Pillar Two of AUKUS More Important Than Nuclear Subs, but Is Floundering, Says Analyst

Director of Strategic Analysis Australia Michael Shoebridge says the technology exchange part of AUKUS matters more, but is in trouble.

The sun rises over a Royal Australian Navy submarine berthed at HMAS Stirling in Garden Island, Australia, on Jan. 21, 2021. POIS Yuri Ramsey/Australian Defence Force via Getty Images

Pillar Two of AUKUS, which involves the exchange of technology between the United States, Australia, and the UK, has more potential benefit to Australia than Pillar One—the purchase of nuclear-propelled submarines—but it has become “bogged down” by regulation says a leading strategic analyst.

Michael Shoebridge, director of Strategic Analysis Australia, says the United States does not possess the capacity to deliver the submarines it has promised Australia. This echoes concerns expressed recently in a report to Congress from the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

“At the moment, the United States does not have the capacity to produce ballistic missile subs and attack subs at the rate needed to meet its own needs,” Shoebridge told The Epoch Times via email.

“[It] has been spending to lift the production rate for about five years now but it has not happened.

“A Virginia-class sub takes around seven years to build, so any sub not under construction now won’t be available in the early 2030s, [which is] when Australia wants to get it’s first.  So, any ‘get-well’ program only helps AUKUS later that decade.”

The only way Australia will get delivery within the promised time frame is if a U.S. president decides that AUKUS is sufficiently important to justify selling the first three Virginia-class submarines to come off the production line, even though that would reduce the number available to the U.S. Navy.

That’s an unlikely prospect, given research that shows the American public is not overly concerned by any potential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

For its part, Australia is “behind the curve” in implementing its part in AUKUS, Shoebridge said.

“We’re doing the easy stuff and talking about it like it’s an epic achievement: handing money over to the U.S. and UK and getting Australians into U.S. and UK training programs,” he said.

“However, the design and build of the core infrastructure for AUKUS are lagging. The Henderson precinct [in Western Australia] announcement recently is a good example—three years on from AUKUS being announced, we have an announcement that consultants will get $125 million to do pre-feasibility studies on what the ship and submarine facilities should look like. That means any new infrastructure resulting from these studies is at least seven years away and probably more like 10.

He added that there lacked any similar announcements for submarine facilities on the east coast and also no timelines published for a radioactive waste repository.

Lacking Workforce Mobilisation

Australia also faces significant workforce constraints which hamper its ability to deliver its side of AUKUS.

“Engineers are in rising demand for our resource sector, renewables, for the large infrastructure projects going on across the country, and for other defence programs like shipbuilding,” Shoebridge points out.

“So, there are large and growing challenges for Australia’s implementation of AUKUS, none of which are being openly discussed by officials and ministers, who insist everything is on track and any problems are just natural phenomena with a programme of this size.

“Even if this was just natural, effective programme management means acknowledging and addressing challenges, not just insisting there’s nothing to see here.

Shoebridge is not alone in his prediction that Pillar One may falter or fail altogether: the Australia Institute recently told a Senate Committee that the lack of planning for AUKUS is “deeply worrying.”

But this wouldn’t reduce security in the Indo-Pacific before the mid-2050s, Shoebridge says, “because it takes until then for Australia to get its eighth sub, meaning it’s [only] then that [it] can reliably deploy two nuclear subs, given maintenance cycles.”

This photo taken on Sept. 22, 2023, shows a Chinese Coast Guard ship (R) blocking a Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) ship as it neared the Chinese-controlled Scarborough Shoal in the disputed South China Sea. TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images

But the underlying focus of AUKUS isn’t submarines, it’s about deterring Beijing from war by resetting the military balance in the Indo-Pacific region away from China.

“And here, Pillar Two should matter more, and have an earlier effect, than the subs program, which gets all the public focus,” Showbridge said.

“But [it] has been bogged down in regulatory and policy measures between the three governments that are about spreading U.S. ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] controls more deeply across the UK and Australian defence sectors.”

Pillar Two is supposed to bring technologies not currently used in the defence sector into the hands of the three nations’ militaries.

Shoebridge cites “proliferating commercial drone technology, data analytics, AI that are in routine use in the corporate world, and cyber technologies also used broadly outside our militaries” as examples.

But he warns it’s “in worse trouble than the subs programme because the implementation is not focused on bringing new entrants with these commercial technologies into the defence sector, it’s instead about putting the high wall—that is already an obstacle to this in the U.S.—around Australia’s defence sector too.”

Return The Focus of AUKUS Firmly to Beijing

With talk in Congress of America not supplying any nuclear-propelled submarines to Australia, the three nations need to return their focus to the real purpose of AUKUS, which is aimed squarely at limiting the CCP’s ambitions and activity in the region “and to do this every day from now over the next few decades.”

For that reason, Shoebridge says he is “attracted” to alternatives like those set out in the recent Congressional Research Service (CRS), which suggests Australia instead acquire B21 bombers which able to strike at long distances and use inexpensive but effective weapons, as well as equip its three militaries with large numbers of diverse autonomous systems in the air, on and under the sea, and on the land.

“We need to invest in the latent capability of our medium and small companies, including those outside the traditional defence sector, to generate this affordable mass rapidly,” he recommends.

“AUKUS taking the new path set out in the CRS report would strengthen deterrence of China, and do so much faster than the current plan. That would reassure regional partners,” Shoebridge said.