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Defence Minister Richard Marles during a visit to the United Kingdom in November last year (Kym Smith/Defence Department)
More ambition and more members can’t be a mask for success.
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Is AUKUS Pillar II growing too quickly?Is AUKUS Pillar II growing too quickly?
In the “Advanced Capabilities” effort of the AUKUS grouping, Pillar II is less well defined than the parallel nuclear-powered submarine initiative.
However, Pillar II’s potential to transform the military and technological capability and capacity of the three partner nations is arguably greater. But only if temptations to prematurely expand its remit are resisted.
Four initial Pillar II capabilities were announced in September 2021 – cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities. In April 2022, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities, electronic warfare, innovation and information sharing, were all added to the Pillar II priority list.
But the risk here is in adding new baubles to the arrangement without first ensuring the earlier aims had advanced on the goals.
The eight initiatives at the centre of Pillar II are all important to remain competitive and capable in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. But more focus should have been placed on making progress within the initial four capabilities before announcing more.
“Innovation” and “information sharing” are not even technological capabilities as such, but “functional areas” in the jargon. While important to the success of the AUKUS enterprise, it seems likely that their subsequent inclusion was at least partly motivated by a desire to publicly indicate significant Pillar II progress via legal and administrative reforms in the United States, which help reduce the burden of licenses and technology transfers.
The test of progress should be building upon and consolidating the initial aims and achieving advanced capability milestones.
Real progress is being made across Pillar II, with the public announcement of experimentation and demonstrations across four areas.
In the Artificial Intelligence stream (which had Autonomy subsequently appended) for example, the three partners have achieved two world firsts. These were “the live retraining of models in flight and the interchange of AI models between AUKUS nations” as part of “a collaborative swarm to detect and track military targets in real time”.
The AUKUS Electronic Warfare Innovation Challenge, started in March 2024, is another example of publicly avowed Pillar II progress, as is the touted implementation of a trilateral algorithm to share sensor data across the P-8 Poseidon anti-submarine naval aircraft.
Due to the highly sensitive nature of the capabilities being developed, much of Pillar II remains secret. More is happening out of the public view.
But with public criticism of both pillars of AUKUS growing, the impression is that the announcements about “functional areas” and the addition of new advanced capabilities are being made in a bid to illustrate progress.
Perhaps the most troubling example of this is the speculation about new countries joining Pillar II.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Chris Luxon told the Lowy Institute in August that his country “could potentially partner in Pillar II”. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also said that he has held “excellent conversations” with AUKUS leaders about joining Pillar II. While Japan’s prospective membership featured in the April 2024 AUKUS Defence Ministers’ Joint Statement.
Though there are arguments in favour of each of these nations joining or partnering in Pillar II initiatives, the test of progress should be building upon and consolidating the initial aims and achieving advanced capability milestones.
The temptation to conjure attention-grabbing headlines by expanding the remit or membership of the grouping should be resisted.
About the author
Kieran Thompson
Kieran Thompson is Manager, Defence, Advanced Manufacturing and Technology at Dragoman, a Melbourne-based, international strategic advisory firm.
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