The US Navy's decision to reduce submarine production for 2025 has raised concerns among both advocates and opponents of the AUKUS defense agreement.
US President Joe Biden has slashed the number of nuclear-powered submarines that the Navy will buy in 2025 from two to one in his bloated budget request.
While struggling to keep up the current rate of new launches, the Navy must now speed up ship-building to compensate for the looming sale of three Virginia-class fast attack submarines, armed with torpedoes and cruise missiles, to Australia by the end of the decade.
Democrat Connecticut representative and co-chair of the congressional AUKUS caucus Joe Courtney slammed the Navy's decision, saying “it makes little or no sense,” especially given that the submarine fleet is already below planned strength at 17 boats.
“Given the new commitment the Department of Defense and Congress made last year to sell three submarines to our ally Australia, which I enthusiastically support, the ramifications of the Navy’s proposal will have a profound impact on both countries’ navies,” Courtney told reporters.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240314/is-aukus-in-trouble-australias-submarine-deal-with-us-in-turmoil-over-production-cut-1117277751.html

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The sweetest words in the English language: I told you so.

French submarines, the first of which were scheduled for delivery in 2034 under a $90bn program with France’s Naval Group – before the contract was ripped up by the Morrison government – were lethal and affordable.

Now we know that the US is very reluctant to sell us Virginia Class nuclear powered SSNs under the AUKUS agreement.

https://johnmenadue.com/i-told-you-so-no-aussie-subs-in-2030s-total-reliance-on-the-yanks/

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The general theme of delusion and the particular theme of ‘dead in the water’ as they apply to the entire AUKUS arrangements are provocations worthy of taking further.

These are, of course, extracted from the essays in the most recent issue of Australian Foreign Affairs (paywalled). The most prominent of these, authored by Professor Hugh White, deserves special mention. In short it is an estimable contribution to the debate which marshals a great many of the arguments against AUKUS – his own, and others – which first erupted in the immediate aftermath of its announcement, and followed ever since, not least, and numerously, on this site. It is not being in any way ungenerous to White to mention the others; rather, it is a requirement of intellectual honesty. A similar tribute is due his shorter essay on the Navy’s response to the Surface Fleet Review in “The Saturday Paper” (also paywalled).

The situation is dire: what White has produced could be likened to a revolution in Crown Law and forensic pathology: an auditor’s review, autopsy, and coronial determination – all undertaken in anticipation of the the subject’s demise but nevertheless while it is living but failing.

As more of the organs of the subject are examined it becomes clear that observers could pursue further paths of inquiry which buttress the sense of delusion.

To begin, at the core of the national debate on AUKUS is a question that has not been answered comprehensively by government: as White phrases it, “either we design our capabilities to help America project power against China, or we design them to prevent China projecting power against us.” The respective designs, according to White, are radically different.

What is constant, however, is that the ADF is being designed primarily for a war with China should deterrence fail, a consensus among many strategic commentators who, in their inability to empathise are equally unable to understand a different historically informed knowledge and understanding of the world so wrapped up are they in their own particularity and “exceptionalism.”

China is, therefore, a linear extrapolation of what the US constructs China to be on the basis of reflecting upon itself. Australia is in lockstep both epistemologically and strategically.

This gives rise to the first of the many conundrums. The US has a disposition to war with China but no strategy to relate to China other than by force and the threat of force. Nowhere in official US pronouncements is there to be found a comprehensive plan for engaging with China on equal terms beneath the threshold of violent conflict, or even actions under the aegis of so-called hybrid war which includes clashes across the spectrum of diplomacy, finance, commerce, and technology.

In simple terms the answer to the question, “what does the US reasonably expect from China?” is silence – except for the inference that it should accept US dominance.

It cannot be to deter China from attacking the global shipping lanes when it is itself so dependent on them.

Perversely, given that China is an Asian power, and the US manifestly is not, the US is apparently uninterested in different ways to create a renewed concert of powers in the Indo-Pacific.

In the absence of a proper strategy and in the presence of its surrogate, attitude, the US has proceeded to impute to China its own mindset for ordering the region – namely the propositions advanced by Alfred Thayer Mahanian in the late 19th Century that, inevitably, great powers sought to expand, anticipated conflict between themselves, and would engage in major naval battles for the command of the world’s oceans which, when achieved, would determine the victor. It is an inherently offensive strategy.

