Maybe Australia’s boats just never turn up.
To fanfare and flags, the Aukus deal was presented as a sure bet, papering over an uncertainty that such an ambitious deal could ever be delivered.
It was assured, three publics across two oceans were told – signed, sealed and to-be-delivered: Australia would buy from its great ally, the US, its own conventionally armed nuclear-powered attack submarines before it began building its own.
But there is an emerging disquiet on the promise of Aukus pillar one: it may be the promised US-built nuclear-powered submarines simply never arrive under Australian sovereign control.
Instead, those nuclear submarines, stationed in Australia, could bear US flags, carry US weapons, commanded and crewed by American officers and sailors.
Australia, unswerving ally, reduced instead to a forward operating garrison – in the words of the chair of US Congress’s house foreign affairs committee, nothing more than “a central base of operations from which to project power”.
Reliable ally no longer
Officially at least, Aukus remains on course, centrepiece of a storied security alliance.
Pillar one of the Australia-UK-US agreement involves, first, Australia buying between three and five Virginia-Class nuclear-powered submarines from the US – the first of these in 2032.
Then, by the “late 2030s”, according to Australia’s submarine industry strategy, the UK will deliver the first specifically designed and built Aukus submarine. The first Australian-built version will be in the water “in the early 2040s”. Aukus is forecast to cost up to $368bn to the mid-2050s.
But in both Washington and Canberra, there is growing concern over the very first step: America’s capacity to build the boats it has promised Australia, and – even if it had the wherewithal to build the subs – whether it would relinquish them into Australian control.
The gnawing anxiety over Aukus sits within a broader context of a rewritten rulebook for relations between America and its allies. Amid the Sturm und Drang of the first weeks of Trump’s second administration, there is growing concern that the reliable ally is no longer that.
With the casual, even brutal, dismissal of Ukraine – an ally for whom the US has provided security guarantees for a generation – the old certainties exist no longer.
“I think America is a much less dependable ally under [president] Trump than it was,” the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull tells the Guardian this week. “And this is not a criticism of Trump, this is literally a feature, not a bug: he’s saying that he’s less dependable.
“It may be that – regrettably – we do end up with no submarines. And then we have to invest in other ways of defending ourselves. But the big message is that we are going to have to look at defending Australia by ourselves.
“That’s really the issue. We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up.”
Trump can hardly be accused of hiding his priorities. If the 47th president has a doctrine beyond self-interest, “America First” has been his shibboleth since before his first term.
“Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” he said on the campaign trail. He told his inauguration: “I will, very simply, put America first.”
‘The cheque did clear’
On 8 February, Australia paid $US500m ($AUD790m) to the US, the first instalment in a total of $US3bn pledged in order to support America’s shipbuilding industry. Aukus was, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles said, “a powerful symbol of our two countries working together in the Indo-Pacific”.
“It represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent … it represents an increase in Australian capability, through the acquisition of a nuclear‑powered submarine capability … it also represents an increase in Australian defence spending”.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth – joking that “the cheque did clear” – gave succour to Aukus supporters, saying his country’s mission in the Indo-Pacific was not one “that America can undertake by itself”.
“Allies and partners, technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.”
But, just three days after Australia’s cheque cleared, the Congressional Research Service quietly issued a paper saying while the nuclear-powered attack submarines (known as SSNs) intended for Australia might be built, the US could decide to never hand them over.
It said the post-pandemic shipbuilding rate in the US was so anaemic that it could not service the needs of the US Navy alone, let alone build submarines for another country’s navy.
Under a proposed alternative, “up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs would be built, and instead of three to five of them being sold to Australia, these additional boats would instead be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the five US and UK submarines that are already planned to be operated out of Australia”.
The paper argued that Australia, rather than spending money to buy, build and sail its own nuclear-powered submarines, would instead invest that money in other military capabilities – long-range missiles, drones, or bombers – “so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States”.
On some forecasts, the US is projected to have half the working submarines it needs in 2032 and is building new boats at half the rate it needs to.
Trump believes it can be fixed. He told an address to Congress-cum-campaign rally this week he would “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry” by establishing a new “office of shipbuilding” inside the White House.
“We’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”
A sunken history
Submarines have long presented logistical and political turmoil for Australian governments.
The country’s first submarine, HMAS AE1, hit the sea floor near Papua New Guinea in September 1914, barely seven months into service. All hands were lost. The second was scuttled by its crew the next year after five days of operations during the Gallipoli campaign.
In 1919, Australia was “gifted” six obsolete J-class submarines by Britain. They were sold for scrap within five years. Subsequent decades brought persistent issues with costs and crewing and difficulties simply keeping boats in the water.
The nation’s current submarine fleet, the Collins-class fleet, was built over two decades from 1990, with the first boat put to sea in 1996.
But to replace that now-ageing class, three different submarine designs have been pursued by successive governments, with boats to be built by Japan, France and now – under Aukus – the US and UK.
Indecision has brought delay, and with it, a capability gap: a vulnerability exposed in recent weeks when a flotilla of Chinese warships – perhaps accompanied by an undetected nuclear submarine – circumnavigated Australia, and undertook allegedly unforecast live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.
