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EXCLUSIVE: Reed, Inhofe warn Biden AUKUS risks becoming 'zero sum game' for US Navy - Breaking Defense

"We are concerned that what was initially touted as a 'do no harm' opportunity to support Australia and the United Kingdom and build long-term competitive advantages for the U.S. and its Pacific allies, may be turning into a zero-sum game for scarce, highly advanced U.S. SSNs," wrote the SASC heads.

breakingdefense.com

Albanese says US relationship with Australia remains strong despite concerns raised over AUKUS deal

The federal government is adamant working with the US and UK to build nuclear submarines will benefit all involved, despite revelations US senators have expressed concern.

www.abc.net.au

 

[BravoZulu]

Australia’s nuclear submarine program will cost up to $368 billion over the next three decades, with confirmation that the federal government will buy at least three American-manufactured nuclear submarines and contribute "significant additional resources" to US shipyards.

The Australian government will take three, potentially second-hand Virginia-class submarines early next decade, pending the approval of the US Congress.

There will also be an option to purchase another two under the landmark AUKUS defence and security pact, announced in San Diego this morning.

In the meantime, design and development work will continue on a brand new submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS, "leveraging” work the British have already been doing to replace their Astute-class submarines.

That submarine — which will form the AUKUS class — would eventually be operated by both the UK and Australia, using American combat systems.

One submarine will be built every two years from the early 2040s through to the late 2050s, with five SSN-AUKUS boats delivered to the Royal Australian Navy by the middle of the 2050s.

Eventually, the fleet would include eight Australian submarines built in Adelaide into the 2060s, but the federal government is leaving open the option of taking some from British shipyards if strategic circumstances change.

Meanwhile, the federal government estimates the cost of the submarine program will be between $268 billion and $368 billion over the next 30 years.

As part of that figure, $8 billion will be spent on upgrading the naval base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.

From as early as 2027, four US and one UK submarine will start rotating through Western Australia, to be known as the Submarine Rotational Forces West.

No decision has been made on a future east coast base for submarines, although Port Kembla has firmed as the most likely location.

Standing alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, US President Joe Biden spoke of the strength of the alliance already.

"Today, as we stand at the inflection point in history, where the hard work of announcing deterrence and enhancing stability is going to reflect peace and stability for decades to come, the United States can ask for no better partners in the Indo-Pacific where so much of our shared future will be written," Mr Biden said.

During the announcement, President Biden flagged that, from this year, Australian navy personnel would embed with both US and UK crew on submarines and at their shipyards.

"In fact, as we speak, the nuclear-powered sub, is making a port call in Perth and later this year, there will be a rotational presence of nuclear-powered subs to Australia to help develop the workforce it will need to build," he said

Mr Albanese confirmed that Australian submariners were already undergoing nuclear power training in the US.

"I am proud to confirm that they are all in the top 30 per cent of their class," he said.

"This will be an Australian sovereign capability, commanded by the Royal Australian Navy and sustained by Australians in Australian shipyards, with construction to begin within this decade."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-14/aukus-nuclear-submarine-deal-announced/102087614

 

[BravoZulu]

Australia’s nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will be of a new British design, but their reactors, combat systems and heavyweight torpedoes will all be American.

After 18 months of intense consultations, details of this massive joint project to produce SSN AUKUS were announced today by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the US naval base in San Diego. A stated objective is to enable the three nations ‘to grow the size of our combined submarine forces’.

Albanese said this was ‘the biggest single investment in Australia’s defence capability’ in the country’s history and would require a whole-of-nation effort.

Throughout the process there’s been a strong focus on very visibly setting the highest standards of nuclear stewardship to ease concerns that have been raised about the possibility of the tri-national project driving nuclear proliferation in the Indo-Pacific.

The program is comprehensive and carefully stepped to build up a potentially lethal submarine deterrent in the region and to get formidable attack submarines into the hands of Australian sailors as quickly as possible.

Australia has declared that it will not seek to acquire nuclear weapons and will not enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel as part of this program. And while Australia is a major global source of uranium, it has undertaken not to produce the fuel for its submarines.

The reactors will not need to be refuelled in the submarines’ lifetime, and the UK and US will provide Australia with nuclear material in units that are welded shut.

While the reactors to be fitted to the new submarines will contain high-grade nuclear material, it cannot be used to make nuclear weapons without further chemical processing, which Australia says it will not seek.

The whole endeavour will proceed within the framework of Australia’s comprehensive safeguards agreement and its additional protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The three nations have consulted closely with the agency on the AUKUS program.

Rather than adding to the complexity of the project, using the US combat system and Mark 48 heavyweight torpedoes in a British-designed submarine will provide Australia with opportunities. The combat system and torpedoes will be evolved versions of those already used in Australia’s Collins-class submarines. Australia was involved in the development of both and will have a key role to play in incorporating them into the British design.

The US will immediately increase the number of submarine visits to Australian ports and the UK will make regular visits from 2026. While that will establish a nuclear submarine presence, it will also provide increasing opportunities for Australia to begin building the industrial capability to service and maintain the boats during their visits. The three leaders said that would increase capacity in peacetime ‘and meet operational needs in time of crisis’.

By 2027, the intention is for the US and UK to begin formally rotating submarines through the HMAS Stirling naval base in Western Australia under a formal process to be designated Submarine Rotational Force—West.

The base will be expanded to support the scale of infrastructure required for nuclear-powered submarines—both visitors and those that will belong to Australia. The UK is expected to provide one of its Astute-class submarines for these rotations and the US up to four Virginia-class SSNs. The partners stressed that this arrangement would not constitute basing, noting: ‘This rotational presence will comply fully with Australia’s longstanding position of no foreign bases on its territory’.

Apart from bringing strategic weight, that will also increase opportunities for Australian personnel to serve aboard the submarines of both allies. Biden said that would help ‘jump-start’ Australia’s capability.

Pending congressional approval, the US has committed to selling three of its Virginia-class ‘hunter-killer’ submarines to Australia in the next decade and it will provide up to five if required.

The three leaders said Australia and the UK intended to start building the submarines in their domestic shipyards before the end of this decade. The UK plans to deliver its first boats to the Royal Navy in the late 2030s. Australia’s boats will be built in Adelaide and the goal is to deliver the first locally built SSN to the Royal Australian Navy in the early 2040s. The three leaders stressed that the highest nuclear non-proliferation standards will be applied to each phase of this program.

Estimates of the total cost over the life of the program range from $268 to $368 billion. That includes running and maintaining the boats.

From 2023–24 to 2026–27, the program will cost an estimated $9 billion. Of that, $6 billion will come from funding that had been allocated to the since cancelled French Attack class conventionally powered submarine program.

Over the 10 years to 2032–33, it’s estimated that Australia’s spending on the AUKUS nuclear boats will rise to between $50 and $58 billion. Of that, $24 billion will come from the Attack-class program.

In the longer term, until 2054–55, the government estimates that the SSN program will absorb about 0.15% of Australia’s GDP on average.

The money will include an Australian contribution to the cost of the expansion of the American submarine industry base to enable the US to provide the additional Virginia-class boats for the RAN.

Having industrial capability in all three AUKUS nations will strengthen supply chains and make them more resilient, the leaders said.

The British company Rolls Royce will build the reactors to an American design.

A major hurdle will be finding and training the large numbers of specialised engineers and technicians required to build and maintain nuclear-powered submarines. And each of the new boats will require a crew of about 100. The Collins-class submarines currently operated by the RAN have crews of around 65.

Albanese said the submarine project would create around 20,000 direct jobs for Australians, including engineers, scientists, technicians, submariners, administrators and tradespeople. ‘[T]his investment will be a catalyst for innovation and research breakthroughs that will reverberate right throughout the Australian economy and across every state and territory, not just in one design element, not just in one field, but right across our advanced manufacturing and technology sectors, creating jobs and growing businesses right around Australia, inspiring and rewarding innovation, and educating young Australians today for the opportunities of tomorrow,’ he said.

The process of building up workforce numbers and skills has already begun. Australian naval personnel and civilian specialists are embedded with the US Navy and the Royal Navy and with relevant industrial bases in both countries. Australian submariners joined US nuclear-propulsion training programs last year.

The US Congress has passed a bipartisan provision allowing Australian naval officers to train at Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in South Carolina and eventually to serve on US submarines. The UK is also training some Australian officers on such courses.

Australian personnel already train aboard US and UK submarines and their numbers and seniority will increase as the program progresses.

Australia will send hundreds of workers to US and UK shipyards and scientists and technicians to US and UK technical facilities for specialised training and to gain the experience they’ll need to build and sustain nuclear-powered submarines.

It’s understood that regional nations have been extensively briefed on the AUKUS developments in recent weeks.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/u...mp-start Australias nuclear submarine program

 

[BravoZulu]

Last week, US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the pathway for AUKUS that will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. Canberra will purchase three to five Virginia-class SSNs from the United States before buying eight newly designed, UK- and Australian-built ‘SSN AUKUS’ subs. The deal outlines new docking, training and rotation agreements that will provide the US with a more robust strategic hub in the Indo-Pacific.

The three leaders have promised that the submarine project will create jobs, educational opportunities and investment for all three countries. While the announcement is welcome in its bold strategic vision, it remains scant on details and does not address the elephant in the room: the weakness in the combined defence industrial capacity to produce so many boats in so little time with so few resources.

Recent discussions about a lack of industrial capacity to support the AUKUS submarine project highlight the continuing difficulties facing the trilateral technology security agreement. Leaders in Washington, Canberra and London all express the will to make nuclear attack submarines a reality for the Australian Defence Force in order to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. But the hard work of building submarines doesn’t happen in the national capitals. Regional, state and local politics and markets—including debates about sourcing of raw materials and development of skilled labour pools—require attention.

Public pressure is the force necessary to untangle the Byzantine knot of regulations frustrating the sharing of classified and otherwise sensitive know-how, and will make or break the program. While platitudes around ‘mateship’ and the strength and history of the US–Australia alliance sound comforting, the fundamental groundwork to make AUKUS a success will require previously unimagined levels of political and financial investment in the locales where SSNs are designed, constructed and maintained.

As ASPI DC Director Mark Watson noted recently, ‘regardless of the strongly stated political and military support for AUKUS, members of Congress could begin to take a more ambivalent view if it comes at the expense of US operational readiness’, even when the strategic logic is compelling. Moreover, if policymakers don’t provide incentives and benefits—jobs, educational opportunities or tax breaks—to get rank-and-file voters onboard, the American, British and Australian publics will be unlikely to make the necessary sacrifices and investments to see the deal through.

Failure to seek public support among key populations and to explain why AUKUS matters beyond the strategic area of the Indo-Pacific reveals a misunderstanding of what is required. For example, while US congressional committees and Oval Office staffers make key decisions on the future of nuclear submarines for Australia, American taxpayers will, at some point, demand evidence of a return on their investment.

Without that dividend, Australia’s requirement for a long-range submarine capability will remain unmet. And American interests in linking industrial bases and integrating defence supply chains to share the burden of countering China through ‘collective efforts over the next decade’ will founder. US officials, Australian and British diplomats, and supportive strategists and researchers must make these arguments now.

The term ‘subnational diplomacy’ refers to the engagement of non-central governments in international relations and can include the foreign policy efforts of states and cities. We’ve seen negative publicity regarding subnational diplomacy in Australia in the case of the Victorian government’s aborted agreement with China on a proposed Belt and Road Initiative project in 2019. But for countries such as Australia and the US, these sorts of relations are commonplace and generally constructive. As Washington’s prime characteristics are partisanship and a short attention span, it’s no wonder that many promising bipartisan projects falter when campaign seasons begin or when other pressing foreign or domestic issues distract policymakers from following through. A subnational campaign to drive home the importance of AUKUS could help overcome these perennial structural problems.

