When Joe Biden announced it in 2021, the surprise deal to share submarine and arms technology with the UK and Australia was meant to establish a generation-defining new alliance aimed at hemming in China.
But three years later, critics argue the Aukus partnership has made little progress. It faces questions in all three countries over when it will be able to deliver. Even supporters acknowledge that Aukus, which is meant to link the allies for decades to come, needs to show some tangible results before the end of this year – with elections coming up in two of the three partners – if it is to succeed.
Key to the deal is a plan to sell US nuclear-powered attack submarines – the crown jewels of American defense technologies, invulnerable even to China’s latest missiles – to replace Australia’s aging boats and project power under the Pacific. But US shipyards, racing to catch up with a fivefold increase in production as Washington modernizes its own fleet after decades of post-Cold-War neglect, are already running years behind schedule even without the additional demand. Under the Aukus agreement, Canberra is supposed to get its first US-made subs sometime after 2032.
“If you fast forward 10 years, I will be shocked if the Australians have a sub,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It just seems very optimistic to think that all these investments will turn out by then.”
Officials in all three capitals aren’t that pessimistic, but they concede the effort has faced early obstacles.
In addition to the subs, the Aukus agreement calls for the three allies to share some of their most sensitive military technologies, from artificial intelligence to hypersonic missiles. But secrecy concerns and bureaucratic obstacles have hobbled those efforts so far. The US earlier this year failed to certify that Australia and the UK have adequate procedures to protect classified information.
Negotiated in secret, the Aukus deal was so important to the three allies that they were willing to offend a fourth – France – which saw its contract to supply submarines to Australia canceled. Canberra has been trying for years to replace its aging fleet of diesel-electric subs.
But the mission goes much further. Backed by an unprecedented naval buildup that’s given it a fleet eclipsing the US one, China is expanding its reach across the Pacific, pressuring US allies. Flagship US aircraft carriers are now potentially vulnerable to China’s latest missiles, as are giant American bases in Japan and Guam.
“We are not overmatched, but I do not like the pace of the trajectory” of the Chinese buildup, Admiral Sam Paparo Jr., the top US commander in the region, said at a Senate hearing in February.
Nuclear-powered submarines, nearly undetectable and capable of staying underwater for months at a time, are a key US advantage, developed over the decades of the Cold War, allowing America to put forces where China can’t always stop them. But Beijing, with help from Russia, is building its own atomic fleet and its latest boats will be “world class,” according to US Navy War College researchers.
Political opposition in Australia has raised questions about whether it can sustain the huge efforts that will be needed to turn a country without a nuclear industry into one of the only half-dozen in the world capable of running an atomic navy.
“There are obviously challenges,” said former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who presided over the pact’s launch with Biden and served as leader from 2018 to 2022. “But it’s just one of those things where we have no choice but to be successful with the strategic environment we’re facing.”
Further clouding the outlook is the possibility that Donald Trump, who’s been skeptical of US alliances globally, wins the White House in the fall. Morrison, who met Trump in May and asked about the fate of the pact, said he’s confident it would survive a change of administration in Washington.
But Elbridge Colby, who held a top Pentagon job in the last Trump administration and is advising on plans for a possible new one, said “the jury’s still out” on the submarine part of the deal. “Aukus needs to be measured by delivery for the military balance in Asia in a timeframe relevant,” he said, underlining concerns about delays.
Asked when the ambitious effort needs to show results, Representative Joe Courtney, whose Connecticut district is home to the shipyard that makes the subs, is blunt: “Like now.”
It took 18 months from the announcement of the pact for the countries to agree on what they call the “optimal pathway” detailing how it will be brought to life. Under the deal, the US begin patrols from an Australian base with American nuclear-powered attack subs in 2027. Canberra is supposed to get the first of the US-produced boats, known as Virginia class, after 2032. They will be replaced by a new super-advanced model jointly developed by the UK and Australia with US help sometime after 2040.
