When I joined the defence department in early 2019, a senior military officer cautioned: “You will soon learn that everyone has an opinion about the tank.” Indeed, that realisation dawned quickly. In the two years since 14 March 2023, when the government announced the optimal pathway to acquire nuclear-powered, conventionally-armed submarines, there has been no dearth of opinions about them, either.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House has spurred debate about whether Australia was unwise to bank so heavily on US commitment to expanding our naval capabilities. Discordant notes on foreign and defence policy have emanated from Washington DC since 20 January, but as America looks gimlet-eyed at what allies and partners bring to the table, Australia has a good story to tell. That has been recognised by senior Administration figures, most recently Secretary for Defence Pete Hegseth.
So, we should set aside the first AUKUS fallacy. Acquiring a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia is an ambitious and complex task, which will take a long time and cost a lot of money. But it is not beyond us, despite our national tendency to talk ourselves down. We need a nuclear submarine fleet if we are to be – and are seen to be – capable and credible in our own defence in coming decades. And it is in America’s strategic interest that a staunch ally like Australia strengthens its defence self-reliance.
A further fallacy persists, namely that chanting “AUKUS”, like “open, sesame”, magically will unlock rivers of gold and impel Australia to near-autarky in defence capability. We have a very capable, but small, full-time defence force of some 58,000 people. Our population base is modest relative to that of many of our regional neighbours and to our continental scale. So, we must be ambitious, but realistic, in determining our future defence capability requirements.
Submarines aside, work under the lesser-known “Pillar Two” of AUKUS to deepen trilateral military-industrial and technological cooperation has proceeded steadily, if not very visibly. Enhancing Australian military capability more broadly is as significant as the pursuit of a nuclear submarine fleet. Even leading US defence companies – the so-called “primes”, such as Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin – acknowledge that meeting the scale and pace of contemporary security challenges is beyond any single nation’s industrial capacity.
Hence, Pillar Two is directed at jointly developing the new systems and capabilities we need if Australia is to retain a leading military edge in the Indo-Pacific and be an effective and credible AUKUS partner. Fundamental to this is the expansion of our collective industrial base and the pooling of sovereign capabilities. The goal is to achieve interoperability by design, not just practising how to operate separate systems in a coordinated way.
A lot is happening behind the scenes, which doesn’t make for footage as visually arresting as a nuclear submarine or an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. This points to the third fallacy, namely, that there is nothing to show for Pillar Two efforts to date.
The regulatory overlay in our own system needs further purging.
Balancing what to reveal and what to conceal about a nation’s military is an eternal conundrum. But there are glimpses of what is being achieved in key areas such as autonomous technologies, hypersonics, guided weapons and explosive ordinance, as well as sub-sea warfare, including the protection of underwater assets and critical infrastructure like seabed cables and pipelines.
Since late 2023, we have seen patterns of sabotage of such vital national infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. This is arguably even more pertinent for Australia, given our almost complete dependence upon seabed infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.
AUKUS members’ navies have been driving research and joint development in this area, most recently in an exercise off Norfolk, Virginia in the United States in December last year. The collective experience of deploying and testing uncrewed underwater platforms is proving valuable to all three navies and their increasing operational integration.
Pillar Two collaboration must become an even more potent accelerant to getting these capabilities into operation. Business-as-usual acquisition processes are inadequate. It ought to be a given that, if a provider has satisfied one nation’s due diligence and procurement scrutiny, this ought to be taken favourably into account by the others in their own processes. This is not lost on Defence officials, but the regulatory overlay in our own system needs further purging.
This trilateral cooperation has underscored how hard it is to overcome Cold War-era legislative, attitudinal, and technical barriers to sharing sensitive technologies. While unspectacular in media terms, critical enhancements to Australia’s export control legislation that took effect in September 2024 are central to enabling our three nations to deepen this cooperation, and are already generating tangible benefits for Australian business.
Both major parties in Australian politics agree fundamentally on the strategic analysis of the challenges we face. Both know from experience in government that defence procurement spans multiple parliaments and budgets. It is past time to set aside “gotcha” politics in the matter of defence and national security. We need a unity ticket on the core policy and defence capability challenges we confront. This would give industry and our education system greater confidence to invest for the long term. And it would be a powerful signal to allies and adversaries alike.
