Australia and France sign military access agreement as post-Aukus tensions ease
Reciprocal access to military bases and training facilities to be granted in clear break from diplomatic rupture over failed submarine deal
Similar to the agreement with France.
www.defenceconnect.com.au
landmark Japan-Australia Reciprocal Access Agreement, transforming bilateral defence cooperation and enhancing the interoperability of forces. The pair also discussed a number of recent milestones in the strategic partnership ..
Australia to take part in Exercise Yama Sakura for first time
The Australian Defence Force will take part in the Japan-US Exercise Yama Sakura 85, deepening the nation’s interoperability and mutual defence capability with the two Pacific nations. The Exercise
www.defenceconnect.com.au
landmark Japan-Australia Reciprocal Access Agreement, transforming bilateral defence cooperation and enhancing the interoperability of forces. The pair also discussed a number of recent milestones in the strategic partnership ..
As I said, it was always political posturing from a few.
www.defenceconnect.com.au
Christmas gift: US Congress green-lights submarine sale to Australia
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, Richard Marles has been handed an early Christmas gift by US Congress, as members voted to allow the sale of three Viriginia-class submarines to Aust
www.defenceconnect.com.au
As I said, it was always political posturing from a few.
Christmas gift: US Congress green-lights submarine sale to Australia
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, Richard Marles has been handed an early Christmas gift by US Congress, as members voted to allow the sale of three Viriginia-class submarines to Aust
It was always necessary. To keep both China and India in check. It canalso be considered as announcing the possibility of increasing the submarine lines. An additional line in the US and a new one in Australia pretty much doubles SSN production, alongside the one in the UK. Helps keep up with both China and Russia.
While the bad news for India (and Indonesia) is we are also a target of the program, the good news is it opens up some possibilities for India in terms of more serious tech transfer from Russia and France.
So that means all this shout out loud over INDUS-X ToT platform was just a joke and feel good drama by both the countries. US is not interested in Indian money, they want more than money and India will not agree to their demand finally back to France and Russia.
I was referring to SSNs, which the Americans have flat-out denied any ToT. They are offering ToT elsewhere though, like the F414 and Stryker. They are even willing to bring India into the FVL program. Of course, even space programs.
So whatever the US is not gonna offer, the Russians and French can fill that space. So SSNs, stealth tech, hot core engine tech and so on.
Buying Scorpenes could open up ToT in some areas, the same with leasing more Russian SSNs.
And no, the Americans are not linking defense deals with political benefits, at least as of now. Their intention is to capture a part of the Indian market and reduce Russian influence in India. For example, if the IA replaces all Russian stuff with non-Russian stuff, the Russians will lose access to the influential political, bureaucracy, business and military personnel within that segment.
Awkward truths about US and UK AUKUS challenges
Three reports over the past two months are required reading for anyone involved in or scrutinising the Australian Government’s work on AUKUS. Two are US reports and one is from the UK.
None are from the Pentagon or the UK Ministry of Defence, instead each is from an independent government oversight agency with responsibility for objective assessment of their country’s military plans.
Put together, the three reports show an alarming and growing set of challenges in front of Australia’s AUKUS partners when it comes to meeting their own submarine needs. AUKUS adds additional demands on top of this, and additional complexity by introducing a third nation, its government, laws, budget and acquisition processes.
The US Navy is required by law to provide to Congress its long-term shipbuilding plan every year (it’s a striking contrast to our situation where Defence has not released a public version of its acquisition plan for nearly three and a half years). The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its assessment of that plan in October. The US Navy has set out three options for its future surface and undersea fleets, with slightly different numbers and mixes of ships and submarines in each.
But each option has the same basic flaw: it is unaffordable without massive growth in US shipbuilding budgets. The options require ongoing annual increases to the amount the Pentagon currently spends on building ships and submarines of between 31 and 40 per cent per annum for decades if the US Navy is to look at all like its plans and not shrink substantially. The problem behind these numbers is that the US Navy continues to aspire to larger, more complex and more expensive ships and submarines than it has now, with the costs for even producing similar vessels to those being built now spiralling.
This was followed by the US Congressional Research Service’s 13 November 2023 report titled the ‘US Navy’s Virginia Class submarine program and the AUKUS Submarine Proposal’. The CRS is required to provide independent advice to the Congress on the legislation it will consider. In this case that legislation includes funding for submarines and authorising the President to transfer nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. The CRS report is consistent with the CBO report in its understanding of the challenges to US submarine building and maintenance, but goes deeper on the submarine industrial base challenges.