In the UK, which got US nuclear-sub technology back in the 1950s, officials are mainly concerned about Australia’s ability to develop the huge industry needed to support the vessels in time, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In the US, there are doubts closer to home. Scrambling to make up for decades of production cuts after the end of the Cold War, the two shipyards that make nuclear subs are aiming to produce them at a rate not seen since World War II. Even if they reach planned targets, the US may find itself short of attack submarines once it starts supplying them to Australia, according to a government report.
To help speed things up, the US and Australia are spending $6 billion to expand America’s sub-making industry.
Washington surprised Canberra this spring by putting only one new Virginia-class sub in its annual budget request instead of the usual two, hoping to keep the overall cost down. The news set off a firestorm in Australia, where newspapers called it a “potential blow” to Aukus.
“This is really a case of us being mugged by reality,” Malcolm Turnbull, who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2018, wrote in a March op-ed. “So much for Australian sovereignty.”
With a price tag of A$360 billion , Aukus dwarfs the country’s past defense spending and has sparked a complete rethink of Australia’s military posture.
In the US, too, the cut in the budget for the submarines has raised concerns. The Navy’s effort to compensate for it with other spending commitments “has come up woefully short,” said Courtney, the US congressman, especially since Australia may wind up needing more of the Virginia-class boats than currently planned.
In addition to the submarines, which are referred to as Pillar I in Aukus-speak, the pact calls for cooperating on advanced technologies, known as Pillar II.
On the first part, “we know what we’re buying, we know where it needs to be built, we know how many of them there needs to be,” said Morrison, the Australian former prime minister. “Pillar II doesn’t have those knowns and they need to become known.’
“That, having some form and substance is really I think the challenge over the next twelve months,” he added.
Seeking to reassure doubters, Australia’s government has been giving regular progress reports on Aukus since the start of 2024.
Still, then-UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, on a visit to Washington in April, voiced concern about the persistent bureaucratic obstacles to cooperation. “If we’re going to have a partnership as close as this between three like-minded countries, you must be able to have the free flow of munitions between us,” he said.
Feeling the pressure for results, President Biden’s administration is preparing to roll out some initial Aukus success stories in the next few months, officials told Bloomberg News. Before the end of this year, the partners expect to field a new AI-powered technology to allow them to share underwater reconnaissance data on Russian and Chinese subs in real time, Michael Horowitz, deputy assistant secretary of defense, said in an interview. Remote-controlled undersea drones are another target area, along with hypersonic missiles.
“Pillar II is stronger now that at any time since the inception of Aukus,” he said.
At the same time, officials in the Pentagon and the State Department are racing to weave the alliance into the fabric of the bureaucracy, staffing up teams to implement it, aiming to make it harder for a new administration to throw cooperation into reverse.
“Institutionalization and bureaucracy is not glamorous, but it’s critical to ensuring the success of Aukus,” said Mara Karlin, who until December served as a senior official in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Still, “there is a risk it does die on the vine,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. That’s a worry some inside the administration share, though they decline to say so publicly.
Technology sharing is still in question because of decades-old US rules on releasing secrets to other countries. Efforts are underway to remove those barriers, but it’s been slow going. “If they can’t break those down, the whole thing on Pillar II, I think, will collapse,” said Pettyjohn.
Only in the last few months have government officials begun reaching out to industry in the three partner countries for feedback on how to improve cooperation. Executives, who had been blindsided by the deal, had been calling for that from the outset.
Still, Aukus backers argue the huge effort is gaining steam.
“Pillar I is on track despite being a massive and heavy lift,” said Karlin, referring to the submarine part of the deal. “Pillar II is being increasingly well-defined.”
Courtney, the congressman, said, “Of all the initiatives that the US is doing in the Indo-Pacific, it’s definitely the one that has the most muscle.”
For the moment, of course, the US still has a massive lead in nuclear-powered attack submarines, which allow it to secretly deliver munitions around the globe. But its fleet counts only 49 of the vessels — well short of the 66 the Navy says it needs. About half are based in the Pacific, but only a fraction of those are at sea at any given moment.
“We’re going to slow-walk all this stuff because it’s all really complicated, and then we’re going to find ourselves in a goddamn shooting war with the Chinese and we’re going to realize we should have done this,” said Bruce Jones, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
With assistance from Alex Wickham, Peter Martin and Adrian Leung.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
