1. The ridiculous down payment lie:
So here we are with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s total commitment to AUKUS — a dismal caving in to the Labor-right agenda. It would be convenient post-hoc cynicism to say that this was expected. One had thought that a nominally left government might find a way to triangulate between the demands of the permanent security establishment, the right, and setting a mildly independent agenda. But no. Australia’s defence policy is coloured not by a desire to uphold international law or the so-called “international rules-based order”, as the Albanese government frequently insists, but conversely by a desire to protect the dominance of the United States.
“The singular goal of our defence policy is to show relevance to the United States in its quest to uphold its own primacy,” said former army intelligence officer turned historian Professor Clinton Fernandes.
The amount being voluntarily given to the US as an AUKUS down payment is not the widely reported $3 billion figure – it is $4.7 billion. This is because to date the government – meaning Ministers, the Department, and the RAN – have hidden the fact that all their references to $3 billion have omitted a critical detail – that is in US currency, not Australian.
The money is supposed to be our chip-on for half the cost of building a new shipyard - in the US. The joke is that the $3 billion, even if delivered, would go nowhere near to addressing the scale of the industrial shortfall.
Speaking to an unnamed journalist in Washington on November 1, the following exchange with Defence Minister Richard Marles occurred:
“JOURNALIST: In terms of Australia’s contribution do you ever see a point in which Australia may need to lift its $3 billion input?
“MARLES: We’ve, as part of this process, made clear what Australia’s contribution is. It’s very significant. Of course, the passage of the legislation obviously enables that contribution to be made. It’s a fair contribution in the context of the overall uplift on the industrial base here in the United States and what will of course happen with the development of the industrial base in Australia.”
Similarly, on September 15 the head of the nuclear-powered submarine task force, VADM Jonathan Mead, leaving an ASPI conference in Canberra was also asked about the $3 billion figure by journalist Colin Clark, quoted as saying:
“It’s partly long-lead items but it’s also partly working on those yards where our submarines will come out of for us.”
The story appeared under the headline: “Aussies to pour $3B into US nuke boat yards, long lead-time items for AUKUS subs.”
After the San Diego announcement of the “optimal pathway” on March 14 this year, the media first widely reported the duplicitous $3 billion figure based on background information supplied by Australian officials. Outlets carrying this included the ABC, The Australian, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review.
Government people have been very careful – in a way that looks coordinated – to omit the currency being referred to, leaving the impression that $3 billion is in Australian rather than US currency. This has never been corrected or clarified until a few days ago, and then only late at night during a previously unreported Senate Estimates hearing.
Standard practice is that all government purchases are announced in Australian dollars, irrespective of the country of origin of the contract. This is particularly so for Defence equipment with everything from submarines to satellite contracts being in AUD for public statements and media releases.
The apparent purpose of nominating $3 billion as Australia’s contribution to the extremely profitable US submarine building sector is to disguise and minimise the true amount being transferred. Using today’s exchange rate of US $1 = AU $1.56 the AUKUS commitment will be $4.68 billion, a more than 50% increase over what the public have been led to believe.
The cat has been let out of the bag by two inquiries – one in Washington and another in Canberra.
On October 25, the ‘US House Armed Service Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces Holds Hearing On AUKUS Submarine Industrial Base’ heard repeated references to the Australian commitment, clearly in the context that the $3 billion was in US, not Australian currency.
Meanwhile, late at night in Canberra – also on October 25 – Senate Estimates heard the following from the deputy head of the Australian Submarine Agency:
“Rear Adm. Buckley: In terms of the uplift to the US system, we have provision for US$3 billion—that’s the provision that we’ve allocated within our model. On the UK side, we’re still working through what that provision might be.”
And shortly afterwards:
“Senator Simon BIRMINGHAM: To be clear, it’s US $3 billion?
“Rear Adm. Buckley: It’s US $3 billion.
“Senator BIRMINGHAM: Is that funding subject to the normal currency adjustment that defence gets for major acquisitions and those factors? As the dollar has gone down, is defence having to find more to meet that US $3 billion.
