- by Con Pakavakis
- The Guardian
- Issue #2187
Sydney participants in the Anti-AUKUS and Anti Bases day 21 February.
Academic and author Clinton Fernandez, in Search for Security – AUKUS and the New Militarism, highlights better alternatives to nuclear submarines. Air-independent propulsion (AIP) submarines convert chemical energy into electric power efficiently, can dive as deep as nuclear-powered submarines, and stay underwater for up to three weeks without surfacing. They are quieter and cheaper, allowing for more units and local maintenance jobs.
Countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Italy all use AIP submarines.
Rex Patrick, a former submariner and senator, has argued that Australia could build 20 modern AIP submarines for $30 billion.
Furthermore, the AUKUS nuclear submarines are by no means a certainty. There are real concerns about the capacity of the UK and the US to actually deliver nuclear submarines to Australia. Not long ago, Melbourne newspaper The Age carried a front page headline ‘Grim warning on AUKUS subs.’ A retired British rear admiral, Philip Mathias, a former director of nuclear policy with the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, said, “Australia has shown a great deal of naivety and did not conduct sufficient due diligence on the parlous state of the UK’s nuclear submarine program.”
While Australia is meant to buy 3 second-hand Virginia submarines from the US under AUKUS, the other 5 are meant to be jointly constructed by the UK and Australia. The UK faces shortages of leaders with nuclear submarine experience, and only one of its six nuclear submarines is operational. Mathias emphasised that policy and money alone do not build submarines – skilled people do, and there are not enough with the necessary expertise.
The US faces similar issues, unable to meet its own needs for nuclear submarines and unwilling to guarantee deliveries to Australia, despite Australia’s $2 billion payments each to the US and UK submarine construction industries to improve their infrastructure.
Late last year, a US congressional report criticised the lack of clarity on Australia’s use of AUKUS submarines in a potential conflict with China. Prime Minister Albanese had refused US Defence Under-Secretary Elbridge Colby’s attempts to commit Australia to war over Taiwan and declined to increase military spending as urged by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
More recently, however, following Minister of Defence Marles’s US visit, Bryan Clark, a commentator from a conservative US think tank, suggested that assurances were secretly made that the submarines would support allied operations, including actions against China.