For starters, entrenching the US–Australia alliance and particular projects associated with AUKUS at a state level can ensure Australia sells the importance of its interests to American voters. Australia has proposed investing $3 billion, mostly in America’s shipyards to expand and expedite production of the Virginia-class submarines. Australian policymakers will need to visit more than just Washington to discover the people who will be front and centre for AUKUS and who will help Australia meet its needs. Sending delegations that include officials and industry representatives from Australian states to boat-building cities in Connecticut and Virginia is a necessary next step.

Engaging on the ground means learning about and dealing with local politicians and community leaders. It also means dealing with labour unions, fabrication companies and the manufacturers of components beyond the nuclear technology that garners so much attention among DC tongue-waggers. State governments hold the purse strings on building new and refurbishing old shipyards or creating tax conditions and tax breaks for AUKUS-related investments. Collaborating with state governments, county officials and mayors will promote a smoother process of getting submarines quickly into the hands of Australian defence personnel. Moreover, robust subnational outreach opens the door to new investment opportunities for American companies and for Australian companies in the US to invest in Australia.

The demand for full-society cooperation and coordination is even more important for the second pillar of AUKUS, which promises cooperation on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cyber, quantum computing and undersea capabilities—and in which states such as Arizona, Michigan and Utah may play prominent roles. In these various fields, the private sector is often the lead innovator—and the lead investor. Commercial players working in conjunction with state and local governments is the way to fast-track the development of dual-use technologies and avoid ponderous federal bureaucracies and partisan DC politics.

Selling governors and mayors on the benefits of AUKUS investment—things they already want—coupled with a national security message is smart. Subnational engagement will pay dividends when the time comes for Australia to develop maintenance facilities for the new SSNs or to create new industrial hubs to support integrated AUKUS shipbuilding that combines the industrial bases of all three partners. Australia, too, will need workers, high-tech fabrication yards and access to vital materials. Standard-setting across shops and opportunities for cross-training workers—including apprenticeships connecting specialists in Groton and Newport News and experts in Barrow-in-Furness with trainees in Perth and Adelaide—will be important.

The all-of-country approach needed to meet the strategic challenges facing the US, the UK and Australia is an ‘integrated industrial base’ that benefits all three societies. The SSN AUKUS deal is a welcome step in the right direction. However, if the partners are serious about deterring China, subnational engagement—from the politician to the welder—is imperative.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/l... the Washington beltway for why AUKUS matters

 

[BravoZulu]

When I was Australia’s ambassador to the United States, I visited General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, one of two yards constructing the Virginia-class submarines. A Virginia was the backdrop in San Diego last month for the three AUKUS leaders’ announcement of Australia’s path to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs).

Electric Boat plans increase its workforce by some 6,000, doubling the number of shifts. Hundreds of Australians will join them. Their training will be invaluable to the creation of a sovereign workforce to build and sustain our SSN AUKUS fleet and sustain our Virginias as we receive three to five of them in the 2030s.

As I entered USS Missouri’s control room, the captain asked if I recognised anything. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am standing in the control room of a Collins-class submarine.’ He revealed that his last sea post had been as an exchange officer in Australia on a Collins. ‘Best I’ve served on,’ he said (obviously, a certain amount of hyperbole for a guest, but a moment of pride for me).

As ambassador it was my job to request US support for our replacement boat. We’d been looking at a Japanese drive system for the Collins, so I sought assistance from the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of the US Navy and the US defense secretary. They were, however, not the go-to authorities for submarines. That was Admiral James Caldwell, director of the naval nuclear propulsion program in the US Department of Energy. The first director was Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (1949 to 1982).

I experienced some testiness from the Americans along the lines of, ‘Get on with it’. They emphatically didn’t want us in the nuclear program and liked having allies with a conventional capability. They were particularly enamoured of the Collins, despite criticism in Australia, and found it virtually impossible to detect on exercises. But their overwhelming concern was to limit access to the nuclear technologies in which they enjoyed global superiority. Over Rickover’s screaming objections, they shared that technology with the British 65 years ago, and wanted to spread it no further. The AUKUS arrangement is strongly supported in the US but runs very much against their nature. Technology transfers will require congressional approval and there will be much work for the embassy.

There’s been a lot of discussion about threats to our sovereignty once we acquire the US-made Virginia SSNs. The Americans have made clear that all facets of their deployment will be under our control. In accordance with the nuclear non-proliferation processes thus far endorsed by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the reactors’ fuelling will be handled by the Americans. Any decision to go to war, or not to, will be solely a matter for Australia’s government.

Until Australia receives its SSNs, British and American boats operating from here will be designated Submarine Rotational Forces—West and will have their own lines of authority. That’s been the case with submarines that have made nearly 300 visits to HMAS Stirling since the early 1980s.

The US–Australia alliance is critical to our survival, and ensuring its effectiveness involves intense work on commonality of systems. We acquire the best of our ally’s equipment. The Australian Defence Force’s strike, intercepting, surveillance and transport aircraft are virtually all American, including the F-35 Lightning IIs, Superhornets, Growlers, Wedgetails, P-8 Poseidons, C-17 Globemasters, C-130 Hercules, Chinooks and Black Hawks. Hardly commented on but huge is the acquisition of 200 Tomahawk missiles likely to be deployed from our submarines and destroyers. In addition, we’ll receive the HIMARS missile system. A sovereign missile capability is being developed through the guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise. Exposure of threats in our region is much assisted by our joint intelligence-gathering facilities. Our navy’s sensing and weapon systems are largely American. We don’t feel our sovereign decision-making is curtailed by our need to acquire these weapons and spares. If origin equals sovereignty, we lost it long ago. But of course, it doesn’t.

Despite the US government overriding Rickover’s objections, the British didn’t feel obliged to join the allies in Vietnam. Indeed, until that war the Royal Australian Navy flew the Royal Navy’s ensign. The British objected because they didn’t want our ships mistaken as British. They had an active trade with North Vietnam. Without access to the best American equipment ,we would have virtually no affordable defence. The SSNs will be in continuation.

I strongly support the government’s SSN decision. Ironically, if Sweden’s Saab, which now owns the company that designed the Collins, had been allowed to bid for the Collins replacement, it may well have beaten the French and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We are fortunate that this opportunity has arisen. Courtesy of Rickover, the nuclear boats are very safe. He was almost paranoid about safety and believed that any accident, particularly in port, would end his program. Our sailors and workers will be trained to the highest level, and the boats will likewise be built to that standard.

Conventional boats are quiet and difficult to detect. Nuclear boats are not as quiet, but they are quiet. The conventional boats are deft lurkers, but they have discretion issues as radars and other detection systems improve. Our Collins boats have two to three days submerged before they must ‘snort’, raising a mast to take in air to drive their diesel engines and recharge their batteries. As they do that, they can be detected. Air-independent propulsion could extend their time deeply submerged, but in a conflict that remains a vulnerability.

When a submarine discharges a weapon, it is exposed. SSNs are fast and can depart very quickly. Conventional boats are not so fast, and they are slow to reach their station. Diesel–electric conventional boats must vacate the deployment area to refuel, and an enemy knows where they do it. Nuclear boats, not so. Their deployment time is influenced by crew endurance and food. Speed gives the nuclear boats advantages in open waters and in discretion close to shore.

As retired Rear Admiral David Oliver, who has operated both types of boats, told the Lowy Institute: ‘Nuclear submarines [close in] have such inherent advantages, in that the ocean is so noisy and layered that sounds pursue odd paths.’ He also argues: ‘Nuclear-powered submarines will give Australia invulnerability. There is no nation or system that can prevent a determined attack by a nuclear submarine.’ The Chinese know this, too, and as they attack the AUKUS program, they are building SSNs at pace.

Our nuclear boats will be expensive—up to $368 billion—which will increase the defence budget by 0.15%. The government has said it hopes to make savings towards them. I would argue that lifting defence’s share of GDP from 2% to 2.15% would be fine. In my day it was 2.3% to 2.5%. We can’t make this long-term program the enemy of what must be done now. This is a government of cautious financial management, but it has prioritised national security. Defence spending is massively outweighed by what we spend on social programs. The National Disability Insurance Scheme, for example, will cost at least four or five times that $368 billion over the same 30-year period.

It will probably take a decade to get our first Virginia-class boat and slightly less than two decades for our first British–Australian-designed boat incorporating much American capability. But it’s a major deterrent. The rotation of allied boats will be much sooner, and that helps. Deterrence, not war, is the government’s objective. Its diplomacy is clearly directed towards that. The suggestion that our sovereignty is impinged on by this, when our total program is considered, is untrue. A massive lift in our military effectiveness is assured.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/n...ed submarines are vital to Australias defence

 

[BravoZulu]

US Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said Australia's contribution to the three-way AUKUS agreement, which includes Britain, "doesn't always have to be dollars".

The pact was signed in late 2021 and is seen as a way of countering China's growing clout in the Asia-Pacific region.

Work under AUKUS has so far focused on supplying Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, a fleet capable of travelling stealthily over vast distances and striking foes at long range.

But the pact is increasingly focused on developing advanced capabilities such as long-range precision firing, artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons.

Wormuth said Australia could be a proving ground for these weapons.

"One thing Australia has in spades is long distances and relatively unpopulated land," she told AFP in a telephone interview from Washington.

"A challenge for us in the United States when it comes to hypersonics or even some of our things like the precision strike missile -- which is not a hypersonic weapon but has very long ranges in some of its increments -- for us to find open spaces in the United States where we can actually test these weapons, it's a challenge.

"Australia obviously has a tremendous amount of territory where that testing is a little bit more doable -- so I think that's a unique thing, as an example, that the Australians bring to the table."

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230809-pentagon-eyes-missile-testing-role-for-australia

 

[BravoZulu]

The September 2021 announcement of Australia’s transition to nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) under the AUKUS program indicated that ‘at least eight’ would be acquired. More recently, the rhetoric has firmed up to eight, with the program director telling a Senate committee in May that there would be three Virginia-class SSNs and five AUKUS SSNs. Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead implied that this was the full extent of the program and that decisions for what followed would be left for a future government.

A decision to stop at eight overlooks critical strategic, industrial and personnel considerations that determine the number of submarines Australia acquires.

Since the 2009 defence white paper, successive reviews have affirmed the need for 12 submarines supported by a base on each coast providing specialised infrastructure, workshops and a submarine squadron staff. While nuclear propulsion provides much greater mobility, a submarine can only be in one place at a time. Once its position is revealed by counter-detection or its own offensive actions, uncertainty over its location is removed and with that, its deterrent value diminishes for a period. Added to the reality of our geography, a force able to deploy at least two submarines on each coast would require at least 12 SSNs to provide ongoing uncertainty (for an adversary) and, if needed, operational impact.

It takes three to four submarines to guarantee having one available for deployment. The ‘rule of three’ was validated by the Coles review, but that doesn’t include any spare capacity to cope with unexpected defects. The UK and French experiences confirm that four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are required to sustain one at sea—noting that SSBNs operate in a much lower mechanical and operationally stressed environment than SSNs.

Industrial issues are significant factors in the cost of ownership and effectiveness of the force. Australia intends to build the AUKUS SSNs in Adelaide. That is thoroughly commendable, but we should expect delays and difficulties as we learn how to do it. In all shipbuilding programs, the time and cost of successive vessels reduces as the workforce and processes are optimised. Typically, based on Australian (and global) experience, the third submarine will cost some 40% less than the first, with much smaller reductions anticipated as later submarines are built.

This only works if the building program is continuous. Stop–start shipbuilding is a well-known recipe for prolonged delays and grossly inflated costs, as demonstrated by Britain’s Astute class, which, according to a House of Commons Defence Committee report in early 2010, was already by then 57 months late and 53% over budget.

Once we have mastered the complexities of building SSNs, as I am sure we will, we shouldn’t stop building.

Australia is planning on a three-year interval between delivery of submarines, driven by the time it will take to generate a crew from our small submarine personnel base and limited sea training capacity in operational Collins-class and US and UK submarines.

