20.03.2026
If the US is unable to provide Virginia-class submarines and the UK’s timeline to build the Aukus class falters, Australia could be left with nothing
www.theguardian.com
The weakest link: Australia’s submarine hopes depend on the UK, but Britannia no longer rules the waves
If the US is unable to provide Virginia-class submarines and the UK’s timeline to build the Aukus class falters, Australia could be left with nothing
When HMS Anson – a British nuclear submarine – surfaced just off the coast of Perth last month, it was hailed as vindication of the Aukus triumvirate: “
a historic new phase” in Australia’s path towards commanding its own nuclear submarines.
The submarine’s arrival, it was argued, was
demonstration of the political willbehind the ambitious Aukus deal: manifestation of Donald Trump’s exhortation the agreement was “full steam ahead”.
But the Anson’s arrival brought with it no small amount of consternation also.
Anson is now the only attack submarine in the British fleet that can be put to sea, of a
supposed complement of six. The others are all in maintenance, being refitted or have been stripped for parts to keep other subs afloat.
“Perhaps more local concerns
should be the priority,” the news site Navy Lookout suggested, unconvinced by foreign adventurism.
And so it came to pass. When war suddenly broke out in the Middle East and the Anson
abruptly ended its engagement in Australia early – called back to a potential deployment in the strait of Hormuz – there was no fanfare, none of the triumphalism.
It was, perhaps, a neat metaphor for the
Aukus agreement itself: political intent aplenty, but capacity lacking.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh …
A ‘demanding’ timeline
In the gallons of newsprint spilled over the Aukus deal, forensic attention has been paid to the capacity of the US to spare three Virginia class submarines for Australia from the early 2030s.
Given sclerotic – and
thus-far stubbornly unshiftable – rates of shipbuilding in the US despite billions in Australian taxpayers’ assistance, the Congressional Research Office has openly considered that instead of the US selling any Virginia-class submarines to Australia, it would instead
rotate its own US-commanded vesselsthrough Australian ports.
But Australia’s use of the American submarine is only ever intended as a transitory capability.
Far more than the US, Australia must depend on the UK.
For its own, sustained nuclear submarine capability, Australia will rely on Britain’s capacity to design and build the first of an entirely new class of nuclear submarine: the SSN Aukus.
Some have argued the UK’s nuclear submarine industry is beyond salvation.
Even the booster-ish House of Commons inquiry into Aukus heard it was “a source of national shame the way we’ve treated the nuclear submarine building enterprise in this country”.
The published “
optimal pathway” forecasts the first Aukus class submarine being built by the UK for the Royal Navy in the “late 2030s”.
The design of that vessel will form the basis for Australia’s own Aukus submarines, to be built in Adelaide. Australia’s first Aukus submarine is due in the water in the “early 2040s”.
It is, by even the most optimistic accounts, a “
demanding” timeline. And the UK has more pressing priorities.
It must first complete the seventh and final boat in the Astute class (Britain’s nuclear attack submarine, of which the Anson is the most recent into active service). But the UK also has, in construction, four Dreadnought class nuclear ballistic submarines, the basis of the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
All of these are being built by BAE Systems Submarines at Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria.
Put frankly, one senior UK defence source told the Guardian on condition of anonymity, while upholding Aukus is politically important to the UK, other boats must, and will, take precedence.
Back of the queue
That leaves Australia in an invidious position.
If the
US is unable (
by its own legislation) to provide Virginia-class submarines, and the UK’s timeline to build the Aukus class falters, those countries still have nuclear submarine fleets.
Australia has the most at stake in Aukus, but the least control over how it unfolds.
Decades of neglect of the UK’s ship and submarine-building industries cannot be undone by prime ministerial paeans to the “crucible of British marine engineering … the historic
vast maternity ward of these steel leviathans”.
By comparison, the smaller Astute class submarines have been launched at a rate, on average, of one every three or four years.
HMS Agamemnon, the penultimate Astute class boat, entered service last September: it took more than 12 years to build, the longest construction time of any British submarine ever.
Okopi Ajonye, co-director of the
Nuclear Information Service, argues “a lot of the UK industry’s problems are rooted in the fact that it’s highly consolidated: there’s only one site that makes all the submarines.”
“The Dreadnought fleet needs to be built first, but the Dreadnought program has experienced considerable delays, and the program’s end date was not disclosed in the latest annual report on the UK’s government’s Major Projects Portfolio.”
BAE Systems, the contractor building all three classes of submarine, faces immense logistical challenges in expanding its shipyard facilities, training thousands for a vastly expanded workforce, and streamlining construction processes that have remained stubbornly resistant to productivity uplifts, despite massive injections of new money (much of it Australian).