“Rear Adm. Matthew Buckley: My short answer is yes, it would be subject to those arrangements. Our agreement with our partners was for US $3 billion, so yes, it would be.”
In summary, for at least the past eight months the government has implied a far lower figure will be given to the US rather than the actual amount – an unprecedented occurrence for large Defence contracts. The motivation is presumably to minimise embarrassment and live in hope that the correct $4.7 billion is never reported.
2. The lie that AUKUS is a "done deal"
Seven months after Albanese joined Biden and the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in San Diego to announce the AUKUS plans, there remains uncertainty over congressional approvals needed for them to succeed. While Biden told reporters during the visit he was confident the required legislation would pass, he declined to provide a personal guarantee of success. Albanese said he remained “very confident of a very positive outcome”.
As well as the complication of congressional dysfunction, doubts about Australia’s willingness to join forces with the US in a war against China are also being cited by congressional researchers as a potential obstacle to the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal.
Albanese’s looming visit to China will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first visit to the country by Gough Whitlam in 1973. Asked on Tuesday whether or not he was walking a diplomatic tightrope between the strategic competitors – Washington and Beijing – the prime minister said Australians wanted him “to be direct about our interests”.
“China knows that we’re in an alliance with the United States,” Albanese said. “They know that we’re a nation that stands up for human rights and for the rule of law, and they expect us to do that. I’ve been direct about that.”
He said Australia wanted to stabilise the diplomatic relationship with China and to get trade going again between the two countries. Australia and China would “cooperate wherever we can … disagree where we have differences and [be] open and honest about them and can talk those issues through”.
“We have different political systems, of course, and different values, but it always makes sense to have dialogue and to be talking.”
At the end of the day, countries have interests not friends. The US will only approve transfer of their precious few nuclear submarines to Australia if it is in its interest. Whatever is said by President Joe Biden in 2023, by the early 2030s it is extremely hard to see how those in power will agree to any transfer of nuclear submarines to Australia, given its own shortfalls and needs.
This is a political reality that has yet to be acknowledged by the Albanese government. The political risk is heightened by the fact the final approval to transfer a nuclear submarine will require both a future US administration to approve and a future US congressional vote. Anyone watching US politics in 2023 would be brave to gamble on that playing out with any certainty in 2033. Meanwhile, Australia is spending billions on this pipedream.
An accident by the Australian navy operating US-made nuclear-powered submarines could result in American warships being banned from foreign ports, a new report ( Congressional Research Service report ) warns US legislators, providing fresh ammunition for congressional sceptics to scuttle the AUKUS deal. Such an accident might “call into question for third-party observers the safety of all US Navy nuclear-powered ships”, potentially affecting “US public support for operating US Navy nuclear-powered ships and/or the ability of US Navy nuclear-powered ships to make port calls around the world for purposes of sending deterrent signals of alliance resolve and solidarity to China, Russia or other potential adversaries”.
3. The lie that Australia will build submarines here
The $368bn AUKUS plan to build nuclear submarines in Adelaide has been labelled “a fairytale” and “pork barrelling” by Alexander Downer, Australia’s longest serving foreign minister.
Downer said on Monday 30 October 2023 that the central plank of AUKUS would “drain the national economy”, joining a number of elder statespersons with concerns about the feasibility or desirability of building nuclear submarines.
Under the AUKUS plan, in the early 2030s Australia will acquire US Virginia-class submarines. Australia will upgrade the shipyard at Osborne, South Australia immediately to begin constructing new SSN-AUKUS submarines by the end of the decade for delivery in the early 2040s. The entire plan is estimated to cost up to $368bn between now and the mid-2050s.
On Monday 30 October 2023, Downer questioned where Australia would get “$360,000 million dollars from”. “Getting the nuclear submarines is important to national and, more broadly, regional security, so I’m in favour of that, but building them in Australia was way too expensive and it will never happen,” he told Radio National.
“None of the politicians in power today will be in power by [the time the submarines are launched in the 2040s]. They won’t have to deal with the consequences of this; some future government will have to deal with it.”