Construction of the first submarine will take longer and reduce to a steady state after three or four are built and the workforce has made its way up the learning curve and processes have been optimised. The building process is a production line—at any time, submarines will be in different states of completeness. Construction time doesn’t determine the drumbeat for delivery; rather, construction starts in sufficient time to achieve the delivery drumbeat.

Three years is a slow drumbeat industrially. Shorter would be more efficient but is currently not feasible because of personnel limitations. The personnel training limitation should ease once Australia has at least six SSNs at sea. The drumbeat could then be shortened. A slow drumbeat is more expensive due to idle production but is also likely to contribute to a loss of skilled workers; witness the UK’s experience at Barrow in Furness because of the slow Astute drumbeat.

A construction program building eight submarines at a three-year drumbeat would take 21 years. Submarines typically have a hull life of 25–30 years. Thus, this production line would have nothing to build for four to nine years, and would then be then back into stop–start shipbuilding.

A force of 10 SSNs at a three-year drumbeat with a planned 27-year life is the minimum to provide a continuous-build program, avoiding the stop–start situation. A force of 12 could achieve a shorter drumbeat in the later stages when the personnel restrictions are not so severe.

Decisions on the final size of the force must be made now, at the program’s inception. They drive industrial issues such as the size of facilities, production-line technology, the supply chains supporting the force and the ordering of long lead items such as the reactor. The decision cannot responsibly be left for a future government.

My study of British, French and US submarine-crewing policies, summarised in my 2018 ASPI report, concluded that a force of 10 SSNs with 10 crews was essential to generate the minimum critical mass of experienced personnel. A smaller force will not generate sufficient highly experienced personnel to oversee the safe technical and operational aspects of the program. That calculation assumed one base and one submarine squadron. Two-ocean basing with an additional 200 highly experienced squadron staff, a key link in the operational and safety chain, would require at least 12 SSNs.

Britain’s Royal Navy has six or seven SSNs and four SSBNs operating from one base in a single squadron. Its personnel situation is dire. High wastage rates and shortfalls in many critical categories have reportedly necessitated drafting non-volunteers to submarine training and cannibalising parts and crew to get even one submarine to sea. At times, the RN is unable to achieve even one. Is that where Australia is heading?

The issues are undoubtedly more complex than simply the size of the force, but it reinforces the point that a force of eight SSNs requiring six to seven crews is below critical mass, vulnerable to personnel shortfalls, will struggle to sustain two SSNs deployed, and won’t be able to sustain two-ocean basing.

Even more problematic is whether Australia can achieve an operational, sustainable and deployable SSN capability from eight boats made up of a mix of Virginia and AUKUS designs. The mix of classes adds to the complexity, cost and risk because it entails two supply chains and differing major onboard equipment, spares, and training systems and simulators.

Australia requires at least 12 SSNs to sustain two-ocean basing with two deployable on each coast in the good times. A force of 18—nine on each coast—would be more resilient, reliably providing two deployable SSNs, with three available in the good times.

Eight is plainly insufficient on all counts.

Leaving the decision for a later government will mean greater expense and increase the risk that the program doesn’t produce the needed strategic capability, while stripping funds from other key defence capabilities. A lack of decision, along with Australia’s failure to join the AUKUS SSN initial design effort, indicates inadequate commitment.

A ‘damn the torpedoes’ transition to SSNs could leave us with no submarine capability.

If Australia is not prepared to, or cannot, invest the resources to achieve a viable SSN force, we are better off not continuing down this path.
Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia.

 

[BravoZulu]

The United States has never sold a nuclear-powered vessel to any nation. In 1958 it transferred technology that enabled the UK to build its own nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). Washington’s decision to provide this technology to Australia under the AUKUS agreement is tough, complex and, in some ways, frightening. It reflects a late realisation that the US needs effective allies, particularly in the maritime environment of the Indo-Pacific. Canberra is among Washington’s most trustworthy friends.

The only US ally exempt from its cumbersome International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is Canada, and that arrangement was briefly suspended in 1999–2001 over doubts about the Canadian security regime.

For AUKUS Pillar 1 (submarines) and Pillar 2 (technologies) to work, the UK and Australia require the same exemption. Australia’s SSN requires more. The US Congress must be convinced that our security systems can be trusted with secrets, and that the boats sold to us will not dangerously deplete US combat capability. This is arguably America’s most important weapons system and one that potential enemies will be unlikely to match.

For Australia this is a long-term program. There’s urgency in our defence situation, but our immediate major tasks are to support American and British submarines rotated through the HMAS Stirling naval base and to train crews, maintenance personnel and construction workers. We hope that deterrence works and those boats don’t have to turn lethal. They will come just in time to replace our six Collins-class submarines as the development of underwater interception capabilities makes the environment lethal for conventional boats.

Submarines are valuable for surveillance, reconnaissance, insertion of special forces, mining and countermining, and to deliver lethal effects at sea using torpedoes and missiles, and, increasingly, on land. Their capacity to remain clandestine and locate anywhere at sea optimises their deterrent value. The conventionally powered Collins boats carry similar weapons, but SSNs have many more of them. SSNs can range over broader areas at greater speed, which heavily complicates the task of any potential enemy. When an SSN has fired a weapon and its general location is known, it can rapidly vacate the zone.

An adversary’s surface warships or submarines have four routes through the archipelago to Australia’s north to reach our waters. A Collins can intercept, but it doesn’t have the speed to follow. An SSN has that speed and it can reposition rapidly if necessary. Our military capabilities on the surface or on land can potentially be targeted but SSNs cannot. That’s why the government sees their essential deterrent value. We have no equivalent. The defence minister is constantly being asked why we must have SSNs despite their high cost. The $369 billion over 30 years is a bagatelle compared with what we will spend on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and many other social programs over that period.

This is the essence of our deterrence: a heavy weapon that can hit targets on land and sea. Previously that was the role of the F-111 bomber. Years ago my Indonesian defence counterpart, the late General Beni Moerdani, told me that when those around the cabinet table with him were angry with Australia and inclined to do something about it, he would remind them that Australia had an aircraft that could put a bomb through a specific window. That capability is effectively restored by SSNs—and the delivery system can’t be seen.

Australia won’t have its first SSN for 10 years. The beginning of the program is the most fraught, but it will be challenging throughout. The plan is to fold the AUKUS bills in Congress into the US National Defense Authorization Act. One of the plan’s strongest supporters, Democratic Representative Joe Courtney, tells me the Senate still hasn’t appointed conferees for this process. The House has. Conference is how disagreements between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate are rationalised. The House Foreign Affairs Committee backed the plan 48–0. In the Senate, Republican Roger Wicker has put a hold on it. He wants from the president a full industrial base plan before supporting the sale. That isn’t necessary and the industrial build-up is proceeding at pace.

The question for Wicker and others is not whether Australia should have SSNs but whether a target to get 66–69 SSNs in the US inventory can be reached if we get ours. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of boats delivered drop to 1.2 a year when 2.3–2.5 is necessary. Available numbers dropped to 60% because of maintenance challenges. It is now back to 67% and SSN production has climbed to two per year. The US Navy wants 80% available and believes that can be reached by 2028.

The US has almost finished building Block IV Virginia-class SSNs, the version we want. A much bigger Block V version is now the focus. It has a substantially larger number of vertical launchers for cruise missiles with ultimately a hypersonic missile version. This capability replaces the launchers in four soon-to-be-paid-off converted SSBNs.

This month a five-year industrial agreement between submarine builder Electric Boat and its 3,400 skilled employees was completed. The agreement incorporates a substantial wage rise, retention bonuses, a lift in retirement savings, a comprehensive medical plan and increases in vacation and sick leave. These conditions also apply to the 5,000 workers the company has been trying to recruit this year. It reached 4,000 in August. It is also outsourcing production to other companies, with assembly in the main yards. Americans can do things quickly when money and workforce are available. Joe Biden’s administration will need to convince doubters and the $3 billion Australia is putting in is proving useful in discussion in Congress.

Exemption from ITAR is critical. I thought that had been achieved in 2010 when we and the British negotiated the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty which ratified a 2007 agreement between George W. Bush and John Howard, but it fell short of the Canadian exemption.

ITAR makes cooperation with US companies difficult because, if a good product is developed, sales to third countries may be blocked. The US is deeply concerned about Chinese intelligence capabilities. The director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, noted that after AUKUS was announced a massive Chinese espionage effort was detected aimed at Australian government, industrial and educational entities.

Defence News says a strong effort is being mounted in the administration and Congress. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended a different approach to ITAR reform which scooped us up, and that has passed the Senate 86–11 as an amendment to the 2024 defence policy bill. Kurt Campbell, National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, said this was not ‘whether to’, but ‘how to’. The State Department has also established an AUKUS trade authorisation mechanism as an interim capability to speed up technology transfer.

The Americans have identified areas including quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonics where our research is ahead of theirs. Anthony Di Stasio, who oversees Defence Production Act grants, has suggested Australia would help bolster US supply chains for critical minerals like cobalt and explosive materials like TNT.

We need patience. The American decision-making environment is complicated. We know how to work it but we can expect much frustration. We can only hope that our diplomatic skills and those of our allies prevent a major conflict in our region while we restructure.

Events in the Middle East and Ukraine may divert attention when we need intense US legislative concentration on the AUKUS issues, but we have time. No SSNs are due until the 2030s and, in the meantime, the structures to support rotating allied forces are relatively easy to establish. The future crews can be trained on allied boats. The capability is worth the effort.
Kim Beazley is a senior fellow at ASPI. He served as Australia’s defence minister from 1984 to 1990 and as ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2016.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/a...submarines will be worth the waitand the cost

 

[BravoZulu]

The AUKUS program—sweeping in the intimacy and level of its proposed cooperation—has enjoyed a high level of bipartisan support among the Australian political elite. First agreed by the Coalition government in September 2021, it was reaffirmed by the Australian Labor Party—then in opposition—within 24 hours, subject to a small number of caveats. The Labor government under Anthony Albanese has taken more fulsome ownership of the program since its election in May 2022. The prime minister was in Washington last week, meeting with President Joe Biden and making the case for AUKUS with some recalcitrant members of the US Congress.

That bipartisanship is unsurprising, given the golden chalice that AUKUS holds out to Australia: namely, assistance in the acquisition of eight nuclear-powered submarines (Pillar 1), a capability exercised by few countries worldwide, and a seat at the top table in exploring the potential of a range of cutting-edge technologies (Pillar 2).

But it would be wrong to imagine that AUKUS is above political debate. Indeed, quite the opposite. The program has provoked the revival of some old areas of contention in Australian strategic policy and encouraged a few new ones. I intend to explore five: three that relate directly to AUKUS and two others that reflect older, wider divisions.

The two broader debates are about:

• the near versus the far in Australian strategic policy priority-setting
• the relative balance between Asia and the Anglosphere in Australian strategic linkages.

The three that touch directly on AUKUS are about whether the program will:

• deliver the hoped-for blend of purchased US submarines and home-built Australian ones
• have a distortionary effect on other defence and social spending (what we might call the ‘elephant on the waterbed’ effect)
• provide the right outcomes—a debate spurred in part by a sotto voce concern about whether the advanced technologies of Pillar 2 will, in fact, help provide the means of tracking and sinking the submarines so expensively procured under Pillar 1.

Let’s start with the near–far debate. It’s an old debate in Australia that’s always close to the surface. It pits those who believe Australia should concentrate on fighting off existential threats close to home—‘border wars’— against those who would be prepared to fight for grander goals in more distant theatres—‘order wars’. The classic criticism that the border school throws at the order school is that they get sucked into ‘other people’s wars’. And the classic response of the order school is that order wars help prevent the emergence of border wars.

The nuclear-powered submarines are, unmistakably, vessels that would fit better as a contribution to order wars—the far rather than the near—and so stir once more that old polarisation.

