This brilliant nuclear submarine deal – in which we buy three or more Virginia-class nuclear submarines from the US, while simultaneously working with both the Brits and the Americans on a common sub design for a little further down the track – is a giant step forward for Australia.
It could revolutionise our military and industrial capability, at an expensive but affordable cost.
Frankly, it’s the first time a working Australian nuclear submarine under AUKUS arrangements has looked plausible.
The government is likely to send 1000 Australian personnel to the US to learn how to make nuclear subs. That’s a fantastic idea.
Defence Minister Richard Marles seems to have pulled off an astonishing policy trifecta: he’s convinced the Americans to provide full-scale Virginias for us; he’s broken the paralysing grip of Adelaide politics on our submarine programs; and he’s actually come up with a plan that has a fair chance of working.
The signals have been intensely confusing in recent weeks. There was the strong sense, not least out of Britain, that Canberra would work with the Brits on a replacement for their Astute-class nuclear sub. They would adopt a US combat system, and probably a US reactor, and this would be a common AUKUS sub, though the Americans would continue with their replacement for the Virginia.
The big problem with that idea was that it meant designing a new sub. That will take a decade. Then we have to build a whole new sub. That takes another 10 years. That meant the first AUKUS sub was probably 20 years away, at best.
At the same time there were strong signals that the US was after all going to help us with some early acquisition of Virginia-class nuclear submarines. The big problem with that was the Americans said they had no spare capacity to build more Virginias, and they can’t afford to give us Virginias out of their existing production line as the US navy needs them urgently. It turns out both stories were true.
How can the Americans manage to build us Virginias after all? It looks like we will finance a third production line in the US. If so, there’s no better way we could spend our money. If the Americans build a Virginia for us, we will get it on time and it will work perfectly from day one. This massively de-risks the program.
It also almost certainly means the government saves a bomb of money. It probably costs three times as much to build subs in Adelaide as to buy them in the US.
Eventually, it’s true, we’ll be operating two different types of nuclear sub simultaneously, but they will be extremely similar, and in any event that moment is decades away at best.
Won’t Adelaide be sore about all this? Probably not, because we will still build the AUKUS sub in Adelaide eventually. In the meantime, the government will build a giant submarine yard in Adelaide. It may even mean we ultimately get more than eight nuclear subs. If the AUKUS design goes more quickly than expected, and we’re confident we can build it properly in Adelaide, we might stop the Virginias order at three and start building the AUKUS subs in Adelaide. There’s no reason we couldn’t then build eight subs in Adelaide, giving us 11 nuclear subs.
The Morrison government, though it never disclosed this publicly, gave serious consideration to eventually ramping up to a fleet of 15 nuclear subs. Before everyone has a nervous breakdown at the eye-watering cost of such ambition, this would be a project to run over many decades. And because of economies of scale, each boat is cheaper, and easier to build, than the ones before it.
Also, the government will give Adelaide all the naval ship building work it could possibly imagine. It could construct three new Air Warfare Destroyers there. Plus all the life-of-type extension work on the Collins. It could well decide to build a fleet of six Corvettes in Adelaide. And while the troubled Hunter frigate program will probably be cut from nine to six and delayed, they too will be built in Adelaide. At the same time, the government will be building the new submarine yard there. That surely is as much naval work as Adelaide could possibly dream of.
If the Albanese government gets the support of Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government in Adelaide, it’s all systems go.
The politics of Adelaide has killed all previous subs. It killed Tony Abbott’s Japanese submarines, it killed Malcolm Turnbull’s French submarines, and it looked as though it would render Scott Morrison’s AUKUS subs as such an infinitely distant prospect as to be effectively meaningless. Only a federal Labor government, with a state Labor government in Adelaide, could liberate Australia from this killing strait jacket.
If the deal is as reported, the Brits will get plenty out of it during the design stage, and then when we eventually build however many AUKUS subs we finally decide on. And by 2027 we will have sufficient facilities in Perth that US nuclear submarines rotate through, and perhaps effectively home base there, essential for us to develop the skills required to handle nuclear subs. At the same time, we’ll construct a second sub base in Port Kembla at Wollongong, offering much better long-term recruitment opportunities.
If the deal is as reported, Marles has liberated our submarines from Adelaide politics, scored an astonishing breakthrough with the Americans, provided a path to the earliest possible acquisition of nuclear subs, and transformed a concept into concrete reality. Much could still go wrong, but this looks a brilliant deal for Australia.
More Coverage
Military spending boost ‘a likely demand’
The new Trump administration will pressure Australia to lift defence spending and may renegotiate the AUKUS deal to secure more favourable terms for the US, analysts say.
Budget ‘prioritisation’ in satellite plan axing
The Australian Defence Force may end up buying satellite time from partners or commercial vendors following the axing of a $7bn space project, officials say.