Pillar 1 of the AUKUS security arrangement between Australia, Britain and the United States, envisages the transfer and building of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.
So far, the money stream has flown into the military industrial complexes of Britain and the US, both desperate to keep the production of these absurd boats steady.
Australia is yet to see these white elephants and the Labor government in the meantime is allowing the country to become garrisoned to Washington’s geopolitical vanities.
China has become the target for Canberra’s foreign policy dunces, despite being Australia’s most lucrative trading partner and not being an adversary in any sense.
in September 2021 as “an enhanced trilateral security partnership”, AUKUS has stuttered its way into 2025.
The conservative media, such asThe Economist,AUKUS on January 9 as “ambitious but expensive”.The Australian, eager for a war with the “Yellow Peril”, describes it as “a defence revolution”.
,adefense and national security focused site,onto the idea that Australia’s naval modernisation is central in this endeavour, although it never mentions the obvious beneficiary.
“Nevertheless, AUKUS allows for a broader integration of technological advances in its partners and much-needed modernisation of the Australian navy.”
This optimistic glow, despite the delays and blunders, caninAustralian Defence.
The military industrial complex never needs concrete reasons to exist. It’s a creature onto itself. “Global firms are partnering with Australian based entities in a bid to position themselves for lucrative AUKUS submarine contracts, despite law reforms needed to progress.”
One of these is the Texas-based, an engineering and construction firm. Gillian Cagney, its Australia and New Zealand president, is proud of its “thousand engineers who have nuclear capability”.
Cagney, like most CEOs in this line of work, is good at saying nothing. “We have that experience and capability that we will be supporting the joint venture to bring to bear and making sure we’re bringing the best in class globally.”
But even Cagney concedes that the whole business of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy, known as “Pillar 1”, is dicey.
But that is hardly a reason to panic, she said: “One of the things as Worley Fluor Australia we are able to do is in multiple sectors globally is to ramp up to meet our customers’ needs so it’s no different.”
United States Studies Centre senior research associate Alice NasonFrance’séپDzthat hiccups are bound to take place with such big tasks. “In a project of this size, length and complexity of AUKUS, it’s no surprise that disruptions and delays are going to arise.”
The truism here is intended to excuse the unpardonable: Why projects of such scale are needed is left dangling in ether.
These dreary justifications dressed up as analysis do not hide AUKUS’ fundamental defect.
It remains, almost entirely, governed by US domestic and foreign interests, and speaks to Australia’s confected fears. It advances an agenda of insecurity, not security.
The analysts cannot assure anybody about what Congress will do if the submarine supply quota lags, or if there will be a war over Taiwan.
No publication, however supportive of the business of war, can avoid the teasing worries.
Even the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the US defence industry funded outlet based in Canberra, has gone so far as to consider a heresy. In December, itby Peter Briggs, past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, suggesting that Canberra consider acquiring “at least 12 submarines of the French Suffren design.
“The current AUKUS plan for eight nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) has always been flawed, and now its risks are piling up.”
And so we return to where we began: a Franco-Australian agreement to acquire submarines that was sunk in 2021 by Coalition Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
All in all, forget the Pillar 1 submarines and focus, instead, on the second “pillar”,which is all about entrenching the military industrial complex into Australian universities while also seeing a greater deployment of USmilitary assets to the north of the country. Pillar 2 covers thedevelopment of advanced weapons technologies, using artificial intelligence and quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, underwater drones, and advanced cyber capabilities.
Labor has allowed Australia to be enlisted as servitor, grounds keeper and nurse. Retirees from the US Navy are being given astronomical sums in consultancy fees to divulge wisdom they do not have on junkets here.
Australian think tankers, purporting to be academics, make similar trips to Washington to celebrate a failing agreement.
The price citizens are paying is already savagely burdensome. It may well, in the long run, prove worse.
[Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University.]