Sam Roggeveen’s recent book, The echidna strategy, shows that we’re witnessing a revival of this debate. For Roggeveen, who is the director of the Lowy Institute’s international security program, Australia’s geographical location is a prized strategic asset—because distance complicates an aggressor’s calculations about use of force.

In normal years, Australians don’t think of their country as a spiky, indigestible monotreme. Echidnas spend most of their lives with their noses in the dirt. Their strategic horizon is low and short. By contrast, Australia is a strategic extrovert—not just because its closest strategic partners live far away, but because the global, regional and even neighbourhood order is set by the force balances along the Eurasian rimlands. When Albanese spoke in Washington of the AUKUS submarines as Australia’s contribution to ‘strategic equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific’, he was echoing that thought.

Existential threats to Australia aren’t merely those that unfold close to our borders, although the emphasis placed on deterrence by denial in the recent defence strategic review unhelpfully misleads on that point. Coercion can happen over longer ranges. And our strategic fate is entangled with the fates of our allies and partners: there is no world in which Australia bravely soldiers on as the last bastion of democracy when all others have fallen.

The second debate concerns the relative weighting of Asia and the Anglosphere in Australian policy settings. Some of the fiercest criticism of AUKUS has come from those who—in earlier years—invested heavily in Australia’s supposed ‘reorientation’ to Asia. Unsurprisingly, this debate is coloured by a wide range of factors that have almost nothing to do with submarines—such as the rise and fall of Asian-language tuition in Australian schools and universities, and the correlation between Anglophilia and being at the right of the Australian political spectrum.

In his National Press Club speech in March, former prime minister Paul Keating charged that ‘a contemporary Labor government [was] shunning security in Asia for security in and within the Anglosphere’. AUKUS tied Australia to the old, declining Anglospheric powers. In his book Engagement, published in 2000, Keating wrote of the US as ‘the big dog’ on the Asia–Pacific block. Clearly, he thinks that time has passed; he argues for the US to be a balancing power in the region, but believes that any attempt by Washington to cling to primacy would not have a happy ending.

This debate turns directly on the impact—real or imagined—of the AUKUS program on Australia’s relations with Asian countries. The opinions of the Southeast Asian states seem to be of particular concern, with Indonesian statements meriting exegetical analysis. Northeast Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea—fellow US allies—are generally supportive.

And then there’s China itself, of course. What does AUKUS mean for Australia’s relations with China? Despite AUKUS, the bilateral relationship has stabilised. Former head of intelligence Peter Varghese says it’s not in Australia’s interest to thwart the rise of China. But that depends on what kind of China rises, doesn’t it?

Let’s move to the three debates over AUKUS itself. The debate over capacity has two foci—because AUKUS has both a purchase component and a build one. The purchase part of the program is scheduled to unfold during a time when America’s submarine-construction capacity has no spare headroom—US submarine yards are struggling to satisfy US domestic demand. There are questions too about the build component. Australia has never built a nuclear-powered submarine, or indeed anything of such complexity. And while the US has experience in different shipyards each producing parts of a submarine, the final assembly is usually done by the shipyard with the responsibility for installing the reactor unit.

These two difficulties are directly related: if we minimise the number of submarines purchased from the US, we increase our reliance on domestic production. Conversely, if we minimise the vessels built locally, we increase the disruptive effects on the US shipyards.

The fourth debate centres on the potential distortionary effect of AUKUS on other defence programs and on broader social spending. That concern is about more than simple opportunity costs. The sheer size of AUKUS means the program may prove to be a gravity well, sucking talented personnel and funding from other areas both within and beyond the defence portfolio. The defence budget will have to increase substantially for the country to be able to afford both the AUKUS submarine program and a viable surface fleet, air force and army. Former ministers differ on the degree of distortion. Kim Beazley still supports the program, arguing that the subs will be worth the wait and the cost. Alexander Downer supports getting nuclear-powered submarines but buying them all off the shelf.

Finally, the fifth debate touches on outcomes. Even the full eight submarines won’t be deployable simultaneously, so, really, we’d be looking at one or two at sea at any one time. That could still be a significant capability—provided submarines remain largely invisible and invulnerable during their deployments.

But there’s the rub: might the potency of the AUKUS submarines be compromised by the very technologies being explored in Pillar 2? Back in 2019, the US Defense Science Board observed that quantum sensing applications were ‘currently poised for mission use’. Such improvements, married to more capable artificial intelligence, might render the seas less opaque than they are now. There would be a degree of irony if the technologies of Pillar 2 ended up substantially negating the very submarines so expensively procured under Pillar 1.

Together, those five debates suggest the AUKUS program will be the subject of continuing controversy. Today’s bipartisanship is deceptive.
Rod Lyon is a senior fellow at ASPI.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/a...o to the heart of Australian strategic policy

 

[BravoZulu]

The U.S. Navy is beginning to integrate its industrial base with those of Australia and the United Kingdom, despite Congress not yet passing several measures to enable the trilateral submarine-building arrangement AUKUS.

AUKUS will bring about the sale of American submarines to Australia and the development of a new AUKUS-class design, but U.S. Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven recently told lawmakers the agreement goes beyond acquisition programs.

“It is about fundamentally changing and integrating three industrial bases in different parts of the world to produce maximum effect to serve our mutual national security efforts,” Raven said, noting such efforts are already underway.

Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, the program executive officer for strategic submarines, recently told Defense News at an additive manufacturing summit in Danville, Virginia, that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program is tightly linked to its British counterpart, the Dreadnought program. Of particular importance is the bilateral collaboration in casting metal pieces for their common missile tubes.

Castings is among the weakest sectors in the U.S. submarine-industrial base, and something the U.S. Navy is actively trying to address by pouring money into vendors’ workforces and facilities, while also looking for new technologies — like additive manufacturing — to supplement traditional vendors’ output.

Pappano said his office, which also manages overall submarine-industrial base issues, has been looking at ways to use the U.K. castings sector and leverage the country’s castings suppliers.

Matt Sermon, the executive director at the strategic submarines office, said at the summit that Australian 3D-printing company AML3D would join a research and development effort at the Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Danville. The company’s machine uses a different printing technique than those already there, which could help the Navy advance its knowledge of the directed-energy deposition printing method and a nickel aluminum bronze alloy the service wants to use for printing submarine parts.

Sermon also noted a handful of Australian students had come through the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing schoolhouse across the street from the center of excellence. This partnership was meant to be a train-the-trainer arrangement, meaning students will return to Australia where they will establish an accelerated training center to locally grow a submarine workforce in support of AUKUS.

U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro attended the summit and said these efforts are critical for the service, adding that AUKUS is “incredibly important to our national security interests five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

The secretary noted he’s “very comfortable” in the submarine-industrial base’s ramp-up ahead of a 40-year-long heavy workload, but said more must be done to bolster the workforce — something Australia and the U.K. can help with that.

“Being able to bring Australian skilled workers here to the United States to participate in U.S. companies, and to also go back to Australia and participate in future Australian companies that are also helping to maintain, repair and build future SSN-AUKUS type ships — that’s a win-win situation for our allies and partners working together to make this happen,” he told Defense News.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2...k/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

 

[BravoZulu]

The wars raging in Europe and the Middle East remind us that conflicts erupt suddenly. It’s a point that some AUKUS critics have seized on to say Australia and its partners are not making sufficient progress to be battle-ready in the Indo-Pacific.

Certainly, we need urgent investment to increase our military preparedness. But this fact doesn’t reflect badly on AUKUS.

AUKUS is about a longer game. Sceptics who are already declaring the partnership a failure because it won’t deliver nuclear-propelled submarines for decades, and therefore will produce no military or strategic returns in a useful timeframe, are missing the point.

This was always about much more than filling a single or immediate capability gap. It is about giving us the best chance to deter aggression, now and in the future, and therefore prevent a war with the Indo-Pacific’s major strategic challenge, China.

Deterrence relies on having strong capabilities, but also on credibility. Intent matters and it was missing, for example, in Europe before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. AUKUS, even in its nascent stage, is the clearest signal that the three countries are resolved, and working together, to meet the China challenge.

With the right political and industrial support, and the necessary resources, AUKUS shows Beijing that we are collaborating on security-related technologies such as quantum, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems that will be decisive in the strategic competition defining our period and the decades ahead.

By turbocharging the advantages inherent in our market-based innovation culture, we will be best positioned to offset China’s massive technology push supported by military spending.

Even by the historical standards of geostrategic competition, this current intense period is marked by an unprecedented convergence of economics and security. Implemented effectively, AUKUS demonstrates the intent that underpins the capability and credibility necessary to deter war and deny Beijing any benefit from starting one.

Projecting this intent, Defence Minister Richard Marles met his US counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in Washington last week following Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit with President Joe Biden the week before, injecting further impetus and political commitment in the AUKUS process.

Demonstrating bipartisanship in the long-term national interest, Labor not only backed AUKUS but doubled down on the arrangement—with senior government figures including Marles supporting it at the party’s feisty national convention—as a generational, whole-of-nation endeavour.

AUKUS addresses the reality that a collective approach to security with trusted partners is a strategic advantage. No country, not even the US, is strong enough alone to confidently deter and compete with a power of China’s size.

Pentagon officials say that, for now, US submarine technology is better than Chinese technology, but the sheer numerical advantages of China’s maritime fleet demonstrate the old military saying that ‘quantity has a quality of its own’. This captures the strategy that Australia, the US and partners must follow and explains why we need AUKUS: comparative advantage is gained by working with and strengthening friends.

Leveraging each other’s aptitudes by working together puts us in a firmer position to tackle a strategic competitor in China. Fusing its civil and military sectors, China’s strategy openly seeks to monopolise key economic, defence and technological capabilities, including through a combination of intellectual property theft, coercion, interference, and unfair subsidies and investment arrangements. It is these practices and Beijing’s malign intent that motivated AUKUS.

The belated realisation that the world cannot be walled off into neat spheres and regions, due to the global nature of technology and economic supply chains (including in space and cyberspace), makes it significant that the AUKUS partners span the geography of the planet.

And while our open, market-based economic approaches confer advantages in spurring innovation and generating industrial energy, national resilience is strengthened when friendly nations work together and governments concurrently collaborate with industry and incentivise defence and technology industries to cooperate across nations.

There are of course legitimate challenges with AUKUS. They include real workforce and skill shortages, funding and infrastructure gaps, and regulatory restrictions. Each of these poses risks.

The answer, however, is not fatalism but government and industry leadership and a cultural shift to understand that our respective interests lie in collective power. As much as sceptics focus on political distractions in Washington, Albanese and Biden ensured AUKUS was a top priority at their recent meeting, noting progress across both pillars including the first graduation of Australian military personnel from the US Navy’s Nuclear Power School, the first Australian port visit by an American nuclear attack submarine, and the first demonstration of AUKUS artificial intelligence and autonomous capabilities. This was a clear signal of intent and resolve ahead of Albanese’s trip to China.

At the same time, a hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces showed the strength of bipartisan support for AUKUS, with members—including Republican Mike Gallagher and Democrat Joe Courtney—backing supplemental funding and export control reform.

Support doesn’t equal a blank cheque and reasonable questions are being asked in Washington—not just in Congress but in other parts of government—yet these aim to ensure that AUKUS is a success.

The expectation that the necessary domestic political reforms for such a tectonic shift as AUKUS would come easily were always unrealistic. Meanwhile, many of the criticisms about technology-transfer restrictions, difficulties building submarines in Adelaide or the potential for a war this decade are issues that would apply more acutely without a bold initiative like AUKUS.

This is about having a coherent, long-term strategy, at which many authoritarians excel because they are untroubled by the demands of democracy (from elections to protecting the rights of citizens). As a senior figure instrumental to AUKUS remarked at a Washington dialogue ASPI hosted with the Center for a New American Security earlier this year, this partnership is about ensuring the three allies are so intimate that we ‘finish each other’s sentences’ on matters of strategy and security.