Its analysis shows that the US is currently producing Virginia Class submarines at the rate of about 1.4 boats a year, which is a shortfall against the targeted rate of 2 boats a year. This is despite years of focused investment into the industrial base and supplier network that builds these boats. But much more significantly, the CRS assessment, which is accepted by the US Navy, shows that the rate of submarine product has to grow not just to 2 boats a year but to the equivalent of five ‘standard’ Virginia Class boats a year by 2028. That’s because by then, the US needs to be building the larger Block V Virginia-class submarines with the missile payload insert along with the much larger and more complex Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Each Columbia takes 2.5 times the industrial base capacity that it takes to build a ‘standard’ Virginia class boat.
So, not only does the US have to invest between 31 and 40 per cent more per annum into its programs, it needs to lift production capacity to over 3.5 times the current rate of 1.4 boats a year. That’s without counting the even greater industrial capacity required on top of this to meet the AUKUS demand of producing 3-5 extra Virginia subs for Australia (backfilling ones provided out of the existing US Navy fleet and building new ones sold to Australia before SSN AUKUS (Snorkus) arrives.
The numbers understate the difficulty of doing this. It’s not just running a production line faster or replicating the existing production line with a new one. Nuclear submarine building relies on highly skilled shipyard workers that are hard to recruit and retain, and the builders depend on 100s – 1000s – of small suppliers for all the components and subsystems that go into each boat. Expanding the capacity or variety of this supply chain is harder than growing the skilled submarine construction workforce. So, the CBO and CRS reports, in their measured, quiet but authoritative way raise real doubts about the US capacity to do what it needs to do – for itself – and on top of this deliver for AUKUS.
In June 2023, a US Government Accountability Office report had already told us that, because Virginia Class sub construction continued to degrade, it looked like each Block V submarine would take an average of over 2 years longer than reported last year.
Shifting from the US situation, we now have recent news on nuclear sub challenges from across the Atlantic. The most recent report is from the UK’s National Audit Office – the equivalent of Australia’s ANAO, which brought us bad news on Defence’s Hunter frigate program.
It has assessed the UK Ministry of Defence’s 10-year Equipment Plan2023-2033 and found that it is unaffordable, with costs for key programs growing rapidly because of inflation and a better understanding by the UK defence ministry of the actual costs involved. Two of the largest cost increases are in the UK’s Defence Nuclear Enterprise (that builds the UK’s nuclear submarines and nuclear missiles) and the Royal Navy (which is acquiring the BAE Type 26 frigate that is the basis for our Navy’s ‘Hunter’).
The UK’s defence nuclear program has had a 62 per cent increase from the costs forecast in last year’s version of the Equipment Plan. That’s a £38.2 billion increase (equivalent to $A73 billion). And the Royal Navy’s non-nuclear acquisition program has had a 41 per cent cost increase between the 2022 and the 2023 10-year plan – that’s an increase of £16.4 billion (equivalent to $A31 billion).
The UK NAO notes that the Equipment Plan is unaffordable, and has yet to include ‘must have’ capabilities for the UK military identified from studying the lessons of the Ukraine war – integrated air-missile defence, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, long-range surface-to-surface missiles to strike deep into an enemy’s rear areas, unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare’. These make the UK plan’s unaffordability problem worse, requiring either large cancellations or large budget increases.
Action by the UK government to make the military’s plans fit its budget won’t affect the nuclear enterprise, because that has been ‘ringfenced’, but as the NAO says, will ‘put greater pressure on programmes not included in [the ringfence]’ – including the Royal Navy’s surface fleet.
The net result is that both nations were challenged meeting their own surface ship and submarine needs before AUKUS came along, and those challenges are growing because the consequences of many years of low investment are now inescapable.
They also show that both the US and UK face cost spirals in their submarine programs, with forecast costs rising owing to inflation and supply chain troubles that are making everything more expensive. Those costs have not stabilised. This experience means that Australia’s stated cost of $268-368 billion for the eight AUKUS submarines now must be considered to be understated—or at the very least fall at the upper end of that band–as it will be affected by the rising costs faced by the UK and US.
AUKUS helps in one way – Australia is bringing a bag of gold to the effort. But overall, AUKUS makes the total program harder – there’s more to be done and it needs to be done across three different governments, economies and defence industries.
So, while much of the domestic discussion and debate on AUKUS has been on Australia’s readiness to produce, operate and maintain eight nuclear submarines, the greater challenges to AUKUS come from the ‘home games’ that the UK and US must play to meet their own needs. These face deep, long term underlying problems. They won’t be solved by the US Congress passing AUKUS-related legislation this year. US investment into its submarine base has increased in recent years, and Congress supports more of it, which is good but insufficient.
