The UK’s Aukus
After 18 months of uncertainty, the AUKUS partnership has unveiled its long-term framework for pillar one, submarine acquisition. The plan has emerged as a grand piece of political craftsmanship, with logistical and financial questions momentarily left in the dust. The UK’s Astute Class submarine, alongside its in-development successor, has been selected for the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) new boats, which will be built in Adelaide and utilise US technology. Considering the role that Aukus plays in the UK’s post-Brexit search for identity, the perceived success of British negotiators to pull out “a win” will mean massive dividends for the government, but also for Whitehall and the UK’s defence industry.
Stood at a crossroads, with the Integrated Review Refresh around the corner and the Indo-Pacific ‘tilt’ yet to take form, Aukus is a mammoth political victory. Plans for submarine procurement and the interim period will be discussed below but it is still too early to undertake a full analysis. However, the role that Aukus plays for the UK, both ‘home and away’, has a range of soft and hard implications from identity to geopolitics.
What has the Aukus unveiling revealed?
While the debate on the surface reflected the question of whether it should be US or UK submarines that Australia acquires, it is not nearly that simple. Both the UK and US submarine procurement and operation have been mired by declining shipyard numbers and productivity, as well as shortages of trained specialists, and if nothing else the complexity of building stealthy, nuclear, and technologically cutting-edge submarines. For the Australians to get the boats they were promised, and to build them in Adelaide as politicians promised, negotiations were never going to be straightforward for any of the three nations.
The deal has gone to great lengths for all three states to be able to return home with the porkbarrel. The first aspect of the deal is a US-Australian quid-pro-quo, in which the US will allow Australia to purchase up to five Virginia Class submarines which will likely be jointly operated by the US Navy (USN) and RAN, allowing for training and experience on nuclear boats while not losing submarine capabilities. In return, Australia will heavily invest in the US’s submarine production sites in San Diego, allowing for problems in the production and maintenance chain to be overcome. The second part of the deal will see the UK and Australia collaborate to produce the UK’s Submersible Ship Nuclear Replacement (SSNR) - now dubbed SSN-Aukus - programme that is due to deliver Astute boat replacements in the late 2030s. The Australian boats will be built in Adelaide and will utilise US technology. This plan will see a procurement of 8-12 submarines for Australia, which will become operational around 2040. So far, all three administrations have expressed the plan to have been “a win”.
UK government branding for the ‘SSN-Aukus’
Sunak and the government’s payoff
This Aukus framework offers a range of victories for the UK, the first of which is for Rishi Sunak and the conservative government. The UK’s armed forces have been placed under a microscope through the Ukraine war, most recently being criticised as second-rate by a US general, while the donation of Challenger 2s was largely overlooked as a symbolic gesture. With the RAN selecting the Astute submarine, however, the government can once again argue that they are building and supporting a world-class military, and whoever lost an election for championing the armed forces? The UK’s submarine building and housing centres are also located in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, in the North-West of England, traditionally a ‘red wall’ Labour area. The sustainment of tens of thousands of jobs in the area, as well as the likely creation of more, will contribute to their local and electoral political capital and the government’s policy of “levelling up”. Labour, who were taken aback by the initial announcement in 2021, has been manoeuvred into firmly supporting the Conservative's deal, due to its strong links to jobs in these red-wall areas.
One of the biggest problems in shipbuilding and the defence industry is that without sustained workloads, the specialised workforces disintegrate, which leads to far more expensive defence procurement in the long run. The Aukus project will mean the maintenance of the workforce well into the 40s, at which time UK orders for the SSNR will resume. Due to the fact nuclear submarines are unavailable for export due to their highly sensitive technology, this deal is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the UK, a fact Sunak will be sure to pounce on.
It should also be stressed that the UK has the added plus of not seeking an end-product. Defence procurement is a painful process, with projects – especially submarines – often being delivered both late and over budget. Due to the scaling of technological capabilities, defence is also getting considerably more expensive for what often seems to be increasing less output. While Aukus will involve huge sums of UK investment, if it is over-schedule or over-budget, it is the Australian government that will be under fire from its citizens.
Whitehall’s sigh of relief
It is also essential to examine what the Aukus reveal means for Whitehall and “Global Britain”, which is still heavily in progress. Eight years of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and a plethora of politically tumultuous tenures have done much to discredit the UK on the international stage. Much of the nation’s economic and political previous clout has been stripped away and its post-Brexit identity has been thoroughly questioned. One of Whitehall’s attempts to rebuild the nation’s identity is the Indo-Pacific ‘tilt’. The tilt has come under fire in recent years for being empty rhetoric. Insignificant trade deals with the Australians and the Japanese, alongside falling diplomatic staff sizes across the Asia-Pacific have been cited by critics as proof of empty promises and poor efforts.
With the UK’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) being lost in the mail, Whitehall has bet most of its chips on Aukus being a political and identitarian success. Locking-in major defence and security cooperation with Australia offers the UK a secured alliance capable of weathering the changing tides of international politics. The need to find meaningful economic and diplomatic roots in the region has not been diminished, but anxieties in Whitehall will be greatly soothed by the fact the UK now has at least a few toes planted in the region.
Alongside the recently signed Global Combat Air System with Japan and Italy, the UK has growing diplomatic capital in the region. The ability to project the image of the UK that is reinvested in the region as a force for stability may just help elevate its worthiness of CPTPP membership or bilateral attention from India, Singapore, and beyond. Aukus, therefore, should be put into a wider context than just tensions with China or an ‘alliance of the anglosphere’, and instead understood as a genuine effort to cement themselves as more than a paper tiger.
With the Integrated Review Refresh emerging this week, we already know that there has been £5bn pledged to defence, £3bn of which will be devoted to the UK’s nuclear capabilities and kicking off the next phase of AUKUS. While there has been lots of discussion on the need to supplement our defence against Russia, it is the China-focused Aukus agreement that gets the lion's share of the money, and a large focus in Sunak’s recent comments on defence priorities. Though some fear the UK is overextending itself by going after both Russia and China, especially as Russia offers an immediate threat, we should not get bogged down in short-term defence planning, or reactionary policy making. Aukus, as mentioned above, is far more than simply a submarine deal and has a significant impact on the UK in a multitude of ways. Even if it is reduced to a military transaction, the second pillar of Aukus represents an important component of a range of the UK’s future defence and intelligence and technology capabilities. In this sense, while it may seem like a breakdown in prioritisation, it may be a smart long-term planning and investment.
With the MoD and the Government already updating their social media pages with the news, it's clear AUKUS is at the heart of several simultaneous bids for rejuvenation in Whitehall, the Military, and the Conservative Party.