“Full steam ahead” is the new Aukus catchcry, the unintentionally ironic Trump-inspired mantra for nuclear-powered boats.
Certainly, the money is powering on, flowing freely in the direction of the United States, with Australia set to hand over its third cheque – this one for $US1bn – to assist America to build its submarines.
But the “full steam ahead” rhetoric can’t mask the reality of a US shipbuilding industry that is chronically falling behind the needs of its own navy, let alone any additional boats for Australia.
The reality of Aukus, from Australia’s perspective, is that it is not, fundamentally, an agreement that will deliver this country nuclear-powered submarines. It is a plan that will further enmesh Australia into US defence strategy, with more US assets stationed on Australian soil (including warplanes and helicopters), more troops and more rotations.
It is a plan to keep an increasingly self-interested US locked in to this part of the world, engaged in this region, and committed to a security alliance by demonstrating what’s in it for America.
The US Pentagon officials who wrote the initial review of the Aukus arrangement have made careers of clear-eyed assessments of military capabilities: lives depend on their prognostications being accurate.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
It’s an open secret across Washington that their first review draft was far more sceptical, even scathing, of Pillar One of Aukus, doubtful that the nuclear-powered submarine deal could ever become reality.
Their review was ordered to be rewritten, and (on some accounts) rewritten again, to reflect the political enthusiasm for Aukus, specifically to accord with Trump’s support for the deal.
The details of the review have not been made public, only the refrain.
“Consistent with President Trump’s guidance that Aukus should move ‘full steam ahead’, the review identified opportunities to put Aukus on the strongest possible footing,” the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said.
The US government’s own numbers strike a glaringly different tone.
The latest Government Accountability Office report, issued to Congress earlier this year, is damning. Between 2019 and 2023, the US navy forecast it would build 11 Virginia-class submarines. It delivered just four.
And just pouring more money into boat-building won’t help, the GAO said. A forecast that construction backlogs will be eliminated and future craft built “on time and within budget” is “an assumption not grounded in historical trends”, its report read.
“Navy officials with responsibility for the shipbuilding plan stated that they made this assumption because they expect their investments in the shipbuilding industrial base will enable improvements. However, our prior work has shown that Navy shipbuilding has regularly fallen short of schedule and cost goals, and current performance is consistent with these trends.”
Nor is the Aukus agreement a case where political will for it to succeed can override the practical realities.
The US legislation that underpins Aukus makes it law that Australia can receive no boats unless those are surplus to American requirements.
The president of the day (which, should the US constitution’s 22nd amendment hold, cannot be Trump) can only certify the transfer of a submarine to Australia if that transfer “will not degrade the United States’ undersea capabilities”.
Essentially, Australia only gets a submarine if it is redundant to the US. Despite the injection of billions of Australian dollars into America’s ailing shipbuilding industry, this fundamental condition appears increasingly impossible to meet.
The US fleet currently has only three-quarters of the submarines it needs (49 boats of a force-level goal of 66). The US navy estimates it needs to be building Virginia-class submarines at a rate of two a year to meet its own defence requirements, and about 2.33 to have enough boats to sell any to Australia. It is now building Virginia-class submarines at a rate of about 1.13 a year, senior admirals say.
The three Virginia-class submarines sold to Australia by the US are the cover for Australia’s looming submarine capability gap, as the ageing diesel-electric Collins-class submarines retire from service.
The backbone of Australia’s proposed “sovereign nuclear submarine capability” are the SSN Aukus submarines, the first of which will be designed and built in the UK.
But the submarine industry there faces even more structural flaws.
The UK’s National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority this year reported the plan to build the nuclear reactor cores needed to power the Aukus submarines “appears to be unachievable”.
“There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable.”
And only last weekend, the former director of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence, Rear Adm Philip Mathias, gave an interview to the Telegraph saying Britain was “no longer capable” of running a nuclear submarine program, and should pull out of Aukus.
“Dreadnought is late, Astute class submarine delivery is getting later, there is a massive backlog in Astute class maintenance and refitting, which continues to get worse, and SSN-Aukus is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale,” Mathias said.
He argued the UK’s nuclear program had been grossly mismanaged, exposing the UK and its allies.
“It is a catastrophic failure of succession and leadership planning.”
Full steam ahead.