Almost 2.5 years since the September 2021 announcement, it’s becoming increasingly clear that delivering the ‘optimal pathway’ requires some more than heroic efforts in both the UK and the US across very broad fronts of activity, all of which must succeed. And that’s while both nations help Australia get its training wheels on and shift rapidly from a toddler learning to walk when it comes to nuclear submarines to a mature, high performer in one of the most demanding areas of human endeavour.
Asking for plans or mentioning real world challenges is received here as bordering on un-Australian. That’s odd, because the US Congressional Research Service points out, almost every US military acquisition program that hasn’t had a proper business case engaging with the real risks and industrial environment it has to operate in has failed. The now cancelled multi-billion dollar Littoral Combat Ship program is just the most recent example.
Public understanding and support is critical to the sustainability and delivery of AUKUS. That begins with openness about the eyewatering challenges faced by each nation in the partnership – and credible plans that match the scale of the challenges, starting now.
Three reports over the past two months are required reading for anyone involved in or scrutinising the Australian Government’s work on AUKUS. Two are US reports and one is from the UK.
None are from the Pentagon or the UK Ministry of Defence, instead each is from an independent government oversight agency with responsibility for objective assessment of their country’s military plans.
Put together, the three reports show an alarming and growing set of challenges in front of Australia’s AUKUS partners when it comes to meeting their own submarine needs. AUKUS adds additional demands on top of this, and additional complexity by introducing a third nation, its government, laws, budget and acquisition processes.
The US Navy is required by law to provide to Congress its long-term shipbuilding plan every year (it’s a striking contrast to our situation where Defence has not released a public version of its acquisition plan for nearly three and a half years). The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its assessment of that plan in October. The US Navy has set out three options for its future surface and undersea fleets, with slightly different numbers and mixes of ships and submarines in each.
But each option has the same basic flaw: it is unaffordable without massive growth in US shipbuilding budgets. The options require ongoing annual increases to the amount the Pentagon currently spends on building ships and submarines of between 31 and 40 per cent per annum for decades if the US Navy is to look at all like its plans and not shrink substantially. The problem behind these numbers is that the US Navy continues to aspire to larger, more complex and more expensive ships and submarines than it has now, with the costs for even producing similar vessels to those being built now spiralling.
This was followed by the US Congressional Research Service’s 13 November 2023 report titled the ‘US Navy’s Virginia Class submarine program and the AUKUS Submarine Proposal’. The CRS is required to provide independent advice to the Congress on the legislation it will consider. In this case that legislation includes funding for submarines and authorising the President to transfer nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. The CRS report is consistent with the CBO report in its understanding of the challenges to US submarine building and maintenance, but goes deeper on the submarine industrial base challenges.
Its analysis shows that the US is currently producing Virginia Class submarines at the rate of about 1.4 boats a year, which is a shortfall against the targeted rate of 2 boats a year. This is despite years of focused investment into the industrial base and supplier network that builds these boats. But much more significantly, the CRS assessment, which is accepted by the US Navy, shows that the rate of submarine product has to grow not just to 2 boats a year but to the equivalent of five ‘standard’ Virginia Class boats a year by 2028. That’s because by then, the US needs to be building the larger Block V Virginia-class submarines with the missile payload insert along with the much larger and more complex Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Each Columbia takes 2.5 times the industrial base capacity that it takes to build a ‘standard’ Virginia class boat.
So, not only does the US have to invest between 31 and 40 per cent more per annum into its programs, it needs to lift production capacity to over 3.5 times the current rate of 1.4 boats a year. That’s without counting the even greater industrial capacity required on top of this to meet the AUKUS demand of producing 3-5 extra Virginia subs for Australia (backfilling ones provided out of the existing US Navy fleet and building new ones sold to Australia before SSN AUKUS (Snorkus) arrives.
The numbers understate the difficulty of doing this. It’s not just running a production line faster or replicating the existing production line with a new one. Nuclear submarine building relies on highly skilled shipyard workers that are hard to recruit and retain, and the builders depend on 100s – 1000s – of small suppliers for all the components and subsystems that go into each boat. Expanding the capacity or variety of this supply chain is harder than growing the skilled submarine construction workforce. So, the CBO and CRS reports, in their measured, quiet but authoritative way raise real doubts about the US capacity to do what it needs to do – for itself – and on top of this deliver for AUKUS.
In June 2023, a US Government Accountability Office report had already told us that, because Virginia Class sub construction continued to degrade, it looked like each Block V submarine would take an average of over 2 years longer than reported last year.
