Another nail in the coffin for Australia’s phantom defence needs
Nov 30, 2024
The US submarine base was always going to come first, not for the sake of supplying useless boats for Australia’s phantom defence needs, but for keeping an ever watchful US imperium stocked.
When news comes from across the Pacific about AUKUS, that laborious, unequal trilateral pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, it is almost never good. On reaching Australian news outlets, the material is accordingly laundered and starched for common consumption, giving the impression that all is well. Nuclear-powered submarines, albeit of the bottom shelf range from the US, will eventually make it to the Royal Australian Navy – or so we are told. And, even more remarkably, a special AUKUS submarine will be the product of the collaboration.
If you believe those sorts of things, astrology might be your calling. The promise of nuclear submarines was always the hook on which to hang US strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific. Whether Australian military personnel will ever see such beasts of the sea under their operation is less relevant than the creation of a fortified US outpost to quell any regional upstarts.
With AUKUS entirely focused on keeping the US war machine ready, with some bribing morsels thrown Australia’s way, all decisions will, ultimately, concern Washington’s own production targets. On November 25, the Office of Management and Budget delivered a request to the US Congress for US$5.7 billion in “emergency funding” to cover unexpected “shortfalls” in the Virginia-class submarine program.
Roughly US$2 billion is intended for addressing such shortfalls for two Virginia-class submarines slated for the 2024 fiscal year, while US$1.5 billion will go towards another anticipated shortfall for one Virginia-class boat in the FY-25 budget. The rest will furnish the prime contractors General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding to cover increased wages and unspecified “productivity enhancements”.
The urgent request for funding, as reported in Breaking Defense, is also coupled with what is described as an “anomaly” – Pentagon parlance for seeking money from Congress outside the limits of an ongoing resolution – that would allow the continued funding of the Columbia-class (SSBN-826) ballistic missile submarine program were lawmakers to pass a continuing resolution prior to the expiry of government funding on December 20.
Twelve new SSBNs of the Columbia Class are intended as replacements for the 14 Ohio-class SSBNs. A report from the Congressional Research Service published in January this year – mandatory reading, one would have thought, for AUKUS devotees – notes figures that naval gazing denialists in Canberra repeatedly ignore: the Navy’s revised procurement rate of 2.33 Virginia-class submarines coupled with one Columbia-class boat has become a naval dogma.
In a snatch of information from an anonymous US Navy official, one finds that the Virginia-class submarine program “is not where it needs to be right now. The program and the shipyards are not producing submarines at the rate that our national security strategy and the national defense strategy require.”
This has been the lay of the land (and sea) for some time. The Virginia-class program has tended to fall short in terms of production, coming in at 1.2 to 1.3 boats a year. The idea that the US Navy can make targets of two Virginia-class submarines and one Columbia-class submarine is proving to be a fanciful one. But those in naval construction are always insufferably optimistic, and almost always wrong. Hence these words from the same official: “The phasing of these investments is focused on improving shipbuilder capability, capacity and efficiency and thereby reducing submarine construction delays […] and ultimately controlling costs of future submarines.” (That astrological streak is hard to shake.)
As far back as July 2023, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker openly questioned whether the projected production rate of nuclear-powered boats would comply within AUKUS commitments. “As it stands, the AUKUS plan would transfer US Virginia-class submarines to a partner nation even before we have met our own Navy’s requirements.”
Evidently, the funnelling of Australian funding into US submarine production enabled by the 2024 National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA) has not eased concerns, with little to show by way of returns. Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge rightly wonders where the latest call for emergency fits Australia’s own hefty contributions, given the “complete lack of transparency” in the process.
With the request for emergency funding seeping into sedated Australian news outlets, the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) saw no reason to panic. In words so utterly detached from reality, the ASA, through a spokesman, called such a request evidence of “the bipartisan commitment in the US to uplifting its industrial base, a critical enabler for delivering AUKUS.”
Shoebridge offers a more accurate and biting assessment: “No serious observer of the US submarine industrial capacity thinks it will come anywhere near producing surplus submarines for Australia.” It won’t, and the missing point in the non-analysis offered by the ASA and the AUKUS cheer squad in Canberra is that the US submarine base was always going to come first, not for the sake of supplying useless boats for Australia’s phantom defence needs, but for keeping an ever watchful US imperium stocked.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
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