Notwithstanding its embrace down the years, its applicability has been uneven; as a guide to success in a full-scale (but non-nuclear) war with China, it has the status of a vagrant – a body of hypothetical maritime strategic thought without visible means of thought.

Leaving to one side the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 (because the circumstances of engagement were sui generis), there is no supporting evidence in World War I, or World War II. Indeed, in the Atlantic theater the greatest threat was posed by submarines which, ultimately, were defeated by sophisticated combination of intelligence, small unit tactics and evolving anti-submarine warfare. In the Pacific the decisive factor was carrier-based air power.

Since 1944 there have been no great, peer-to-peer naval battles. The US has used its preponderant naval power exclusively against Third World adversaries.

To the extent that we can understand the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) it is not designed according to Mahanian principles. Its configuration, notwithstanding its numerical superiority of its surface fleet over that of the USN, is defensive, designed for regional operations and securing its lines of communications (where it can) and mainly deployed within the bounds defined by the coast of mainland China and the 1st Island Chain – which, extending eastwards, is composed of the Kuril Islands, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyu Island, Taiwan, Formosa, the northern Philippines, and Borneo.

Paradoxically, this is both a bastion in which China is predominant on land, sea, and in the air, and yet an enclosure in which, in a major war with the US, the PLAN would be confined. The “escape routes” from it are relatively few and well-defined for both a surface fleet and submarines. In sum, both would be highly vulnerable to both the US naval forces and whatever allied fleet elements would be arrayed against them.

China, it must be assumed, regards this as an irrevocable fact of strategic geography. Equally, it should be assumed that it is aware that attempting to bust out of the 1st Island Chain on the surface – to where? – is likely to meet with as much strategic success as did the allied naval attempts to “force the Dardanelles” in 1915, and the Kriegsmarine’s “Channel Dash” by the Scharnhorst, Geneisenau, Prinz Eugen and their escorts in February 1942.

It must also be assumed that Chinese strategists concur with and understand the implications of the growing consensus that developments in anti-ship warfare have made surface fleets extremely vulnerable in a major, peer-to-peer war.

Beyond their own deliberations they would have noted the series of 24 war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2022 (focusing on China invading Taiwan), and a series of other war games between the US and China, conducted by the Pentagon, its outside contractors, and consultants (including the RAND Corporation), which found that:

• China might, or might not, succeed in taking Taiwan.

• The costs to the US and its allies were estimated at tens of thousands of its service members, and half of the present inventory in the USAF and the USN (including 2 aircraft carriers and between 7 and 20 cruisers and destroyers.

• The risks of approaching China where it is predominant are so catastrophic that the choice is between either an extended battle which is likely to fail but with horrendous costs or, alternatively, deploying the US surface fleet hundreds or even thousands of miles away from China’s bastion – effectively removing it from a major role.

As far as submarines in general are concerned, including nuclear-powered submarines, there is an emerging consensus that undersea and antisubmarine warfare technologies are disruptive of the traditional undetectability of submarines.

Specifically, attempts to deploy the PLAN’s submarines outside the 1st Island Chain would be even more subject to encircling pressures than its surface fleet. The charts of the passages might as well be annotated with the warning reportedly inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules: ‘ne plus ultra.’

None of this, it seems, has permeated the AUKUS dreamworld. To the contrary, there is euphoria born of technophilia – the SSN-as-Apex Predator. Here, there are blatant contradictions and an appalling lack of historical awareness.

An example of the former is the loud justification for the acquisition of SSNs in terms of their undetectability, and yet at the same time pursuing the acquisition of anti-submarine warfare capabilities because they can detect and destroy submarines.

Then there is the refusal to seriously comprehend history as change. Consider the following. All going well – a heroic assumption – the Royal Australian Navy will not have the proposed surface fleet for another 20 years, nor will the full complement of SSNs be operational for at least another 30 years; indeed, given the high probability of delays, some experts in the field have made forecasts extending in to the 2060s and even the 2070s.

If a time frame of just 20 years is adopted the first conclusion is that this considerably exceeds the period of 10-15 years which the war-with-China commentators estimate as most likely.