Shifting from the US situation, we now have recent news on nuclear sub challenges from across the Atlantic. The most recent report is from the UK’s National Audit Office – the equivalent of Australia’s ANAO, which brought us bad news on Defence’s Hunter frigate program.
It has assessed the UK Ministry of Defence’s 10-year Equipment Plan2023-2033 and found that it is unaffordable, with costs for key programs growing rapidly because of inflation and a better understanding by the UK defence ministry of the actual costs involved. Two of the largest cost increases are in the UK’s Defence Nuclear Enterprise (that builds the UK’s nuclear submarines and nuclear missiles) and the Royal Navy (which is acquiring the BAE Type 26 frigate that is the basis for our Navy’s ‘Hunter’).
The UK’s defence nuclear program has had a 62 per cent increase from the costs forecast in last year’s version of the Equipment Plan. That’s a £38.2 billion increase (equivalent to $A73 billion). And the Royal Navy’s non-nuclear acquisition program has had a 41 per cent cost increase between the 2022 and the 2023 10-year plan – that’s an increase of £16.4 billion (equivalent to $A31 billion).
The UK NAO notes that the Equipment Plan is unaffordable, and has yet to include ‘must have’ capabilities for the UK military identified from studying the lessons of the Ukraine war – integrated air-missile defence, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, long-range surface-to-surface missiles to strike deep into an enemy’s rear areas, unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare’. These make the UK plan’s unaffordability problem worse, requiring either large cancellations or large budget increases.
Action by the UK government to make the military’s plans fit its budget won’t affect the nuclear enterprise, because that has been ‘ringfenced’, but as the NAO says, will ‘put greater pressure on programmes not included in [the ringfence]’ – including the Royal Navy’s surface fleet.
The net result is that both nations were challenged meeting their own surface ship and submarine needs before AUKUS came along, and those challenges are growing because the consequences of many years of low investment are now inescapable.
They also show that both the US and UK face cost spirals in their submarine programs, with forecast costs rising owing to inflation and supply chain troubles that are making everything more expensive. Those costs have not stabilised. This experience means that Australia’s stated cost of $268-368 billion for the eight AUKUS submarines now must be considered to be understated—or at the very least fall at the upper end of that band–as it will be affected by the rising costs faced by the UK and US.
AUKUS helps in one way – Australia is bringing a bag of gold to the effort. But overall, AUKUS makes the total program harder – there’s more to be done and it needs to be done across three different governments, economies and defence industries.
So, while much of the domestic discussion and debate on AUKUS has been on Australia’s readiness to produce, operate and maintain eight nuclear submarines, the greater challenges to AUKUS come from the ‘home games’ that the UK and US must play to meet their own needs. These face deep, long term underlying problems. They won’t be solved by the US Congress passing AUKUS-related legislation this year. US investment into its submarine base has increased in recent years, and Congress supports more of it, which is good but insufficient.
Almost 2.5 years since the September 2021 announcement, it’s becoming increasingly clear that delivering the ‘optimal pathway’ requires some more than heroic efforts in both the UK and the US across very broad fronts of activity, all of which must succeed. And that’s while both nations help Australia get its training wheels on and shift rapidly from a toddler learning to walk when it comes to nuclear submarines to a mature, high performer in one of the most demanding areas of human endeavour.
Asking for plans or mentioning real world challenges is received here as bordering on un-Australian. That’s odd, because the US Congressional Research Service points out, almost every US military acquisition program that hasn’t had a proper business case engaging with the real risks and industrial environment it has to operate in has failed. The now cancelled multi-billion dollar Littoral Combat Ship program is just the most recent example.
Public understanding and support is critical to the sustainability and delivery of AUKUS. That begins with openness about the eyewatering challenges faced by each nation in the partnership – and credible plans that match the scale of the challenges, starting now.
You still don't know how to put Aukus into google news
'Historic achievement': AUKUS submarine deal passes US Congress
Defence Minister Richard Marles says he is very pleased of the historic achievement as legislation to allow the US to sell nuclear-powered...
US Congress passes bill allowing sale of Aukus nuclear submarines to Australia
Legislation covering a wide range of military issues clears the way for Virginia class vessels to bolster Pacific defence.
US Congress passes bill allowing sale of Aukus nuclear submarines to Australia
‘Historic’: Major step in US subs deal
The US has passed legislation allowing Australia to purchase three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines as part of the landmark AUKUS...
