Former Reagan administration official Hugh Hewitt didn’t mince his words on the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact last week after it emerged Pentagon leaders wanted a guarantee from Australia that the vessels would be used to back the US in the event of conflict with China.
“Why, for example, would we help country A arm itself if country A would not render assistance in a fight?” Hewitt wrote on X. “If we don’t know what our closest allies are genuinely committed to do in the event of a crisis of the first magnitude, can we call them ‘close allies’?”
US defence undersecretary, and noted AUKUS critic, Elbridge Colby is leading a review into the submarine agreement.Credit: Monique Westermann
His words received backing from the US Defence Department’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell. One of Parnell’s bosses, undersecretary of defence for policy Elbridge Colby, is leading the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS to see if it fits President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda.
This masthead has reported Colby intends to urge major changes to the program, though the broader Trump administration is split on the best way forward.
Those changes could include calls for Australia to lease the submarines rather than buy them; have US crews on board the nuclear boats; or give some form of guarantee to deploy them in conflicts involving the US. So how would those work? And what would that mean for Australia?
Commitment to join a conflict
US officials say Chinese President Xi Jinping wants the ability to invade the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan by 2027, and defence experts say a conflict over the disputed territory is increasingly likely as China expands its military capabilities. China views the island as a wayward province and an internal issue for the country.
Colby believes Australia should provide some form of guarantee that US-made nuclear submarines will be used in a possible conflict with China, this masthead has reported.
Australia already has a mechanism to join the US in conflict under the ANZUS treaty. The pact was signed by Australia, New Zealand and the US in 1951 in response to the spread of communism in the Pacific and the rearmament of Japan after World War II.
But the treaty, which underpins the Australia-US alliance, only binds the nations to “consult” on shared threats. It was used in this capacity following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
That was the first and only time the treaty has been invoked, and then-prime minister John Howard said at the time federal cabinet had determined the provision of ANZUS applied in the circumstances.
Australia has a different relationship with the US today, strained under the unpredictability of Trump’s “America first” agenda, and the circumstances around defending Taiwan from China are different to a situation in which the US is itself under attack.
The Lowy Institute’s International Security Program director Sam Roggeveen pointed to the US’s policy of ambiguity towards Taiwan, which he said strengthened Australia’s position to oppose any iron-clad commitment to join the US in conflict.
“The Americans themselves haven’t even committed to going to war for Taiwan,” he said. “They still maintain an ambiguous stance on that question.”
He pointed to Anthony Albanese’s John Curtin Oration earlier this month, in which he said Australia must not be subservient to its allies, as a signal that the prime minister would not agree to a conflict commitment.
Roggeveen said any such agreement would fundamentally redefine the Australia-US alliance into a much more intimate arrangement, similar to NATO, in which countries have agreed to automatically defend each other if attacked.
“We don’t have that kind of alliance with the United States,” he said.
Australia could stop short of a formal agreement to enter conflict. A similar option that could fulfil Colby’s request would involve preparation for conflict together, including planning and scenario drills.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Wednesday the government could not commit to a hypothetical and any promises made would not bind successive governments, meaning any agreements would not be “worth the paper they’re (not) written on”. That is also the Albanese government’s position.
The Pentagon has pushed back against suggestions it is solely focused on the contingency of a war with China over Taiwan. A US defence official, granted anonymity to speak freely, told this masthead the Pentagon’s concerns were wider than that.
Lease agreement
Leasing the submarines rather than selling them to Australia was a subject of intense debate when the AUKUS legislation was passed, former US official and lead negotiator for the legislation in the Senate, Jennifer Hendrixson White, said last week.
Australia had considered a leasing arrangement to bridge the capability gap between the retirement of diesel-powered Collins-class submarines and the arrival of nuclear-powered AUKUS boats. Australia has agreed to buy five Virginia-class nuclear submarines from the US before AUKUS boats are built in Australia.
There is precedent for leasing military kit from the US.
America provided equipment to Australia and other nations during World War II in the interest of US defence, though the arrangement differed from a traditional commercial lease because payment was deferred. Negotiations following the war ended in Australia buying much of the equipment.
Submarines were not given to Australia, and the country did not have sovereign submarine capability throughout the war, a “nightmare scenario” that Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Euan Graham said the navy would not want to repeat.
Graham said leasing arrangements had been used by other nations, including Russia sending nuclear submarines to India, but the strained US-Australia relationship made such a move more difficult for the Albanese government to sell.
He said Australia had invested a lot of political capital into claiming AUKUS would enhance the nation’s sovereignty, and ceding ownership of the submarines would put that assertion at risk.
“It would be a significant dilution of AUKUS’ value,” Graham said. “If we’re going to do that through a leasing arrangement, then I think immediately the government would come under hostile questioning over this issue of sovereignty.”
Roggeveen said a lease agreement would be unlikely to meet the needs of either country because each would want the submarines in case of a military emergency.
“Any kind of lease arrangement that implies that Australia would have something less than full sovereign control of the submarines, I think would be a non-starter for Australia,” he said.
Under the control of the US
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has previously suggested submarines could be operated with a composite crew from each nation.
“After all, the first ships of the Australian navy had British crews and British captains,” Abbott wrote in an opinion piece for The Australian in 2021.
Britain equipped and trained the early iterations of the Australian navy to provide maritime protection for its colonies. Royal Australian Navy ships operated under British Admiralty command in the British Grand Fleet during World War I, and played a key role in the defeat of Germany through its naval blockade.
Today, a US Rotational Marine Force deploys to Darwin for six months each year to train with Australia and allied neighbours to enhance co-operation.
Australian sailors will deploy on UK and US boats based out of Western Australia from 2027 to develop at-sea experience on nuclear submarines. Known as the Submarine Rotational Force West, the co-operation is in accordance with longstanding bipartisan policy of no foreign bases on Australian soil, according to the Australian Submarine Agency.
Western Australia is geographically strategic for the US because it would allow the military a presence in the region without having to transit through contested Asian waters, such as the South China Sea.
But Graham said the primary hypothetical question to answer for an Australian prime minister in a situation in which the US controlled Australian submarines would be whether Australia had the final say on when and where the submarines were used.
Roggeveen said he doubted the Australian government would agree to letting the submarines be under the control of the US after having emphasised the importance of maintaining sovereignty over them.
“Politically, I think that would be a really bad deal for Australia,” he said. “I just don’t think that’s doable.”
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