The second is that scepticism about “Apex predators” is foolish:

• The iconic Spitfire of World War II was introduced into the RAF in 1938; production ceased in 1948. In the meantime, it was surpassed by the advent of British, German, and US jet fighters.

• The equally iconic Lancaster bomber was introduced in 1942; it was retired from the RAF in 1953. But, even by 1942, its days were numbered when the first jet bomber took to the skies.

• Supersonic fighters appeared in 1951; supersonic bombers in 1948.

• Battleships simply never lived up to the hype which accompanied them despite them being exceedingly expensive: their record was of not being decisive in battle. Eventually, they gave way to the aircraft carrier – also expensive and a major component of surface fleets now judged to be both vulnerable and irrelevant in a major war.

Third, where is the sense of possible political realignment?

In the 10 years following 1945 in the West, the status of the Soviet Union and China went from allies to Cold War threats; two former fascist enemies of the allies in WW II – Italy (1949) and Germany (1954) – were welcomed into NATO.

And then there’s been the promiscuous engagement of NATO with former members of the Warsaw pact following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

What is missing in all of this is any sense that something is missing. Grandiloquent international political-strategic arrangements are at best (to borrow from chemistry) emulsions – only temporarily stable because they are composed of things that don’t mix well together. A common enemy or set of enemies enhances what is inevitably an unstable mixture but it demands compromises.

For now, China (and Russia) are serving this purpose but the very possibility that India, especially on its current trajectory, could be a power inimical to Australia’s national interests is simply an unmentionable prospect. It is to Hugh White’s credit that he mentions such a possibility in passing in both his analysis of AUKUS and the surface fleet review.

From the perspective of all that’s been brought to bear, it is no doubt likely that delusion and incompetence over many years and by many decision makers have led to this state of undoing. But visitors from a parallel universe, or writers of fiction in search of material for their latest novels and screenplays might conclude otherwise: the current state of affairs is indistinguishable from a regime which would be imposed by a hostile power that had, by stealth and a chronic lack of scrutiny, taken over select government agencies.

https://johnmenadue.com/dead-in-the-water-the-aukus-ssn-delusion/

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The arms trade is known for being one of the most corrupt of all legal international trades.

UK research shows that this corruption drives and distorts arms procurement decisions. Arms purchases that were not previously being considered can suddenly appear on the agenda.

Before delving into AUKUS, an egregious distortion in Australian defence procurement, I’ll briefly revisit the original French submarine contract.

The research shows that submarines, in particular, are a procurement area where a very high proportion of the small overall number of deals involve major corruption.

French multinational Naval Group had been wrangling with Malcolm Turnbull’s government for almost two years trying to get the formal contract signed.

In August 2018, Scott Morrison became PM.

Soon after, Naval Group hired David Gazard well-connected lobbyist, former Liberal candidate, and close friend of Scott Morrison, to help them get the deal over the line.

Within months, the Morrison government had signed the contract.

In early 2019, the ABC reported, ‘Naval Group confirmed the arrangement but did not disclose how much Mr Gazard’s company was being paid for its lobbying services’.

Mr Gazard’s company, DPG Advisory Solutions, declined to comment to the ABC about its role. I sent similar questions to Mr Gazard this week and had received no response by deadline.

At the time Australia put Naval Group on the shortlist, the company was under investigation for corruption in three other arms deals: two for submarines (Pakistan and Malaysia) and one for frigates (Taiwan). The Abbott government would have known this.

These were not minor corruption cases: all involved murder.

French authorities commenced another corruption investigation into Naval Group (submarines; Brazil) in late 2016, after Australia had awarded Naval Group the deal, but before we signed the contract.

How did the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments shortlist, select, and then sign a contract with a company being investigated in four separate corruption cases?

Such is the MO of Australia’s Defence Department.

BAE Systems Australia is Defence’s largest contractor and has been for six of the past eight years.

BAE Systems is set to be a significant beneficiary of AUKUS. It has already been handed a £3.95 billion (A$7.5 billion) contract for the detailed design phase of the AUKUS submarines.

BAE Systems provides perhaps the best-known example of systematic high-level arms industry corruption.