'Historic achievement': AUKUS submarine deal passes US Congress
Defence Minister Richard Marles says he is very pleased of the historic achievement as legislation to allow the US to sell nuclear-powered...
US Congress passes bill allowing sale of Aukus nuclear submarines to Australia
Legislation covering a wide range of military issues clears the way for Virginia class vessels to bolster Pacific defence.
US Congress passes bill allowing sale of Aukus nuclear submarines to Australia
‘Historic’: Major step in US subs deal
The US has passed legislation allowing Australia to purchase three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines as part of the landmark AUKUS...
SSN AUKUS to Feature AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System - Naval News
Australia has revealed that the SSN-AUKUS submarines will feature an "evolved version" of the American AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System.
www.navalnews.com
Australia’s Minister for Defence Industry has revealed that Australia and the United Kingdom’s future attack submarine, known as SSN-AUKUS (SSN-A) will use an “evolved version” of the AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System.
Yes, the studies show that the plans to implement AUKUS are completely unfeasible, but that doesn't matter, they decide to go for it anyway. This shows that among the Anglo-Saxons, appearing is much more important than being.
You aren't even living upto the standard of a frog troll. You need to do better.
You quote a troll site.
You only need to look at the headline of their articles.
Articles Strategic Analysis Australia
Strategic Analysis Australia is a small team who value and challenge each other’s contributions with our articles published in this website.
strategicanalysis.org
Last edited:
You aren't even living upto the standard of a frog troll. You need to do better.
You quote a troll site.
You only need to look at the headline of their articles.
Articles Strategic Analysis Australia
Strategic Analysis Australia is a small team who value and challenge each other’s contributions with our articles published in this website.
I suppose that for you the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the US Congressional Research Service's as well as the US Government Accountability Office and the UK's National Audit Office are all notorious trolls in that the article I posted does reports the conclusions of reports published by these organizations.
No what he says about the reports is rubbish. Congress has approved the sale. end of story.
End of story for you, but for reasonable people who examine the possibilities of carrying out the plans:
Navy advertises on LinkedIn to hire nuclear Rear-Admiral
No serving sailors are suitable to replace Rear-Admiral Simon Asquith, the Director of SubmarinesDanielle Sheridan, DEFENCE EDITOR 5 January 2024 • 10:10pm
The Royal Navy has been forced to use LinkedIn to advertise for a Rear-Admiral to be responsible for the nation’s nuclear deterrent amid a growing recruitment crisis...
If you see a nuclear-powered submarine, it's probably American. If he's particularly big, he might be Russian. If it's small, maybe French or British. If there's nothing, it's Australian.
AUKUS fail – US legislation to fund submarine industrial base blocked - APDR
A necessary precondition for the sale of Virginia class submarines to Australia is that their rate of production needs to be increased.
asiapacificdefencereporter.com
A necessary precondition for the sale of second-hand Virginia class submarines to Australia in the 2030s is that their rate of production needs to be substantially increased. This, in turn, requires an increase in funding – an increase that now will not happen because of internal US politics...
… The time is long overdue for Defence Minister Richard Marles to come clean and explain to the Australian public how they benefit from the unprecedented transfer of cash to the already bloated, massively profitable, US submarine construction firms when their own government is critical of their greed. Australian taxpayers: don’t hold your collective breath.
The UK SSN already used US nuc reactors (as deterrent subs if I remember well. Or at least a US design).SSN AUKUS to Feature AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System - Naval News
Australia has revealed that the SSN-AUKUS submarines will feature an "evolved version" of the American AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System.
Australia’s Minister for Defence Industry has revealed that Australia and the United Kingdom’s future attack submarine, known as SSN-AUKUS (SSN-A) will use an “evolved version” of the AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System.
Now next gen will use an US combat system.
OK.... What really interesting remain to the poors GB ?
Next step : the torpedoes?
Incidentally, even if everything went well, they would have to wait until 2028 to find out whether the Americans would authorise the sale of SSN to Australia.AUKUS fail – US legislation to fund submarine industrial base blocked - APDR
A necessary precondition for the sale of Virginia class submarines to Australia is that their rate of production needs to be increased.
A necessary precondition for the sale of second-hand Virginia class submarines to Australia in the 2030s is that their rate of production needs to be substantially increased. This, in turn, requires an increase in funding – an increase that now will not happen because of internal US politics...
… The time is long overdue for Defence Minister Richard Marles to come clean and explain to the Australian public how they benefit from the unprecedented transfer of cash to the already bloated, massively profitable, US submarine construction firms when their own government is critical of their greed. Australian taxpayers: don’t hold your collective breath.