There is still much work to be done to deter China and preserve our own sovereignty, but AUKUS is already making a difference, establishing a tight-knit, collective approach to defence policy and the key capabilities that will shape the rest of the century—not just today or tomorrow.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/a...utm_term=AUKUS sceptics are missing the point

 

[BravoZulu]

In a report on the UK government’s Indo-Pacific policy, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee calls for the United Kingdom to propose to Australia and the United States that Japan, along with South Korea, be invited to participate in a AUKUS technical defence cooperation agreement focused on Strand B, or Pillar 2, activities.

AUKUS Pillar 2 designates cooperation in advanced capabilities in eight areas: autonomous undersea systems, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, advanced cyber, hypersonic weapons, electronic warfare, innovation and information sharing. These lines of effort are critical in reinforcing the integrated deterrence capabilities of the US’s Indo-Pacific allies, including Japan.

Since Japan already has defence cooperation agreements for joint research and development with the US, the UK and Australia, there’s a foundation for AUKUS–Japan cooperation. But cooperation under these frameworks is project-based, with an emphasis on basic technologies rather than a list of priority capabilities. For example, most of the joint research with the US involves technologies directly related to equipment, such as next-generation amphibious technology and modular hybrid–electric vehicle systems. Based on this background, Japan could derive considerable benefit from participating in AUKUS Pillar 2.

The Japanese government stated in its 2022 national defence strategy that leveraging cutting-edge technologies for defence has become critical. Japan, which has high-tech capabilities, needs to cooperate with its allies and mobilise their capabilities to prepare for a long-term race for technological leadership. Because advantages in critical and emerging technologies covered by Pillar 2 of AUKUS will directly translate into military advantages, having access to these technologies will help deter potential adversaries in the Indo-Pacific.

Given Japan’s declining economic power, its future science and technology investment will likely also decline. Japan can acquire critical and emerging technologies more efficiently by closely collaborating with allies and partners. Cooperation through an expanded AUKUS Pillar 2 agreement would allow the participants to complement each other’s capability gaps and leverage economies of scale.

Most importantly, it will promote the internationalisation of Japan’s defence industry. For a long time, the Japanese defence industry’s only client was the Japanese Ministry of Defense and the Japan Self-Defense Forces. But they are undergoing major changes, including a relaxing of the restrictions on defence equipment transfers and promotion of exports. Strengthening ties between the defence industries of Japan and AUKUS members is a good opportunity to improve the Japanese industry’s competitiveness. In Japan, investment in critical and emerging technologies has been driven by civilian usage. In 2020, defence-related procurement from domestic manufacturers made up less than 1% of Japan’s total industrial production value.

The Japanese defence industry must become more internationally oriented. Although joint research and development takes time, the expanded AUKUS group can create an opportunity for the Japanese defence manufacturers to gain marketing and sales know-how from AUKUS partners.

But before it can join AUKUS, Japan will need to overcome a few challenges.

The most critical issue is the lack of an adequate security-clearance system. The Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, the only existing law on information security in Japan, limits the scope of information that can be classified as state secrets to four areas: diplomacy, defence, prevention of espionage, and prevention of terrorism. It does not cover information in economic and technological fields, and without a security-clearance system in these areas, Japanese manufacturers will struggle to access classified information in joint developments. Japan will need to develop a security-clearance system before it can join AUKUS.

In addition, Japan is striving to become a major arms exporter like the US and UK, so there are concerns about potential conflicts of interest. AUKUS Pillar 1 is reminiscent of Japan’s efforts to sell its conventionally powered submarines to Australia in 2015. But considering the lead time to acquire effective deterrence capabilities in the critical theatre of the Indo-Pacific, this is not the time for commercial clashes. Japan should accept the division of labour within the extended AUKUS framework.

Given the military-oriented nature of AUKUS, Japan joining AUKUS would signal to China that it is part of the ‘integrated deterrence’ network the US promotes. Considering that China, Japan and South Korea are working together to revitalise the dialogue channel through the Japan–China–Korea trilateral summit, policymakers in Tokyo may feel that the timing is inappropriate.

But the security environment in East Asia is more dire than ever, and technology implementation takes years, especially the critical and emerging technologies that define future victories. The US has also expressed a positive attitude towards the expansion of AUKUS Pillar 2 membership. Japan can’t afford to delay its efforts to strengthen its defence industrial base with these technologies. Now is the time to accelerate discussions on Japan’s participation in AUKUS.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/n..._term=Now is the time for Japan to join AUKUS

 

[BravoZulu]

Senior officials in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom continue to sing the praises of the AUKUS agreement. The likely passage of the US National Defense Authorization Act and approval of billions of dollars in US support, along with announcements on joint development and progress on Pillar 2 initiatives, have raised hopes among the deal’s proponents that Pillar 1—the AUKUS-class nuclear-powered submarines—will deliver the capability it promises.

Yet if the Australian government wishes to deliver Pillar 1 on time and within the already-wide budget range it has previously outlined, it must learn lessons from the troubled history of the UK’s Astute class of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). BAE Systems, the primary contractor for the Astute program, was awarded a contract to develop the AUKUS submarines in October and is likely to face challenges in developing a nuclear-capable workforce in Australia, as it did in the past in the UK.

With the AUKUS boats slated to be modelled off the Astute design and Australia having to build a workforce from a low industrial base like the UK had, Australia is at risk of repeating the mistakes of the past unless concerted efforts are made to mitigate the problems that hampered the rollout of the Astute program.

As outlined in a new report from the United States Studies Centre, the Astute program was plagued by delays and cost overruns from its inception—primarily because of poor integration and mismanagement of the shipbuilding workforce. A 17-year ’valley of death’ in submarine development at Barrow-in-Furness resulted in significant attrition of its experienced workforce, with little investment in a new generation of young talent to replace retiring workers.

The Barrow shipbuilding workforce fell from 13,000 to 3,000 between the end of the Vanguard class and the beginning of the Astute program. It therefore had significant skills shortages due to its reliance on new staff hired at the outset of the Astute program.

In addition, a small-government philosophy among the leadership of the day slashed the Ministry of Defence’s staff at Barrow from 50 during Vanguard to fewer than half a dozen. Minimal governmental oversight and coordination exacerbated the Astute program’s problems and led to poor visibility within government of the challenges facing the shipbuilding workforce. The private sector then proved ill-prepared to deal with erroneous government assumptions about the design and construction risks of the program.

Following years of delays and cost increases, the workforce issues hampering the Astute rollout began to be mitigated by greater government oversight, stakeholder communication and thorough planning of future workforce requirements. The workforce at the Barrow shipyard now numbers around 10,000 and is poised to grow to 17,000 by the decade’s end. Increases to onsite Ministry of Defence staff, the establishment of a key suppliers forum to coordinate with industry, and external workforce expertise from the US significantly boosted workforce skills, planning and management.

Key to ongoing workforce resilience has been the establishment of a £25 million skills academy in Barrow in 2018. A focus on young workers has boosted retention rates, with hundreds of apprentices having now passed through the academy. Effective integration of funded apprenticeships is likely to also be needed for the development of Pillar 1.

If Australia is to avoid the same pitfalls faced by the UK in developing a nuclear-capable workforce, it must prioritise workforce management and development as crucial to the AUKUS enterprise. Announcements of initiatives such as a skills academy in South Australia and support for university science, technology and engineering places and overseas shipbuilding placements for Australian workers are signs that the government is taking these concerns seriously.

Yet for a multi-decade program such as AUKUS, relentless attention on workforce management will be essential. Strong government leadership will be required to coordinate private-sector efforts, along with effective project and workforce management. Given the significant lead time required to recruit, train and develop a specialised industrial workforce and the enormous complexity of the engineering task they face, efforts will have to be rapidly expanded in the short term but continued in the long term.

The Australian Submarine Agency should also take care not to fully separate the design, build and operational planning teams. That was the approach taken during the Astute program, which hampered its early development due to unwieldy workforce and project management.

Mimicking the model of vocational skills training successfully employed in the UK won’t be easy. British training institutions have benefited from close relationships with employers such as BAE, but structural hurdles in Australia’s tertiary education system and limited integration between industry and tertiary education will make that hard to replicate.

In the absence of proper planning and workforce development, the strategic argument for AUKUS is likely to unravel in the face of mounting costs and delays. The risks and challenges of the Astute program were underestimated by both industry and the UK government. If Australia wishes to see AUKUS through, it can’t afford to make the same mistakes.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/a...sons for Australias AUKUS submarine workforce

 

[BravoZulu]

Welcome, Australia, to the American culture wars.

With passage of the US National Defense Authorization Act a mere two and a half months late, we’ve seen the first significant legislative action since the AUKUS partnership was announced more than two years ago. This is not the end; it’s the beginning. Much work remains. And Australia now has an important stake in the annual US ritual in which global stability and security are held hostage to political partisanship and whim.

Don’t think you’ve seen the last of the drama. If Australians have learned anything from past efforts at closer partnership with the US, it’s that legislation is just the start of a long rulemaking process. Too often in that process, lofty ideals are buried in bureaucratic inertia and vested interests. We saw it in 2009 with the defence trade cooperation treaties. We saw it again in 2015 with expansion of the US national technology and industrial base. Both initiatives began with grand visions of deep and enduring defence-industry collaboration. Both foundered on the rocks of regulatory implementation.

First, the good news. The NDAA gives Australia and the broader AUKUS partnership some clear wins. Included in the act is authorisation to sell Australia up to three Virginia-class submarines, meeting the first test of the optimal pathway set out by AUKUS leaders in March. It acknowledges the long-term goal of increasing that number to five, subject to constraints in US industrial capacity. Nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will be a transformative capability for a nation dependent on stability in the Indo-Pacific. They will provide the reach Australia needs to address threats to national security before they arrive on its shores.

Although its funding provisions remain subject to a subsequent appropriations bill, the NDAA authorises substantial infrastructure investment in the Royal Australian Air Force’s northern bases. RAAF Base Darwin has been allocated US$135 million for a new aircraft parking apron and squadron operations facility (on top of the US$72 million appropriated last year). RAAF Tindal will get a new bomber apron along with aircraft maintenance support and squadron operations facilities worth a total of US$130.5 million.

Other provisions have promise. Australia will be considered (nearly) equivalent to domestic sources under the US Defense Production Act, increasing the opportunities for Australian businesses to sell into US markets. The change comes with a proviso that any associated products must not be available from US sources. This second-best solution was likely necessary to win support from key US constituencies but is still a step in the right direction.

Acknowledging the importance of logistics to the vast Indo-Pacific theatre, the act creates a demonstration and prototyping program that will identify, develop and field allied capabilities to mitigate risks in a contested logistics environment.

It establishes an Indo-Pacific maritime domain awareness Initiative to enhance the ability of partners to monitor the region for emerging threats.

It makes important strides in information sharing, creating an administrative body to oversee modifications to US foreign disclosure policies. The plan would establish a new information-handling caveat specific to the AUKUS partnership. It would reduce use of the ‘not releasable to foreign nations’, or NOFORN, caveat that has been such a large obstacle to past cooperation.

The big question comes in the area of export control. After two previous attempts, can we finally break the logjam created by the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and enable broad cooperation across partner-nation defence industrial bases?

In this regard, the NDAA makes all the right noises. It authorises expedited processing of approvals for foreign military and direct commercial sales to Australia and the UK (while remaining vague on associated resourcing). An anticipatory release policy would set up pre-approval mechanisms for foreign military and direct commercial sales related to AUKUS Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 technologies.

Following certification that partner nations have implemented export controls comparable to those in the US, it would exempt most technology transfers from licensing requirements. The scope would be broad, including re-exports, temporary imports and brokering activities. Australia would gain levels of US industrial-base access currently available only to Canada.

But as I’ve written before, the devil is in the details. What would it mean for Australia to create a ‘comparable’ export-control regime? Is it capable of doing so without creating the same problems as the US system? Would access to US markets make such a tightening of the rules worthwhile?