Britain’s series of arms deals with Saudi Arabia was, and remains, its biggest ever arms deal. It earned BAE Systems at least £43 billion in revenue between 1985 and 2007, with further deals still ongoing. The deal included £6 billion pounds in ‘commissions’ (bribes), paid to the Saudis.

In addition, during the 1990s and 2000s, in ‘a deliberate choice that came from the top’ BAE Systems maintained a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands called Red Diamond Trading. This vehicle channelled hundreds of millions of pounds of bribes around the globe to key decision makers in a succession of arms deals.

The Guardian’s BAE Files contain 15 years of reporting on this subject.

Now let’s consider Australia’s largest ever surface warship acquisition, the Hunter class frigates, designed and built by BAE Systems.

Our national audit office was scathing of this procurement process. Last May it noted numerous serious governance failures, including key accountability documents going missing. The primary legislative requirement of providing taxpayers with value for money had been ignored.

After the release of the audit office report, I did some more digging and uncovered further serious conflicts of interest.

Defence had appointed former senior BAE personnel and advisers into important roles overseeing the evaluation of frigate tenders, without making those appointments public.

Defence also hired one of those former senior BAE managers to negotiate the frigate deal with BAE on behalf of Defence.

More detail about this extraordinary story is in my Substack archive.

It has also been revealed that BAE Systems was given the Hunter class frigate contract despite ‘long-running concerns’ inside Defence about BAE’s alleged inflation of invoices by tens of millions of dollars on the earlier Adelaide class of frigates.

Detailed allegations of fraud in the Adelaide-class contracts, including by Thales Australia, were published in three separate articles by the Weekend Australian in May 2019.

A Defence internal audit had reportedly found that BAE’s contract was ‘riddled with cost overruns, with the British company consistently invoicing questionable charges’.

Defence launched a second investigation.

18 months later, I asked Defence about the outcome of its second investigation. This was their response:

“An independent internal review of this matter found no evidence of inappropriate excess charges by BAE and Thales. The investigation did find some minor administrative issues which have been subsequently addressed through additional training. This training is now part of the normal cycle and is routinely refreshed.”

The “independent” review was conducted in secret by an existing defence contractor. His report was not made public.

Defence said “no evidence” was found of inappropriate excess charges. Yet the allegations were apparently so serious they were referred to Defence’s assistant secretary of fraud control who then referred several matters to the Independent Assurance Business Analysis and Reform Branch of Defence.

Recently, I have been collaborating with UK colleagues trying to uncover more about the Adelaide-class contracts. Freedom of Information requests have been lodged. Defence has blocked them, refusing to release a single page.

An appeal was submitted, Defence blocked that too. We have now appealed to the Information Commissioner.

If this was merely “a minor administrative issue” that has been resolved by “additional training”, why the aggressive blocking of any release of information through FoI?

I will finish by outlining a mini case study of undue influence and the revolving door – that of former CEO of BAE Systems Australia, Jim McDowell. (As I previously reported here.)

I am not implying any illegality on the part of Mr McDowell. I am simply laying out an array of his government appointments – not all of them – to highlight the extensive influence that just one person can have.

Jim McDowell had a 17-year career with BAE Systems including a decade as its chief executive in Australia, then two years running its lucrative Saudi Arabian business. He resigned from BAE in Saudi Arabia in December 2013.

In 2014, McDowell was appointed by the Coalition to a four-person panel undertaking the First Principles Review of Defence. This Review recommended sweeping reforms to the Defence Department, including its procurement processes, which have largely benefited major arms companies.

In 2015, the Coalition appointed McDowell to a 4-person expert advisory panel overseeing the tender process for the original submarine contract. When he announced McDowell as being part of this panel, Defence Minister Kevin Andrews didn’t mention McDowell’s long history with BAE Systems, which had ended only 18 months earlier. It was highly relevant, as BAE designs and manufactures Britain’s submarines.

In late 2016, then-defence industry minister Christopher Pyne hired McDowell as his adviser to develop the Naval Shipbuilding Plan. The appointment was not announced publicly. At that time, McDowell was also on the board of Australian shipbuilder Austal.

Under the Shipbuilding Plan, Austal subsequently won a contract to build six more Cape-class patrol boats while BAE Systems won the biggest prize, the Hunter-class frigate contract.

