By Harlan Ullman*
The 1972 movie The Candidate is a good metaphor for the current state of AUKUS, the tri-nation consortium for supplying Australia with eight nuclear submarines (SSNs) and other technology. In the movie, Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, a political novice who wins a miraculous upset victory over a long-serving Californian senator. As the movie ends, Redford desperately asks his campaign manager, ‘What do we do now?’ There is no answer.
Several years ago, few would have believed that the US would allow even a trusted ally and member of the intelligence-sharing Five Eyes group access to its most sensitive SSN technologies.
Australia’s effort should become a textbook case of how strategic vision can produce implementation. Pillar 1 of AUKUS is aimed at building eight SSNs for Australia and has a time horizon measured in decades. Pillar 2 is a program for technology sharing and co-development that will have more immediate impact. The obstacles to both are many.
It takes nine years to build an SSN for the US Navy, and, currently, the US is not building enough of them for its own use. While Australia takes three to five US-built Virginia-class submarines, Britain will design a follow-on SSN class for Australia and itself; it will also help build them. That will be a long and expensive process with no guarantees of success.
In an earlier article, I proposed making Pillar 2 the higher immediate priority and considering expanding it to include other partners, such as Japan and South Korea, even given the constraints and impediments of US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. But AUKUS has far greater strategic potential that can be exploited if the participants are determined to do so and are prepared to embark on game-changing innovation.
Consider a plan to do that. Pillar 2 should be a force multiplier and enabler that will greatly expand the capability and application of even one AUKUS SSN in both kinetic and non-kinetic scenarios. We notice, for example, that an F-35 Lightning is much more than a fighter: with powerful sensors, computing capacity and communications links, it can be an information node that enhances the effect of other forces without itself firing a shot. Might not each AUKUS SSN be similarly exploited with add-on capabilities that multiply its value? And how might that be achieved?
First, Pillar 2 cannot be just a shopping list of technologies. Specificity is essential. The traditional approach is for senior military commanders to define military requirements needed to execute plans for war and peace and for other contingencies. The shortcoming has been that requirements have often become how Einstein described the universe: finite but unbounded, with emphasis on ‘unbounded’.
What might be a more practical approach would be to convene a series of seminars that use a variety of potential Asian scenarios to determine which technologies will be relevant, useful and even game-changing force multipliers—for example, a Chinese attempt to provoke the Philippines into a crisis or conflict; to control access to and from various Indonesian straits; or to blockade or occupy Taiwan. The scenarios might represent crises involving North Korea, Japan or South Korea, too.
The usual suspects attending these seminars would be political, military or economic officials: military officers; subject-matter experts from national labs; and representatives from large defence companies. Unusual suspects, however, can come from start-ups in Silicon Valley and other high-tech centres in Britain and Australia. The first seminars would identify technologies for further analysis. Subsequent ones would do finer-grain analysis on specific technologies for implementation.
The metric for picking winners and losers must extend across what the military calls the tactical, operational and strategic levels to focus on implications and consequences for China, Russia and the Sino-Russian condominium. One question to be answered is how Pillar 1’s eight SSNs can be enhanced or multiplied to provide greater capability to influence events beyond individual military applications.
In the broadest strategic vision, could a future AUKUS become a transformational construct in advancing the national-security interests of the partners while preventing actions by China or Russia or other parties that would be counter to those interests? While it could be argued that this vision is unrealistic or unattainable, the same criticism could have been used as Australia began its planning for AUKUS.
The organisation of the seminars will require a great deal of coordination to avoid Einstein’s twin pitfalls of ‘finite’ and ‘unbounded’. They will need to be held in various locations and often enough to ensure a comprehensive examination. That will require a major change in the leadership and management of AUKUS.
Currently, working groups of three-star officers and civilian equivalents have been put in place to oversee AUKUS. Clearly, three different governments and cultures are complicated and not easy to manage and coordinate. Further, and with due respect to three-stars, the fact is that four-stars or officials of equivalent seniority are needed if programs such as AUKUS are to succeed. One approach is to create a four-star or undersecretary position to serve in the White House and prime ministers’ offices to oversee AUKUS.
Clearly, the first priority for AUKUS is to start production of the SSNs. However, it would be a great pity not to think about what AUKUS could achieve in the broadest sense and determine how that vision might be achieved. Given the obvious fiscal and personnel constraints, imagination and innovation are critical and are not great consumers of resources. Imagine a ‘no limits’ AUKUS as an antidote to the Sino-Russian condominium. That would be something.