Ajonye cites the UK government’s own reports for specific examples of looming, intractable delays.
For four years in a row, the UK’s National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority has rated the Rolls-Royce-led project to build nuclear reactor cores for Britain’s new submarines as “unachievable”, citing in its most recent report the vagaries of “ongoing challenges”.
The reactor core is essential: without it, there is no nuclear submarine. Says Ajonye: “If I were an Australian politician, or in defence, I would have very low confidence in the timely delivery of the Aukus submarine.”
Ajonye argues too that the UK experience carries lessons for Australia, in the submarines’ nuclear legacy.
The UK has decommissioned 23 nuclear submarines, but never dismantled a single one. Ten of Britain’s retired subs remain nuclear-fuelled, most sitting in water in docks around Britain.
Lord Case, formerly Boris Johnson’s head of the civil service, now leads “Team Barrow”, committed, he told a parliamentary committee, to regenerating the city whose “fortunes have waxed and waned” alongside those of the shipyard.
Booster for Barrow though he is, Case concedes the Aukus timeframe is “a very demanding target”.
“That will be a real challenge to deliver. The thing that we are under pressure to do is deliver housing, schools and hospitals to make sure that the workforce is there to produce the boats on time. We are behind where we need to be.”
Dr Marion Messmer is director of the International Security Programme at Chatham House. She argues the UK’s investments are starting to bear fruit, with the Dreadnoughts meeting construction milestones, and capacity expanding at Barrow-in-Furness.
And she argues that a shifting geostrategic landscape is also compelling all three Aukus partners to uphold the deal.
“One of the elements in favour of Aukus continuing at pace, particularly in the UK, is that these kinds of defence capability investment have received so much more attention since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So much public and private money is flowing into these industrial spaces. I would be the first person to say ‘there’s a big challenge here’; but as far as we can see at this point, I am encouraged that things are going ahead according to schedule.”
Messmer says the UK has underinvested in heavy industry and military production capability, “essentially since the end of the cold war”, a neglect that will take years to turn around.
“It’s clearly not going to happen overnight that the UK is back at full capacity in terms of that kind of shipbuilding, but I am more confident now than in, say, 2021.”
The UK, Messmer tells the Guardian, can find itself beholden to a “pessimism and defeatism” when it comes to its defence capabilities. She argues that some of the criticism is unjustified.
“I would be incredibly surprised if, by the time the first Aukus submarines are in service, we would see that everything went exactly to plan and exactly to cost. When was the last time that actually happened?
“But at this point in time, there’s nothing to suggest to me that we’re actually going to see anything beyond the usual delays and cost slips that you almost have to expect on a project of this size.”
Questions to be asked
Marcus Hellyer, head of research at Strategic Analysis Australia, describes himself as “Aukus agnostic”.
“I don’t jump in and say ‘it’s all doomed’ or ‘it’s the greatest policy idea ever’, but there are certainly questions to be asked about the process that got us here, and how it is going.”
Hellyer says Aukus was announced to the Australian people without any public debate or a proper assessment of alternative defence strategies, such as hypersonic missiles.
And, he argues, while focus has been on the US capacity to deliver surplus Virginia-class submarines, Australia will ultimately have to rely far more heavily on a UK naval nuclear enterprise that has been “chronically underfunded”.
“Now the UK government would say ‘well, where we’re addressing that, we’re funding that’, but there is a massive backlog in both investment required and work to be done.”
Also, Hellyer says, it is hard to pin down exactly how far progressed the design for the new Aukus submarine is.
“It’s really hard to get any kind of reliable information out of any of the players about the maturity of the assets in this program. We keep being told by admirals that the Aukus design is ‘mature’. Well, define ‘mature’.”
“We’re not in the detailed design phase, so we’re still nowhere near starting construction … when are we actually going to start building this thing?”
There is, too, the adversary argument.
Since Aukus was announced in 2021, zero additional Aukus-nation submarines have been built beyond those already in the pipeline before the agreement was revealed. The US has built seven of its own nuclear submarines, the UK has launched one for its navy.
“And their shipyards are successful not because they’ve got gazillions of lowly paid unskilled people banging away with hand tools,” Hellyer says, “they have significant technology and they are absolutely driven by efficiency, by delivering on time and on budget.
“That’s why the Chinese will continue to outcompete us in terms of building ships and increasingly submarines … and now they’ve made that policy switch: they’re now bringing that to their undersea domain.”
Our collective global future is being rapidly reshaped by political, technological and corporate forces focused on the accumulation of power and money. /end
www.defenceconnect.com.au
www.lowyinstitute.org