After the frigate deal was announced, South Australian premier Steve Marshall hired McDowell to head his Department of Premier and Cabinet. SA was the state that gained most from the shipbuilding plan.

In 2020, McDowell left the South Australian public service to become CEO of Nova Systems, a key defence contractor.

Last year, McDowell moved back through the revolving door into a senior role with the Defence Department. He is now Deputy Secretary for Naval Shipbuilding and Sustainment, reporting directly to defence secretary Greg Moriarty.

When appointed, McDowell said his new role was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down because it ‘provides the ability for me to shape the future of Australia’s shipbuilding and sustainment’.

In my view, McDowell’s long list of sensitive senior appointments should not have been possible. He cannot be the only person in the country qualified to undertake each of these roles.

This was a brief discussion of some aspects of the undue influence of the arms industry in Australia. I raise these issues in this AUKUS context because there has been almost no commentary about the likely influence of the arms industry in the AUKUS deal.

Edited text of a speech delivered to the IPAN AUKUS forum, March 12, 2024.

https://johnmenadue.com/aukus-red-flag-for-arms-industry-corruption/

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The AUKUS format was announced on September 15, 2021. Since then, there have been reports that New Zealand is considering joining the bloc’s so-called pillar two, while Canada’s then-defense minister said in 2023 that her country was “highly interested” in working closer on defense technology with Australia, Britain, and the US.

Japan and Canada are jostling in line to join the second - non-nuclear - pillar of the trilateral AUKUS security partnership, Politico reported.

President Joe Biden’s administration is “pushing really hard to get some things on AUKUS pillar 2 done now, before the US election” in November, a diplomat was cited as saying. There are reportedly mounting fears that if ex-President Donald Trump retakes the White House, he might opt to either wind back or scrap the AUKUS deal. It should be noted that Trump is yet to offer any public comment, disparaging or otherwise, about AUKUS, but critics reportedly fear his America First rhetoric might derail the pact.

A Trump-inspired return of “American isolationism is a risk to the Indo-Pacific,” another diplomat was quoted as saying. 

“If pillar 2 fails then AUKUS fails, because we could have just had a submarine deal — albeit a very big submarine deal,” the source said, adding, “We’re very confident of getting some of the pillar 2 deals done by the end of this year.”

There was "impetus to get pillar 2 done sooner rather than later", and there are "ongoing discussions around what pillar 2 will look like," a UK Ministry of Defense official was cited as saying, adding:

“We continue to seek opportunities to engage allies and close partners as work on AUKUS Pillar 2 progresses. Any decisions on bringing other states into specific projects within AUKUS’ Advanced Capability work would be made trilaterally and announced at an appropriate time.”

It was "always envisioned" that pillar two could be expanded to embrace US allies, the report stated, with Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and South Korea among those interested in joining.

"The president and his partners have been clear that as our work progresses on pillar 2 we would look for opportunities to engage other allies and close partners," a White House official was cited as telling the publication.

However, the report stressed that no decisions on Japan and South Korea joining the pact have been made. New Zealand's Defense Minister Judith Collins stated on February 29:

“It is quite early days for Pillar II for the AUKUS partners, let alone anyone else like us or the Canadians... We have started that engagement, we want to keep this up and understand further the opportunities for New Zealand.”

Last May, Canada’s then-Defense Minister Anita Anand told reporters that the country was “highly interested in furthering cooperation on AI, quantum computing and other advanced technologies with a defense nexus with our closest allies.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240320/biden-admin-pushing-hard-to-get-aukus-pillar-2-deals-with-japan-canada---report-1117445259.html

VOTE TRUMP — DESTROY THIS GHASTLY AUKUS.....

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The Australian government will seek to prop up the Aukus pact by sending A$4.6bn (£2.4bn) to the UK to clear bottlenecks at the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor production line.

The funding – revealed on the eve of high-level talks between the Australian and UK governments on Friday – is in addition to billions of dollars that will be sent to the US to smooth over production delays there.

The Australian government will also announce on Friday that the government-owned shipbuilder ASC and the British defence firm BAE Systems will jointly build the nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/21/australia-moves-to-prop-up-aukus-with-46bn-pledge-to-help-clear-rolls-royce-nuclear-reactor-bottlenecks-in-uk

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