Developing Australia’s capability to build nuclear submarines is a central plank of the AUKUS plan, to overcome concerns in the US Congress that selling Australia “scarce” nuclear submarines will diminish US national security.
On Thursday, 26 October 2023 the US congressional budget office published a report warning the sale of between three and five Virginia-class boats to Australia in the 2030s “would reduce the number of attack submarines available to the [US] Navy”. The report said US shipyards were already “struggling” to meet existing demand.
Downer served as foreign minister in the Howard government from 1996 to 2007, when Australia commissioned its Collins-class submarines, the first to be built in Australia. Some of these six vessels may now be required to operate until 2050 as stopgap while the nuclear submarine fleet is built.
Downer said: “A bit of pork barrelling – building a road here, or putting some money into a teaching room and a sports ground there – probably doesn’t matter very much, and it’s more or less acceptable and accepted part of the political process.
“But when you’re talking of, in this particular case, hundreds of billions of dollars, then you have to realise that this sort of pork barrelling is having a pretty negative effect on the national economy.”
“So the Collins-class submarines could have been built in Sweden, it probably would have been better to have built them in Sweden and [we could have] just bought them from the Swedes, but still, I mean, that’s a very long time ago, so that’s been done.”
The AUKUS plan has also been criticised by the former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull over concerns Australia won’t be able to operate nuclear submarines without US expertise and former Labor prime minister Paul Keating for being an expensive and unnecessary deterrent against China.
4. The lie that we're getting 3 new subs being built at the new US shipyard we're paying for
Over the weekend (21-22 October 2023), the United States President Joe Biden put a $US50B supplementary budget request to Congress to fund weapons for Ukraine and humanitarian aid for Israelis and Palestinians following the Hamas attacks in Gaza. As part of that package, there’s a $US3.4B line item to support the US submarine industrial base.
This request seems to be addressing an AUKUS pre-condition of the Congress that the United States must improve its submarine production rate from two boats a year to three and get their existing boats out of maintenance yards faster, before any Virginia class submarines can be transferred to the Royal Australian Navy.
The US currently has two submarine production yards. This may have to go to three.
It now appears that the initial $US3B ($A4.7B) cheque that Albanese has promised to write out to the US Defense Secretary will be combined with this new US money to build a new shipyard capability – in the US.
So, as well as paying for each of the three submarines that are part of the deal, we’ll pitch in half the money to help build a new US shipyard to construct them. Except … wait for it … we’re not getting three new submarines. Two of them will be second hand boats, already one-third into their life span.
After we get two second hand and one new Virginia class submarine, we’re going to switch away from buying proven submarines to buying a brand new British submarine design.
Our Defence bureaucrats are planning to jump from a safe US program to a shipbuilder, BAE Systems, that was, at one stage during its last submarine program, four and a half years late and 53% over budget. BAE is the same shipbuilder for our current Hunter Class future frigate program, which is currently running about three years late.
The United Kingdom Government has just signed a design contract for the AUKUS submarine that, on publicly available information, does not include a requirement to engage Australian industry.
It’s the wrong time to inject Australian industry components in the AUKUS submarine after it has been designed. We’ll have missed the boat.
So, Paul Keating was wrong when he said AUKUS was the worst deal in all history. He missed the mark. It’s actually worse than what he said. It’s looking like the dumbest deal ever.
What Keating did get right, though, was a second statement “At the Kabuki show in San Diego [to announce the deal] a day or so ago, there’s three leaders standing there. Only one is paying. Our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing Happy Days are Here Again.”
5. The lie that all Australians support AUKUS
In August, the United States Studies Centre polled over 1,000 Australians on the key issues concerning Australia’s relationship with the United States. The results, published today, reveal a generational divide in how Australians see their country’s closest ally.
Young Australians hold a far less rosy view of US behaviour in Asia than older Australians. Fewer than a quarter of those aged 18–34 agree the United States plays a helpful role in the region.
This cohort are also markedly less likely to say the US alliance makes Australia safer. And only a third of those aged 18–34 think the AUKUS pact is a good idea for Australia, compared to a strong majority (62%) of those over 65 years old.
