By Sophia Gaston*
The AUKUS review that Sir Stephen Lovegrove will deliver to the British government this month represents a vital opportunity to consolidate the project’s successes and turn a clean page on the areas of dysfunction and inertia that have dogged the project’s first three years. (The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The Strategist.)
Since AUKUS was announced in September 2021, Britain has succeeded in assembling a community of highly motivated officials to work at an impressive pace on this long-term and deeply complex project. This task has been even more commendable in the shadow of the urgent demands made of Britain as the leading European power supporting Ukraine. But the lack of centralised Cabinet Office oversight, the absence of dedicated political leadership for the project, and the failure to connect AUKUS to an integrated economic and national security mission have impeded progress and threatened government’s capacity to deliver on its high ambitions.
Sir Stephen played an instrumental role in the initial conception of AUKUS in his then position as Britain’s national security adviser until he left the government in late 2022 ahead of the announcement of the Optimal Pathway agreement in March 2023. The review will confront not only the highly debated project design for developing and building the SSN-AUKUS submarines but much less visible but equally important questions of process, ownership and leadership. Seven of these issues requiring urgent attention are set out below.
Governance reform
The current machinery-of-government in Britain facilitating AUKUS must be rethought. A decision in 2023 to move the project’s leadership from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) embedded an institutional perception that AUKUS is a limited to a narrow defence-capabilities delivery project. It also put AUKUS at risk of falling on the chopping block when ‘hard choices’ between MoD budget lines have to be made.
The MoD must remain the major stakeholder in AUKUS, but both the prize at stake in AUKUS and the path to achieve it go well beyond defence. Both Pillars 1 and 2 require system galvanisation from the very top and whole-of-government visibility, coordination and leadership to deliver the vision. The oversight and accountability for its success must therefore sit in the Cabinet Office.
Political leadership
Delivering on a project of this scale and complexity will require a specific minister with a dedicated focus to harness all levers available to the government. In the important effort to the foster bipartisan support required to sustain momentum, we have tended to underemphasise the political nature of AUKUS. It is and always has been a deeply geopolitical project that will succeed only if its contemporary custodians can find a political language and rationale to justify its considerable resources.
To date, Britain has sought to lead a fundamentally disruptive project largely through efforts to optimise governmental processes. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that anything less than full-throated support will see AUKUS wither on the vine.
AUKUS as an economic growth project
AUKUS needs to be recognised for its centrality to the British government’s economic ambitions. One of the most important institutional decisions of the past decade has been the choice to prioritise Britain’s knowledge economy—specifically, research and development, higher education and technological innovation—as the foundation of the national prosperity agenda. This means that a project such as AUKUS Pillar 2 (which seeks to accelerate our technological readiness pipeline in cooperation with our closest allies) gives Britain not only the capacity to engage meaningfully in strategic competition but also a leg-up on its core economic mission.
So, AUKUS must be integrated into the British government’s growth agenda and understood as deeply relevant to the nation’s domestic outcomes. The argument must be won with the Treasury to reframe AUKUS as a long-term investment in the nation’s future. As a growth mission, AUKUS can be run with a more ruthless focus on delivery—prioritising fewer projects than now, with proper resourcing, so its deterrence function can be achieved.
Strengthen the stakeholder ecosystem
The government must understand that it has an interest in keeping a broad group of stakeholders informed about AUKUS and in listening to what they have to say: industry, academia, Parliament, the media, think tanks and the general public.
It will benefit greatly, first, from an external policy environment that can help provide meaningful insights and advice to unlock the complex maze of challenges it faces in delivering AUKUS. Second, even though it may not always feel disposed to fostering greater scrutiny, the government will also benefit from an active public debate around all aspects of AUKUS.
Both of these require British institutions forging meaningful engagement settings with different stakeholders and directly supporting initiatives that enable these groups to make a substantive contribution to the project’s success.
The enabling environment
The government must understand that it will need to have a very active hand in fostering the conditions by which industry and academia can get on with it and deliver AUKUS projects.
Reforms to the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations mean the three nations can freely share about 80 percent of advanced technologies with each other. This is game-changing, but the reforms must be seen as simply the beginning and not the pinnacle of Pillar 2 achievement. There remains plenty of low-hanging fruit for the government to address—for example, the harmonising and expediting security clearances between the three partners. The government will also need to be the driving force behind industry-academic collaboration, mitigating the security and funding issues that have led to the privatisation of research labs.
Even the process of driving non-government funding into the AUKUS ecosystem, cajoling venture capitalists and pension funds to invest in defence innovation, will require government facilitation. Resources are tight, but achieving success in these endeavours for AUKUS will also provide wider benefits for Britain’s highly productive defence and technology industries.
Create compelling narratives
The need to design impactful and evolving narratives around AUKUS has been consistently undervalued. This is partly a legacy of the pact’s origins as a highly sensitive security project, but it also reflects miscalculations about the willingness of citizens to engage with the realities of Britain’s security environment. There has been an inclination to present AUKUS in the simple terms of retail politics, promising micro-level job creation opportunities in specific communities already deeply integrated with defence industrial production.
We know from opinion polling that Britons are sold on the bigger picture, supporting initiatives that facilitate allied cooperation, promote deterrence and lift national competitiveness.
There has also been an unwillingness to engage directly with misleading narratives, some promoted by well-meaning critics and others by our international adversaries. This lack of engagement has created a vacuum that risks putting the government on the back foot. It’s time for a grown-up conversation with the public about AUKUS, properly explaining what is being worked towards and confronting misinformation head-on.
AUKUS is the vanguard project of our allied future
AUKUS needs to be understood as a prototype for a new era of co-creation and co-development with our closest friends, particularly those from the G7+3 (the three being Australia, South Korea and India). Within this grouping of 10 nations, we should be hoping to achieve self-sufficiency in access to vital technologies and capabilities that can compete with the ferocious pace of innovation in China.
For this reason, we must stare down the notion that AUKUS is a zero-sum game of prioritising two allies at the expense of others. The benefits of AUKUS will be shared in part through the principle of NATO interoperability and in part due to the project’s experimental nature as the closest possible expression of allied cooperation outside wartime. AUKUS can and must be the blueprint of a future status quo.
Britain has taken some important actions to improve its performance in AUKUS in the past year, but there is much to be done for us to position our institutions to deliver on the considerable opportunities at stake. The Lovegrove review represents the best chance we have to inject new vigour, political ownership and structural reorganisation into AUKUS, so that Britain can best access the project’s full potential and its role in our future resilience.
