2033 to 2053, with a loss of between 65 and 107 operational years of submarine activity.
You really think whoever follows Trump and is president in 2031 (JD Vance? Michelle Obama? Hunter Biden?) will go for that? Of course we can’t abandon AUKUS now. But we should build a mighty defence force around the nuclear subs we likely will never get.
Instead we’ll probably spend huge sums of money, cannibalise the rest of our military and end up with no subs at all. That would be a characteristic Australian defence outcome.
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