Many Australian businesses, offered such a bargain, would say, ‘No, thanks.’ They’ve seen the US system in action and want no part of it. But contrary to common perceptions, such an arrangement would not sacrifice Australian sovereignty over its defence exports. It would merely bring its rules up to a global standard on protection of sensitive technologies.

The problem with ITAR is not its overarching principles. Defence technologies must be protected, and it’s hard to argue that any one of ITAR’s broad regulatory provisions isn’t necessary to that end.

The problem is in the way the rules are implemented. Resourcing is inadequate and wait times are long. Misaligned incentives prevent sound analysis of risk and appropriate balancing of costs and benefits. The rules are a blunt instrument, ignoring existing alliances, varying levels of trust and the capacity of partners’ export-control systems. They freeze the US industrial base in a Cold War mindset and the antiquated assumption that little of value happens abroad.

Past debate has been illuminating. Businesses claim that the rules stifle their ability to collaborate internationally. Policymakers reply that there is no problem with the current system: all of the necessary rules are in place to enable that collaboration. Neither side is wrong. Yet everyone has been talking past each other for decades.

Many businesses have a hard time accepting that significant costs come with operating in defence markets. Zero progress in defence innovation is preferable to a system in which new capabilities are readily obtainable by strategic competitors.

At the same time, export-control administrators have a hard time seeing that not everyone possesses their level of regulatory expertise. Not everyone has pockets deep enough to hire lawyers and cover the payroll while they wait months for faceless bureaucrats to approve a sale. Byzantine rules and draconian penalties kill collaboration in a world without perfect knowledge.

The key to a successful system is not zero risk, but careful risk management. What’s needed is not a feasible path to collaboration, but a clear path to collaboration.

Notwithstanding the significance of this legislation, we must be careful not to declare victory too soon. Significant obstacles remain. It gets the basics right, not least of which is advancing the narrative that the AUKUS partnership is serious. But it leaves implementation of critical provisions up to a bureaucracy that has historically been unable to solve such thorny problems. It relies not on removing bad rules, but on creating more rules.

What is it they say about trying the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting a different result?
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/u...term=US Congress fires the AUKUS starting gun

 

[BravoZulu]

Britain’s Royal Navy has advertised for a suitably experienced individual to fill the role of its director of submarines, a rear admiral who acts as the senior, professional head of its submarine arm. The position is to be filled in April 2024. If this is an early April fool’s joke, the UK Ministry of Defence is part of it.

As the Times newspaper observed on 5 January 2024, the advertisement ‘exposes shameful recruitment gaps’ in senior leadership positions in the RN’s submarine arm.

Under the AUKUS optimum pathway for Australia to transition to nuclear-propelled submarines, it is intended, subject to US congressional and presidential approval, to purchase three to five Virginia-class submarines to fill the capability gap left by the retirement of the six Collins-class boats. This is intended to allow time for a newly designed submarine to be built in partnership with the UK—the so-called AUKUS SSN. The state of the RN and particularly its submarine capability is therefore of more than passing interest.

This position would normally be filled by promoting a suitably qualified candidate from the RN’s senior serving submariners. The apparent lack of suitable candidates prepared to accept promotion to fill the position is extraordinary. Reportedly, internal advertising led to only one applicant, who lacked the pre-requisite submarine command experience. This failure led to the public advertisement.

Under my arguably simplistic interpretation, it would appear that Britain’s senior naval leadership and the government have lost the commitment of their submarine arm.

How did it come to this?

There was a steady decline in the RN submarine capability starting in the mid-1980s with the design of the Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines. To save costs, the length of the submarine was constrained to fit into the existing dry docks. This led to a cramped and difficult-to-maintain submarine. Running them well beyond their design life of 25 years, and the protracted absence of one of the four submarines to refuel the reactor because of a defect, placed additional pressure on the remaining submarines. As a consequence, the very long patrols necessary to maintain the ‘continuous at-sea deterrent’ have severely strained morale and probably contributed to a recent ‘near miss’. Poaching of personnel from other submarines has reportedly been necessary to get submarines to sea. As Robert Forsyth argued recently, inadequate funding and the priority attached to this role have seriously eroded the RN’s conventional capability.

The process accelerated in the 1990s. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the project to replace the Swiftsure-class and Trafalgar-class attack submarines, called project SSN20, was cancelled to save costs. The submarine shipbuilding workforce dropped from 13,000 to 3,000 as building ceased. Many of these skilled workers moved away from Barrow to find other employment. The Royal Corps of Naval Constructors was significantly downsized, with a loss of in-house submarine design expertise. In 1991 the construction of further Upholder-class conventional submarines ceased and it was decided to decommission existing Upholder- and Oberon-class conventional submarines. This decision ended the route to early submarine command and charge positions for engineers, making a career in submarines less attractive.

In the early 1990s the RN began a process of decommissioning SSNs to reduce its force from 17 to 6 attack submarines. As a consequence, the number of serving submariners was reduced by more than half. This has narrowed the talent base and resulted in a lack of suitable candidates for senior positions, reinforcing the point I made recently about critical mass in submarine personnel. I would argue that the RN is below critical mass to create the senior leadership for its submarine force.

The story of the delayed and over-budget Astute class build is well set out in Wikipedia and the RAND review into the program.

More recently, in 2019 the second submarine squadron was disbanded; all submarines are now based in Faslane, Scotland. The remote location of Faslane and reduced chances of a posting to southern England make submarine careers less attractive.

Although all submarines have to be refitted in Plymouth/Devonport, the dry docks there are not up to standard. Two submarines, HMS Audacious and HMS Victorious have been alongside in Devonport for months, waiting for dry docks to be refurbished.

In a reorganisation, the position of flag officer submarines was disbanded, replaced by the director of submarines, a position buried in a larger headquarters. This is the job no suitably qualified serving submariner wishes to fill.

For those who trained and served with the RN, including the ‘Perisher’ command course, and lived in awe of the RN’s achievements in the Cold War, this is indeed a sad saga. It is an unfolding train smash, as the Navy Lookout observed recently: ‘The RN could be at a dangerous tipping point where there is such a loss of skills and institutional knowledge, that the situation becomes almost unrecoverable, even if greater resources are available in the future.’

It is not going to be fixed quickly, as with a pay rise!

Importantly, since the RN submarine capability is the foundation for the partnership upon which Australia intends to build our nuclear submarine capability it calls into question the practicality of the current, so-called ‘optimum pathway’.

There are lessons from this debacle for Australia’s AUKUS program.

The RN appears to lack critical mass and adequately funded build, logistic support and infrastructure programs. The limitations of the current UK submarine design base are another.

We should not accept any argument that building the first RAN SSN AUKUS in the UK would be quicker, cheaper or more efficient—let’s not fall for that April fool’s day joke! As I have argued earlier, suggestions that contemplate building the first of the RAN’s AUKUS submarines in the UK are profoundly disturbing and would condemn us to a UK-based supply chain.

Given the growing accumulation of political, personnel, schedule, cost, capability and design risks apparent with the ‘optimum pathway’ it is time to re-examine the plan.

Would it be possible to start building SSN AUKUS earlier if an updated Virginia was used as the basis for the design?

The designers should be tasked with achieving a simpler submarine, easier and quicker to build, simpler to operate and cheaper to own, including a smaller crew. Compared to the latest Block V Virginia, AUKUS (V) should be smaller and focused on sea denial, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare with the agility to operate in the littorals. It could give the US Navy and RN an option to speed up their own build programs in the face of the deteriorating strategic setting.

If so, this would avoid the huge complications and expense of the RAN operating two different classes of SSN. It would build on the USN’s very successful Virginia construction program of 40-plus submarines and the facilities established to support the Virginia-class submarines based in WA as the Submarine Rotational Force—West (SRF-W).

Importantly, it would avoid the risk of a delayed UK-based design phase, which seems highly likely, given the parlous state of the UK’s submarine capability and current priority afforded the construction of the Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines.

Finally, it could also reduce or avoid the need to purchase three to five Virginia-class SSNs from the USN, something that is looking increasingly improbable and difficult. In the interim, the SRF-W and Collins provide Australia’s submarine capability. Just a thought.

Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/t... capabilityand the implications for Australia

 

[BravoZulu]

In a recent article for The Strategist I painted a depressing picture of the UK’s submarine capability—a force undercapitalised, with inadequate facilities, short of personnel and unable to get its nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) to sea. Britain’s Royal Navy is struggling to sustain a continuous at sea nuclear deterrent, at the expense of its conventional capabilities. The combination of issues is leading to poor morale and difficulty filling key senior leadership positions.

I argued that the RN’s submarine force of four ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and six SSNs has fallen below critical mass. Recovery in terms of manpower, shore infrastructure and submarine numbers will not be simple or quick.

This is a poor foundation for the UK to lead the design of the submarine planned for the UK and Australia’s navies under the AUKUS arrangements agreed to by the US, UK and Australia. The risk is compounded by the need to prioritise resources to recover from this situation, sustain the continuous at sea deterrent, all whilst also introducing a new class of ballistic missile submarines. The risk from a delayed, over cost and unproven AUKUS SSN design, requiring prolonged rectification to achieve an operational capability is much higher because of this combination of factors.

Under the current plan, the capability gap induced by the retirement of Australia’s conventionally-powered Collins Class submarines and the time taken for the transition to the AUKUS SSNs will be covered by the purchase of three to five Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines from the US. This would impact on the US Navy’s force level in a time of shortfall and may well not achieve the necessary agreement from a future US Administration to sell these submarines.

Further, this would entail the RAN operating two classes of SSN, from two design houses—significantly adding to supply chain, training and support costs. The two countries have different nuclear regulatory regimes which impacts on the design of their respective submarines and poses issues for the current plan. Which standard is Australia to adopt? Presumably that of the USA, given the preponderance of USN support and the intention for the USN to certify our fitness for nuclear stewardship under the current plan. How do we then manage a different standard in a UK designed AUKUS SSN?

Further, there is a significant risk that neither of the relatively small number in each class will achieve critical mass or an operational capability.

This is a compounding situation—a change in the plan is needed to avoid it. In developing this we should heed the lessons of the UK situation and ensure that both the UK and Australia’s submarine capabilities individually achieve critical mass. In Australia’s case, I believe this is at least 12 SSNs.

Using the Virginia class as the design baseline for an AUKUS SSN (V), and General Dynamics-Electric Boat (GD-EB) as the lead designer could solve these problems. With a class build of over 38 submarines, currently spread over six blocks, Virginia is a mature design and GD-EB a well-practised designer in updating and building the boats. A secure network and suite of collaborative design applications connecting all three countries would be essential if the program I propose is to succeed. The Integrated Product Development Environment (IPDE) used for Virginia has revolutionised shipbuilding, reducing construction times and costs. It is also the best way to incorporate requirements and design input from the UK and Australia.

Compared to the option for a UK design lead, which is based on the unsatisfactory experience of the Astute Class SSN, which ran considerably over budget and schedule, AUKUS SSN (V) should be less risky, cheaper and importantly, quicker to reach an operational capability.

I suggest GD-EB be tasked with leading an IPDE team, including BAE Systems and ASC, the UK and Australia’s submarine design houses, to produce an updated Virginia design available for construction in the UK, Australia and the US, optimised for sea denial. The design should be updated to achieve the following priorities:

• Simpler and quicker to build,
• Cheaper to own and operate, with a smaller crew
• Incorporating the improvements achieved over the evolution of the Virginia, Columbia, Collins and Dreadnought class submarine designs, possibly including electric propulsion, X configuration after control surfaces
• Able to be built in UK and Australian shipyards, utilising module construction, including by supporting sub-contractors
• Local supply chains in each country would be important to improve resilience and avoid adding to the current difficulties in these areas in the US
• Compatible with current and future US submarine weapons, unmanned underwater and aerial vehicles.

