By Dr Jeremy Stocker
The recent AUKUS announcement has attracted almost as much attention in Britain as it has in Australia, such is its symbolic as well substantive significance. It comes at the same time as the British Government publishes its Integrated Review Refresh 2023 defence and security policy (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/integrated-review-refresh-2023-responding-to-a-more-contested-and-volatile-world). This updates the previous version from 2021, before the war in Ukraine. IRR23 is expansive and ambitious, with the trilateral AUKUS alliance just one of its many moving parts.
A pillar of the UK’s foreign and defence policies has long been the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States (in truth, always more special to the former than the latter). AUKUS should, from a British perspective, perhaps be seen in that light with the UK forming the ‘middle’ partner of the three and no longer the junior supplicant. But that’s not to underplay the instinctive affinity many Brits feel with people who live almost as far away as it is possible to do.
IRR23 tries to do a lot – perhaps too much, given the UK’s circumstances and resources. The ’tilt’ towards the Asia-Pacific region is explicit, given that that’s where the most dynamic economies are to be found and also where the biggest potential threat – China – sits. But the Review is also clear that “The Euro-Atlantic [region] remains the primary theatre to which the UK will commit…” Europe remains our biggest trading area and the Russo-Ukrainian War has reminded us that while Russia may no longer be the biggest threat, it is the nearest and most active one.
There’s a further dichotomy for Whitehall planners. A renewed sense of danger in Europe suggests a rejuvenation of the ‘hollowed-out’ (the Defence Secretary’s own words) British Army after its dusty and unsuccessful adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Asia-Pacific means Navy, though one wonders whether the permanent presence of just a couple of Offshore Patrol Vessels is a symbol of weakness as much as it is engagement. The days when an RN carrier task group deployed East of Suez was a dominant local player are long gone. We also have maritime concerns closer to home, with the only Russian warships larger than a frigate completed in the last thirty years being submarines.
Nor is AUKUS the only security news. The UK and France have just held their first bilateral summit in five years. This marks, if the not the end at least (to use Churchill’s memorable phrase) the end of the beginning of our post-Brexit re-set. We depend on each other too much, and our interests coincide too far, for either party to sulk for too long.
What, then, of the centrepiece of AUKUS, submarines? When the RAN takes its first submarines it will need to operate American platforms using Australian manpower structures and working methods that are more closely aligned with those of the Royal Navy. However, the RAN has a long and successful record of operating US surface ships (DDGs and FFGs) so these challenges can be overcome. But there will then be a further set of adaptations to be made when switching to the collaborative but primarily UK-designed SSN-Aukus type. UK nuclear submarines draw on American technology to an extent (and vice-versa) but are quite different in important ways. Not least of these differences is that British boats operate with significantly fewer people than their American counterparts.
The decision to acquire first, Virginia-class then the very different Aukus type is awkward and expensive but probably unavoidable. The current UK SSNs the Astutes are powered by a PWR2 (Pressurised Water Reactor) plant designed in the 1980s and which first went to sea in the ’90s in the current Vanguard-class SSBNs. When the final Astute (Agincourt, which will further rile the French) commissions the RN will switch to the new PWR3 design, first for the Dreadnought class SSBNS, then the Aukus type. PWR3 draws extensively on American technology assistance. So the current UK SSN design was never really an option. The Virginia‘s S9G plant is of more recent design, but will still be ageing when Australia adopts it as the interim solution. Interestingly, the Virginias have a pump-jet propulsor originally of UK design.
It is widely expected that the RAN will eventually acquire eight submarines – one more SSN than the RN’s current seven-boat Astuteclass. No announcement has been made as to how many the UK will purchase, only that “decisions about how many submarines the UK requires will be made in the coming years, based on the strategic threat picture at the time.” The aspiration is likely to be to acquire an extra boat or two before replacing the Astutes. The industrial ‘drum-beat’ at BAE Systems’ Barrow-in-Furness yard will be a manufacturing constraint. Australia will need to balance getting a significant number of boats as soon as possible with needing a longer-term, sustainable drum-beat of its own. As the UK discovered in the early years of this century, a ‘stop-go’ approach to nuclear submarine building really doesn’t work.
A notable omission from AUKUS is Canada, the third-largest member of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence community. Canada has a unique geographic, economic and cultural relationship with the United States and is, with the US and the UK, a member of NATO which Australia of course is not. But Canada declines to be a serious defence and security player, at least to the extent of the AUKUS partners. It prefers to ‘free-ride’ on the Americans – a perfectly rational if not always edifying approach – and commits a much smaller proportion of its economy to defence than the other three. Ironically, Canada also considered acquiring SSNs in the late 1980s but soon gave up on the idea in light of the financial cost. Had the project gone ahead, the country would have acquired the French Rubis class.
Of course, AUKUS is about more defence capabilities than just submarines. But for some years that will clearly be the main focus. What is perhaps most impressive about Australia’s decision is its long-term commitment to a capability that will not yield tangible results for many years and far beyond any normal political or economic cycle. But you have to start sometime.
* Captain Jeremy Stocker served in the Royal Navy and Royal Naval Reserve for nearly 40 years. He is now an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