‘They have no obligation to sell us a submarine’
In 2016 then prime minister Turnbull signed a $50bn deal with the French Naval Group for new diesel-electric submarines to be built in Australia.
That agreement – which had subsequently encountered delays and cost over-runs – was unilaterally cancelled by his successor, Scott Morrison, who, in 2021, dramatically signed Aukus with US president Joe Biden and UK prime minister Boris Johnson. None of these men are in office any more.
Turnbull argues pillar one of the Aukus deal was a “catastrophe” from conception, and its liabilities “are becoming more apparent every day”.
“We are spending a fortune vastly more than the partnership with France would have involved. We’re spending vastly more and we are very likely, I would say almost certainly, going to end up with no submarines at all.
“We’re giving the Americans US$3bn to support their submarine industrial base, but they have no obligation to sell us a submarine.”
He says Morrison’s agreement to Aukus “sacrificed Australia’s honour, sovereignty and security”.
“Australia has to be sovereign. It has to have sovereign autonomy. We need to be more self-reliant. Unfortunately, the problem with Aukus was that it made Australia much more dependent on the United States at a time when America was becoming less dependable.”
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, now serving as ambassador to the US, said from Washington DC this week the Aukus deal has been consistently reaffirmed under the new Trump administration, including by the defence secretary, Hegseth, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
He said Aukus would equip Australia with the “most advanced weaponry in the world”.
The submarines “will have … a lethality and utility across the Indo Pacific, which will make Australia more secure in the decades ahead”.
“This is a multi-decadal, multi-billion dollar investment by the Australian government.”
And Rudd told a University of Tennessee audience last month that Aukus was in the interests of both the US and Australia.
“The strategic geography of Australia is quite critical to America’s long-term strategic interests in the wider Indo-Pacific. It’s good for us that you’re there,” he told his American audience, “it’s good for you that we are there”.
This is a key argument behind the Aukus agreement, bolstering the belief of those who argue it can and will deliver: Aukus is a good deal for America. Bases on Australian soil – most notably Pine Gap and HMAS Stirling (as a base for submarines) – are critical for US “force projection” in the Indo-Pacific.
But the same argument in favour of Aukus is also used by its critics: that Australia is being exploited for its geo-strategic location – as an outpost of US military might.
‘Almost inevitable’
Clinton Fernandes, professor of international and political Studies at the University of New South Wales and a former Australian Army intelligence analyst, says the Aukus deal only makes sense when the “real” goal of the agreement is sorted from the “declared”.
“The real rather than declared goal is to demonstrate Australia’s relevance to US global supremacy,” he tells the Guardian.
“The ‘declared goal’ is that we’re going to become a nuclear navy. The ‘real goal’ is we are going to assist the United States and demonstrate our relevance to it as it tries to preserve an American-dominated east Asia.”
Fernandes, author of Sub-Imperial Power, says Australia will join South Korea and Japan as the US’s “sentinel states in order to hold Chinese naval assets at risk in its own semi-enclosed seas”.
“That’s the real goal. We are demonstrating our relevance to American global dominance. The government is understandably uneasy about telling the public this, but in fact, it has been Australia’s goal all along to preserve a great power that is friendly to us in our region.”
Fernandes says the Aukus pillar one agreement “was always an article of faith” based on a premise that the US could produce enough submarines for itself, as well as for Australia.
“And the Congressional Research Service study argues that … they will not have enough capacity to build boats for both themselves and us.”
He argues the rotation of US nuclear-powered submarines through Australian bases – particularly HMAS Stirling in Perth – needs to be understood as unrelated to Aukus and to Australia developing its own nuclear-powered submarine capability.
“Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-W) is presented by the spin doctors as an ‘optimal pathway’ for Aukus. In fact, it is the forward operational deployment of the United States Navy, completely independent of Aukus. It has no connection to Aukus.”
The retired rear admiral and past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, Peter Briggs, argues the US refusing to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia was “almost inevitable”, because the US’s boat-building program was slipping too far behind.
“It’s a flawed plan, and it’s heading in the wrong direction,” he tells the Guardian.
Before any boat can be sold to Australia, the US commander-in-chief – the president of the day – must certify that America relinquishing a submarine will not diminish the US Navy’s undersea capability.
“The chance of meeting that condition is vanishingly small,” Briggs says.
It now takes the US more than five years to build a single submarine (it was between three and 3.5 years before the pandemic devastated the workforce). By 2031, when the US is set to sell its first submarine to Australia, it could be facing a shortfall of up to 40% of the expected fleet size, Briggs says.
Australia, he argues, will be left with no submarines to cover the retirement from service of the current Collins-class fleet, weakened by an unwise reliance on the US.
The nuclear-powered submarines Australia wants to buy and then build “are both too big, too expensive to own and we can’t afford enough of them to make a difference”.
He argues Australia must be clear-eyed about the systemic challenges facing Aukus and should look elsewhere. He nominates going back to France to contemplate ordering Suffren-class boats – a design currently in production, smaller and requiring fewer crew, “a better fit for Australia’s requirements”.
“We should have done all this 10 years ago. Of course, it’s too late, but the alternative is no submarines at all … that’s not a good idea. They give us a capability that nothing else does.
“It’s worth the hunt.”