A simple analysis demonstrates some of the benefits the USA could obtain from this approach:

• A much higher probability of a successful AUKUS SSN program, boosting Allied submarine capabilities, in a shorter time and at reduced cost
• A smaller, quicker to build, cheaper to own SSN option, handy in the event the USA needed to increase force levels quickly
• Ongoing supply chain and depot level support capability for Virginia class submarines in the UK and Australia
• The shorter time taken to achieve an operational capability could reduce or obviate the need to sell Australia submarines from the US’s order of battle
• This would avoid the need to provide design support to BAES if it had to undertake the AUKUS SSN design from an inadequately resourced baseline.

From the UK’s perspective the plan would:

• Avoid the costs of leading the design effort, enabling resources saved to be redirected towards remedying the current situation
• Result in a quicker/cheaper build program for Britain’s Astute replacement (possibly allowing for an increased number to be built to overcome the critical mass issue).
• Open up the possibility of supplying major components such as the reactor to a larger number of submarines
• Engage BAES in a world class development and providing ongoing, UK-based design support. Note, BAES already has a design relationship with GD-EB for Astute and Dreadnought designs
• Provide more resilient supply chains, with compatible base and depot level support facilities in the USA and Australia
• Allow greater focus of UK’s resources on achieving an operational ballistic missile capability as early as possible to relieve the pressure on the current SSBNs.

From an Australian perspective the advantages are significant:

• Reduced time to achieve an operational SSN capability, possible avoiding the need to purchase Virginia class submarines from the USN
• Avoid the complications and expenses of operating two classes of SSN
• Avoids the uncertainty and risks of introducing an unproven UK design
• The base and depot level facilities to be established to support the USN Virginia class submarines deployed to Australia as part of the Submarine Rotation Force -West (SRF-W) can be utilised to support the AUKUS SSN, saving time, expenses and personnel
• Given the number of Virginia class submarines already operating in the Pacific and Indian oceans, AUKUS SSN (V) represents a more appropriate design for Australia; the RAN would operate one of many
• The savings, greater efficiency and single class solution offer a better chance to achieve a critical mass in the capability
• Open up opportunities for Australian companies to provide support for a greater number of submarines, including in the UK and US
• The embedded RAN personnel in the SRF-W SSNs and those in Collins Class submarines would provide Australia’s submarine capability during the transition
• ASC, the Australian submarine builder, already has a relationship with GD-EB.

This analysis is simplistic and looks at only at the potential benefits. There will be costs of course and these need to be evaluated in considering whether to change the plan. I suggest that a Virginia Class baseline with GD-EB and the USN leading, offers a significantly improved, reduced risk and lower cost option for the AUKUS SSN program.

All participants stand to benefit from this change. The design, construction and through-life support efficiencies inherent in a single-class operated by the three navies could substantially reduce the cost of ownership and deliver enormous resilience and inter-changeability benefits in times of emergency.

It is time to re-consider the plan; the current concept is one of hope over experience and is at severe risk of becoming entangled in the significant difficulties currently being experienced in the UK’s submarine service, together with the limitations of its submarine building and maintenance infrastructure.

Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/r...d time to acquire our AUKUS attack submarines

 

[BravoZulu]

The SSN AUKUS ‘optimal pathway’ calls for the UK to build the first of the nuclear powered and conventionally armed attack submarines at Barrow in Furness, starting as early as the late 2020s. The submarine is expected to be operational as early as the late 2030s—approximately 10 years to build and commission. How realistic is the UK component of this plan?

In my earlier Strategist article, I flagged the impact of years of under investment, long delays in maintenance, extended patrols to sustain the continuous at sea deterrent and poor morale leading to personnel shortages in the Royal Navy’s submarine capability. This underinvestment has also impacted shore infrastructure, with an SSN and a SSBN ballistic missile submarine reportedly awaiting a certified dock since early last year.

In terms of submarine numbers, manpower and shore infrastructure, recovery will not be simple or quick. A recent analysis of the UK’s Defence planned equipment acquisition over the next decade identifies a worst case £29.8bn or 10% shortfall in the budget, supporting the conclusion that it is: ‘unaffordable, with over spends on its nuclear program now clearly responsible for the overall insolvency of the plan’.

The UK Submarine Delivery Agency’s 2022-23 annual report is a masterpiece in reassuring corporate reporting, without providing any explanation of what is being done to overcome the shortcomings noted above, or any precise target dates for the completion of new Astute SSN or Dreadnought SSBN boats. So, we are forced to make some estimates.

Each of the last three Astute class now in commission (HMS Artful, Audacious, Anson) has taken 130-132 months to build. Two submarines remain under construction. HMS Agamemnon is expected to commission in mid 2024 after a 130 month build and HMS Agincourt is expected to commission in mid 2026 after a 99 month build. The shortened build time for the last Astute is presumably intended to make room for SSN AUKUS? The 130 month build time may well be a result of funding restrictions, not yard capacity, but it sets the workforce capability, so 99 months is still a huge step up for the workforce and facilities. Ninety-nine months to build and commission Agincourt would be 31 months shorter than the previous four submarines in the class and 13 months faster that BAE Systems has ever built an Astute. The risk of delays from completion of the final Astute is significant, with ramifications for the start of SSN AUKUS.

The challenge for BAES in completing the Astute build and starting the SSN AUKUS build is compounded by other, higher priority work in the yard; construction of four Dreadnought class ballistic missile submarines. These are urgently required to relieve the elderly and increasingly unreliable Vanguard class, which are struggling to sustain the continuous at sea deterrent. Three Dreadnoughts, a large, 17,200 ton submarine (more than twice the size of Astute), are currently under construction, the UK Ministry of Defence advises that the program is on track and the first is due to enter service in the ‘early 2030s’.

All does not seem well however. In March 2023, £2bn of the £10bn contingency fund allocated for the project was committed ‘to bring construction forward’. Committing 20% of the project’s contingent funding part way through the construction of the first submarine is most unusual. In the absence of an improved completion target announcement, I assume that the early 2030s remains the target? So, it would seem likely that the contingency has been committed to top up an inadequate original budget or to recover from difficulties, in order to maintain the early 2030s completion date.

Construction of the next two SSBNs started in 2019 and 2023, with the fourth yet to commence. Allowing for (an optimistic) 12 years to build each submarine, the final boat will not be completed before the mid to late 2030s.

The first UK SSN AUKUS build, starting in the late 2020s and aiming for an operational date in the late 2030s, is therefore in a queue, behind the higher priority, Dreadnought and Astute programs.

The design process for SSN AUKUS does not seem to be in any better shape. Although the UK MOD has issued a £3.95B contract to BAES for the detailed design, there are reports that BAES is seeking significant help from design staff at the US builder, General Dynamics Electric Boat, to assist in this process, possibly requiring additional funding? There have been no indications that Australia is actively involved in this process, or plans to mandate an Australian supply chain as I have argued for earlier.

Given this situation, I suggest that the UK’s SSN AUKUS 01 design and build is highly likely to be later than planned.

Even if it proceeds to plan, Australia is unlikely to benefit from the lessons learnt in the UK’s construction of the first SSN AUKUS, as the first build in Australia is planned on a similar timescale. Construction of the RAN’s first SSN AUKUS in Australia is intended to start in the late 2020s, taking longer to build, achieving an operational submarine in the early 2040s.

In my recent article I argued that shifting the SSN AUKUS design baseline to the US designed Virginia class SSN would reduce risks, cost and the time to acquire SSN AUKUS.

Whilst the US shipbuilding industry has no spare capacity to build additional SSNs for Australia it is in a far healthier state than the UK’s. The most recent three of the 22 Virginia class submarines commissioned in an average of 59 months, less than half the Astute build time.

Shifting to a Virginia baseline for SSN AUKUS would avoid the shortcomings and risks arising from the UK situation. It would avoid the problems of a UK based supply chain for a small number of submarines and trying to build an unproven design. Virginia provides a highly refined and proven design baseline, with the possibility of a much shorter construction time. Australia will be operating one of many Virginia class submarines in the Indo Pacific. In addition to these advantages, it may be able to avoid or reduce the need to purchase Virginia class submarines from the USN’s current inventory, an increasingly problematic concept.

A Virginia baseline for SSN AUKUS would also relieve the UK of the need to lead the design, freeing up resources to reconstitute its submarine capability and complete the Dreadnought and Astute programs.

The answer to my question in the opening paragraph is that the UK components of the plan are hostage to several pre-existing and higher priority risks, and success is unlikely.

It is time for a change of direction before the three countries waste more time and resources on a plan which is not going to work.

Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/s...tm_term=SSN AUKUS is at the back of the queue

 

[BravoZulu]

Today marks 12 months since the release of the ‘optimal pathway’ Australia needed to follow to acquire a force of nuclear-powered and conventionally-armed attack submarines (SSNs) under the AUKUS agreement with the United States and the UK.

The milestone has been marked by claims that domestic budget wrangling in the United States is a profound threat to Australia’s submarine plan with the Biden administration proposing to fund only one Virginia class submarine in fiscal year 2025.

Whilst Australia must be alert to US domestic issues that may affect AUKUS, including the looming presidential elections, to boil the agreement down to simple submarine numbers largely misses the point of the agreement and what’s been achieved so far.

Although the provision of SSNs to Australia is about capability, it is also about signaling to China that deep-seated US relationships in the region matter and should cause Beijing to think twice about its aggressive activities. AUKUS is just one strand of this network, but it is important to US Indo-Pacific strategy. To renege on the transfer of SSNs to Australia would undermine US credibility and influence in a region with many Southeast Asian states already hedging their bets.

There is, of course, an issue with the US submarine industrial base and much of the US wrangling on AUKUS is geared towards gaining more funding for its own industry. Australia is providing $4.5 billion to help the US step up construction.

The US Navy currently plans to have a fleet of 355 surface ships and at least 66 SSNs. It currently has 50 SSNs and, as the Los Angeles class submarines are gradually decommissioned, this may dip to 46 in 2030.

The US is now building, on average, 1.2 to 1.3 submarines per year.

To build up its submarine fleet, it needs to increase that rate to an average two Virginia class submarines a year. This increases to 2.33 boats per year if the US is to provide three SSNs to Australia in the 2030s.

Reaching and maintaining that rate will be further complicated by the need to prioritise the building of its seaborne nuclear-deterrent replacement, the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), and addressing the increasing SSN maintenance backlog.

But assuming that the US would automatically renege on the deal to sell Virginias to Australia in the 2030s because it may not meet its target of 66 attack submarines in 2053, fundamentally misunderstands the US strategy supporting AUKUS.

The US submarine industrial base is a risk, but it is not the sole consideration. Putting US domestic issues aside, there’s much to like about what the AUKUS optimal submarine pathway has achieved in its first year.

When the AUKUS plan was announced in September 2021, the lack of detail and consultation on Australia’s intent to acquire SSNs was apparent. Whilst the project has many critics, greater regional acceptance has been signaled by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s willingness to have Australian SSNs visit his country.

When AUKUS was announced, the three partners undertook to outline a detailed plan for Australia to acquire SSNs within 18 months. A year ago the nuclear-powered submarine optimal pathway was announced and set out an effective ‘crawl, walk run’ approach. Phase 1 established submarine rotation force West (SRF-W) with US and UK submarines rotating through HMAS Stirling from 2027. This ‘crawl’ phase would allow Australia to develop the infrastructure, maintenance and stewardship capabilities and skillsets to support nuclear-powered submarines.

Australia will acquire three to five Virginia class submarines in the 2030s. This ‘walk’ phase is intended to see Australia operate its capability at a smaller scale before proceeding to the ‘run’ phase and sharing the building of a new SSN with the UK.

There’s no denying that this ambitious plan has high degrees of risk—including tumultuous US politics and its lagging submarine industrial base. If it all goes wrong, the age of Australia’s Collins class submarines would expose it to a capability gap.

But despite a sparse flow of information, particularly for Australian defence industry, the AUKUS SSN optimal pathway appears to be on track.

Having three countries reach agreement on the optimal pathway was no mean feat.

