Pentagon Reviewing Submarine Defense Partnership With UK and Australia

Since its inception in 2021, the AUKUS trilateral security partnership has focused heavily on providing Australia with more advanced nuclear-powered submarines.

National flags of Australia, Great Britain, and the United States in front of the USS Asheville, a Los Angeles-class nuclear powered fast attack submarine, during a tour of HMAS Stirling in Perth, Australia, on March 16, 2023. AAP Image/Richard Wainwright

The U.S. Department of Defense has begun reviewing its trilateral security cooperation partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia, known as AUKUS, a U.S. defense official has told The Epoch Times.

The defense official said the review of the AUKUS, which formed during President Joe Biden’s term, seeks to determine whether the defense partnership is consistent with President Donald Trump’s current agenda.

“This means ensuring the highest readiness of our servicemembers, that allies step up fully to do their part for collective defense, and that the defense industrial base is meeting our needs. This review will ensure the initiative meets these commonsense, America First criteria,” the defense official said.

AUKUS was formed in 2021 with an initial focus on boosting Australia’s access to nuclear submarine technology, which the United States and the United Kingdom both possess.

Furnishing Australia with nuclear submarines could bolster the country’s naval power and create an added check against aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region by the People’s Republic of China.

However, U.S. defense policymakers may have concerns about what warships are available to the U.S. Navy. The Navy has set a goal to expand its battle force fleet from 295 ships to 390 in 2054, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis. Despite this goal, the fleet is expected to decrease over the next five years before it starts to grow.

Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has expressed skepticism toward AUKUS and specifically the portions of the partnership concerned with arming Australia with nuclear-powered submarines.

In August 2024, Colby indicated that he wouldn’t write off AUKUS if the partnership helps deliver more submarines on such a timeline that they could deter a conflict with China, but he said, “That’s an empirical and concrete question—not a philosophical one.”

More recently, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressed doubts that Australia would actually get new submarines through AUKUS, given the current state of U.S. shipbuilding.

“Unless the Americans are able to dramatically change the pace at which they’re producing submarines, and there’s no reason to believe they will be able to do so, we will not ever get the submarines that were promised,” Turnbull said in March.

In April, Trump signed executive orders in hopes of boosting the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

At a House hearing on June 10, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Department of Defense is having “honest conversations” with Australian and UK defense leaders.

Hegseth said he remains interested in a partnership that benefits the three countries.

“We don’t want to rely just on the architecture of the previous administration,” the defense secretary said. “We’re looking at sort of the opportunity for a signature program or programs we can work on, together, that benefit all three, that create processes or procurement opportunities of systems we need for future fights.”