So, why does support for the so-called “unbreakable alliance” splinter among young people?
Whether obliquely or directly, initiatives like AUKUS are driven by the strategic needs of the growing competition between the United States and China.
Australian officials regularly speak of deterring aggression in the region and responding alongside the United States and “like-minded” partners to “coercive unilateral actions”. This is a thinly veiled swipe at Beijing’s growing assertiveness and regional ambitions.
But this China-centric alliance agenda is unlikely to resonate with young people. For them, another priority is front of mind: climate change.
The polling finds a majority of young Australians (57%) think their country should prioritise fighting climate change over competing with China. And compared to older Australians, those aged 18-34 are twice as likely to “strongly agree” with doing so.
These results are unsurprising. Young people have grown up in a time when unprecedented climatic events are the new norm and appear a much greater and more immediate threat than Beijing’s geostrategic ambitions.
According to UN Secretary General António Guterres, the world is now entering a grimly termed “era of global boiling.” We have just experienced the hottest global month on record in July. And just a few years after the costliest bushfire season in Australian history, we could be facing yet another “unprecedented” fire threat this summer.
If the Australia-US alliance is to endure, our leaders must embrace the challenge of climate change with the same urgency with which they have responded to China’s challenge to the regional order.
6. The lie that the AUKUS subs are the best because of invisibility
Even the full eight submarines we are supposed to eventually get won’t be deployable simultaneously, so, really, we’d be looking at one or two at sea at any one time. That could still be a significant capability—provided submarines remain largely invisible and invulnerable during their deployments To add to these concerns, the number of US attack submarines currently requiring maintenance is almost double the historical average, running at almost 37 per cent of their fleet. This significantly reduces their operational readiness.
But there’s the rub: might the potency of the AUKUS submarines be compromised by the very technologies being explored in Pillar 2? Back in 2019, the US Defense Science Board observed that quantum sensing applications were ‘currently poised for mission use’. Such improvements, married to more capable artificial intelligence, might render the seas less opaque than they are now. There would be a degree of irony if the technologies of Pillar 2 ended up substantially negating the very submarines so expensively procured under Pillar 1.
And the Chinese may already be ahead of the game. The Pentagon report says the new Chinese SHANG III class submarines are being built with a new generation of technologies aimed at enabling “clandestine” missions, so it is likely critical for Pentagon weapons developers to try to discern the relative maturity and capability of these technologies in order to ensure Virginia-class innovations maintain overmatch or superiority against them. A significant essay published in “Covert Shores” as far back as 2017 analyzes earlier variants of the SHANG-class PLA submarines, stating that the boats do in fact have advanced quieting technologies. The essay says that, at this time, SHANG-class submarines were being built with “hidden enhancements such as improved sensors and better stealth.”
“As well as hidden enhancements such as improved sensors and possibly better stealth, the profile has changed markedly. The sail has been lengthened and a blended leading edge added, not unlike that on the U.S. Navy's Virginia Class SSN. behind the sail the casing has been raised. ….. The raised section behind the sail has been refined, gradually becoming less pronounced. The final significant difference is the addition of an integral towed sonar array. This feeds out from the top of the upper vertical rudder. Additionally, an anechoic coating using small square rubber tiles has been applied,” The essay states.
According to 2023 military assessments published by GlobalFirepower.com, China has 78 submarines, 10 more than the US Navy which leaves the US struggling to keep up. The concern among US Navy leaders and prominent members of Congress has been that Los Angeles-class submarines are retiring much faster than Virginia-class submarines can be built, leading may to express concern about a US Navy attack submarine deficit. This deficit has been expected to grow in the immediate years ahead, a key reason why Navy weapons developers have been working closely with members of Congress and the industrial base to essentially “flex” production to help close the US Navy’s attack submarine deficit.
The PLA Navy will have three new hulls of this SHANG-class subs by 2025. “This new SHANG-class variant will enhance the PLAN’s anti-surface warfare capability and could provide a clandestine land-attack option if equipped with land-attack cruise missiles,” the Pentagon report says.
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