Another significant achievement was the establishment of the Australian Submarine Agency. And Australia has focused heavily on training both its naval personnel and the wider defence industry workforce in submarine operations and maintenance. Australian officers are graduating from the US nuclear-powered submarine school, and maintainers are in Guam learning how to maintain SSNs.

Perhaps the most significant achievement was US Congress passing the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) in December 2023 authorising the transfer of the three promised Virginias to Australia in the 2030s, the maintenance of US submarines in Australia by Australians, and the training of Australian contractors in US shipyards.

It’s not all rosy. Defence agreements of this magnitude never are. The NDAA authorisation of the transfer of course came with caveats, including the requirement for the US president of the day to certify to Congress prior to any transfer that the ‘submarines would be used for joint security interests’ and ‘Australia is ready to support their operations and nuclear power procedures’.

This endorsement is not a given. Australia will need to meet an ambitious infrastructure and governance plan to convince the US that it is able to safely operate and maintain the capability.

The strategic importance of this agreement is much larger than the issue of the number of attack submarines in the US order of battle, and Australia should not be constantly distracted by US domestic debates over its submarine industrial base.

Despite the plan’s risks, a lot has been achieved in 12 months.
Jennifer Parker is an expert associate with the ANU’s National Security College, and an adjunct fellow in naval studies at UNSW Canberra who has spent over 20 years in the Australian Department of Defence.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/o...optimal pathway to nuclear-powered submarines

 

[BravoZulu]

I have previously argued for Australia to take an active role in the design and procurement process for the nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarine (SSN) to be acquired under the AUKUS agreement with the US and UK.

That is essential to ensure an Australian based, reliable and sovereign supply chain, able to sustain our own submarine capability.

Construction costs are not trivial, but sustainment will be in the order of 70% of the costs of ownership—about $260bn of the estimated $368bn total cost. With an Australian based supply chain, the through life support costs would be significantly less, and much of the money saved can be directed to Australian industry and its society.

We must learn from the past.

In the 1960s the Oberon class submarines were acquired off-the-shelf from the UK and relied extensively on a British-based supply chain. During the Falklands war in 1982, our paid-for spares were diverted to support the Royal Navy’s submarines. Australia was forced to tie up and cannibalise its own submarines to keep a limited number at sea. The loss of sea days caused a crewing crisis that took years to recover from.

We did far better with the Collins class. The Oberons had suffered from extremely high maintenance costs and it was expected for Collins that an Australian construction program and a high local content would significantly reduce these costs. We resisted the advice to build the first of class overseas, but compromised by opting to build the two more complex sections in Sweden to speed up the delivery of the first submarine. This was a mistake. The weld standards achieved in Adelaide were world class but the Swedish sections both contained major welding defects requiring many hours and costing millions of dollars to repair at the submarine’s first refit.

A parallel project, building the ANZAC class frigates, was very successful both financially and in build quality. This was mostly due to the engineering strategy which involved an Australian-owned shipbuilder, embedding Australian engineers in the overseas design office and repatriating the design office to Australia at the build yard for the detailed design phase, designing the frigates to Australian standards and codes from the outset to ensure an efficient build and later sustainment program and, most importantly, a requirement for a minimum of 70% of the contract value to be spent on Australian industry.

The much-maligned Collins program followed exactly the same recipe. The detail design was undertaken in Australia, at the ASC assembly yard, under supervision of The Swedish firm, Kockums. It incorporated Australian standards, definitions and codes so that work instructions and technical procurement specifications could be dealt with by an Australian supply chain, industry and workforce. Where no Australian standard existed, the Swedish ones were the default.

The program was a success by global standards. Initial delivery was nine years after contract signature, from a yard built on a greenfield site.

The goal of 70% local content in Collins was achieved.

The Kokoda Papers report, Sub Judice: Australia’s Future Submarine, published in January 2012 found the sail-away cost of the Collins submarines were just below international average on a cost/tonne basis. Maintenance costs are half of the Oberon class using the global benchmark of annual expenditure as a percentage of Replacement Asset Value (RAV). Today, over 90% of the cost of sustaining these submarines is spent in Australia—because we insisted on the Australian build with high local content engineered-in during the design for the 1st of class. Prior to the disruption of Covid, Australia was achieving world class submarine availability. We have demonstrated that we know how to do this on both Collins submarines and ANZAC frigates. Let’s build on that.

If the recipes for the Collins and ANZAC ship projects are followed, and they were good, solid engineering recipes, then the AUKUS submarines would be constructed in Adelaide by an Australian owned shipbuilder. Also, if the contract requires a minimum of 70% of the contract value to be spent with Australian industry, then that will set Australian industry on course to be involved heavily with the AUKUS submarine sustainment program. 90% should be our benchmark for the AUKUS submarine sustainment program.

There are two lessons to draw for the future from these experiences. The first is not to condemn the partnership with the UK or USA, but to observe that, when push comes to shove, nations will react in their own best interests. The second, that Australia can master the technology as well as anyone; the build standard in Collins achieved by an Australian shipyard was world class, for weld quality and hull circularity; both critical yardsticks of submarine hull construction.

Australia is planning on a force of eight SSNs. I have argued that we need at least 12. As the second hand and new build Virginia class SSNs we intend to acquire are retired, 15 or 33 years respectively after we acquire them, they’ll be replaced by additional SSN AUKUS, making us an equal partner with the UK, which is currently building a force of 7 Astute class SSNs.

The design for the new submarine is underway and offers an opportunity for Australian industry to be involved from the beginning of the program.

It won’t be easy to take this path, the first AUKUS SSN is planned to be built in the UK for the Royal Navy; the temptation for Australia to subsequently utilise a UK based supply chain for its submarines must be resisted and legislated against in the contract. This make sense economically and from a sovereignty perspective, as I have argued above. It would also be prudent planning, since it is quite likely that the UK build will be delayed; the first Australian build may well occur in parallel or ahead of the UK’s build.

I have argued that the baseline design for SSN AUKUS should be shifted to the Virginia Class design. The US plans to commence building its Block VII Virginia in 2029 and this timing would seem a good fit for the an SSN AUKUS (V). Most importantly in this context, a Virginia baseline would avoid the need to sustain two different classes of SSN, each with its own supply chain.

Regardless of the baseline chosen, the supply chains and shipyards of both the USA and UK are currently hard pressed to meet their own needs. Australia has facilities and capabilities that can manufacture submarine parts for both our partners. If we do that, we can upskill and grow our knowledge before we start to build our own boats. It would also be a sensible and positive way of climbing the learning curve, while bringing a very valuable contribution to our new partnership. Some Australian-owned companies have facilities in USA and UK that can also enter their SSN supply chains.

It’s intended to select the Australian shipbuilder this year. This adds additional urgency to the selection of the baseline for the design. A UK centric industrial arrangement would make little sense for a Virginia baselined SSN AUKUS (V).

Regardless of the baseline, Australia should follow the successful Collins and Anzac project model and select a majority owned, Australian company to build our submarines.

The Australian submarine builder, ASC and its existing supply chain of over 1,200 companies provides the best starting point. We should build from a privatised ASC, incorporating the leading engineering and project management skills available in Australian industry and a minority shareholder with a successful record of building SSNs (and an American accent!). We should not seek to develop a separate Australian, or worse, foreign-owned entity which will compete with ASC for the valuable and limited manpower resources available to sustain Collins and deliver SSN AUKUS.

Delivering a sovereign Australian supply chain, able to control our own destiny, including in a crisis, maximising spending and jobs in Australia and contributing to the AUKUS partnership will require proactive, strategic direction from the Australian Government in establishing an effective industrial program. That process is now urgent.

It’s critical for our citizens to understand that we are now at the only point in this program where Australia’s government has leverage. That leverage must be used constructively to build our own future, and to fully pull our weight.
Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/t...we must learn from our past for the AUKUS SSN

 

[BravoZulu]

The program to equip the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear submarines is in trouble. The takeaway: Australia must begin thinking now about what to do to avoid program failure.

Why has this situation arisen? First, the prospective program costs are enormous and have been badly underestimated. Second, industrial capacity is inadequate for the tasks of building and supporting a nuclear fleet. Third, the program lacks a powerful leader and an effective management plan to drive it forward.

And, strategically, the planned force of eight nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) armed with only conventional weapons would have minimal deterrent value on Chinese perceptions.

Building the submarines is Pillar 1 of AUKUS, the security partnership of Australia, Britain and the United States. Pillar 2 consists of other technology exchanges among them. It is in Pillar 2 that AUKUS may prove itself.

The United States is to supply three Virginia-class SSNs to Australia—two from the US fleet, which will have to be topped up with newly built vessels, and one straight from a shipyard. Australia has the option to seek to acquire a fourth and fifth Virginia. Britain is to design, in coordination with its partners, a new class, SSN-AUKUS, for the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy. The Australians are due to build units of that class to reach a total fleet of eight SSNs by the mid-2050s .

But here is the first constraint. How long does it take to build a new Virginia-class submarine? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the answer is nine years, due to supply chain limitations. Huntington-Ingalls Industries (HII) in Newport News, Virginia, cannot now build enough SSNs for the US Navy. How will it find capacity to build even more to cover acquisitions by Australia?

As well as competing for nuclear talent with General Dynamics, which is constructing the Navy’s top-priority Columbia-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs), HII is building nuclear aircraft carriers. Delays to delivery of the carrier USS Enterprise illustrate the lack of skilled workers for all the required nuclear construction. And the question of huge cost overruns in the Australian SSN program may not have been fully considered.

The first Columbia class boat will cost about $20 billion. Follow-ons are estimated at lower costs. However, the entire nuclear infrastructure is inordinately expensive. Australia must start from scratch. And, as Britain will rediscover, a new SSN class is almost certain to experience large cost overruns.

Maintenance, repairs, logistics, training and recruiting to maintain a nuclear navy are not cheap. While Australia will benefit from using US and British facilities, that will not significantly offset the costs. Plans to deal with these and other challenges are not fully mature.

The question of who is in overall charge is difficult to answer. There is no czar like Admiral Hyman Rickover, who ruled the US nuclear submarine program for decades with absolute authority. Nor is there a Vice Admiral William (‘Red’) Raborn, who did the same for the US Polaris SSBN program.

It is unclear that these obstacles have been fully digested in an overall plan for completing AUKUS Pillar 1. One practical outcome could be—and emphasis is on ‘could be’—the US selling one or two more older Virginias to Australia as an option.

Those who are more optimistic should think about Skybolt.

In the early 1960s, the US was contracted to build an air-launched ballistic missile as the centerpiece of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent. But the concept proved too difficult to engineer, and Skybolt was cancelled, leaving Britain scrambling to find a new way of sustaining its deterrent. Will AUKUS suffer the same fate?

Where AUKUS is invaluable however is in Pillar 2 and the technology exchanges that it covers. If managed and executed correctly, the leverage here is potentially enormous. However, matters of intellectual property, classification and trust are critical. Once these other issues are resolved, adding Canada and New Zealand (the two other Five Eyes members) as well as Asian partners may be wise.

What needs to be done? Without casting fundamental doubts on AUKUS, discrete thinking must start now to address these potentially program-killing issues. A Plan B that raises alternatives must be developed. These must include, if China is indeed perceived as a possibly existential threat, the option of Australian nuclear weapons.

Ironically, in retrospect, a better choice may have been building diesel submarines with long-range strike missiles and air-independent propulsion for extended underwater loitering. But that is no longer re-negotiable.

The crucial question is this: what impact will eight nuclear submarines, if they can be built and delivered, have on China? Unless nuclear weapons are to be carried, the effect will not be significant. And huge impediments threaten development and construction of the nuclear boats.

What is needed now is a plan to save as much of Pillar 1 of AUKUS as possible and to save Pillar 2 at all costs. This is a grim situation that must be confronted now. Otherwise, the spectre of another Skybolt disaster looms large.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/s...king now about alternatives to AUKUS Pillar 1