FOUR YEARS ago America, Australia and Britain sent shockwaves through the world of defence. The three allies, working for months in secret, hatched an audacious plan. Australia would cancel a deal to buy diesel-electric submarines from France. Instead it would build nuclear ones with the help of America and Britain in what would turn out to be the most ambitious defence project for a generation. How is it going?
The AUKUS deal, as it is known, is a multifaceted megaproject. In “pillar one”, Britain and Australia will jointly design and build an advanced nuclear-powered submarine, SSN-AUKUS. Australia’s first boats will be built in Adelaide in the 2030s. To plug the gap until then, it will buy American Virginia-class submarines, ploughing cash into American and British industry to smooth things along. In “pillar two”, the countries are collaborating in advanced technologies.
The deal has already survived changes of government in Australia and Britain. Australian submariners are training aboard British and American attack subs and graduating from the US Navy’s nuclear-power school. Technical colleges are springing up in South Australia. And $5bn is being poured into HMAS Stirling, a naval base in Perth, which will host American and British subs from 2027. But in any multi-decade scheme with so many moving parts, much could go awry.
There are broadly four major risks to AUKUS. The first and most immediate one is that Donald Trump refuses to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia. Mr Trump is thought to support the deal, but some of his advisers worry that America is building too few Virginias—1.2 or so a year, far short of a target of 1.5 by the end of 2024—to spare any. “It would be crazy for the United States to give away its single most important asset for conflict with China over Taiwan when it doesn’t have enough,” argued Elbridge Colby, Mr Trump’s choice as the Pentagon’s top policy official, last year.
A second risk is that Australians change their mind. Federal elections are looming. The ruling Labor Party supports AUKUS but it is divided within. If it limps on to a minority government, it could depend on support from the Greens, who oppose the pact. The risk is that the enormous cost of AUKUS—between $166bn and $228bn over its lifetime—could hollow out Australia’s armed forces, absent big rises in defence spending. It remains popular for now. Last year fully 65% of Australians were somewhat or strongly in favour, according to polling by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank.
The third hurdle is that British or Australian shipyards prove unequal to the task. The Australian Submarine Agency, set up in 2023, is already being reviewed amid claims of low morale and the departure of key staff. In Britain Stephen Lovegrove, a former national security adviser, recently submitted a sweeping review of aukus. He is thought to have warned that the project risks losing momentum, with ssn-aukus being delayed, because of a lack of top-level focus in London and Canberra and inadequate investment in facilities.
The fourth challenge is that pillar two, the collaboration on advanced tech, is going too slowly. The basic problem is that it covers a dizzying range of activity, from deep-space radars to quantum sensors. Many would like it to focus more narrowly on a handful of areas with the greatest promise, including submarine drones and hypersonic missiles. A milestone came last year when America lifted its draconian International Traffic in Arms Regulations, known as ITAR, to let sensitive technology flow to Australia and Britain.
Despite these issues, the fact that AUKUS is alive and ticking over after four years is encouraging enough for people familiar with the fate of many multinational defence projects, let alone ones that involve a country with no nuclear experience building perhaps the world’s most complex pieces of military hardware. “Pillar one is in okay shape,” says an American insider closely involved in AUKUS. That keeps alive the hopes of its authors: that, in two decades’ time, five new cutting-edge subs will be prowling the Pacific.
