Biden, prime ministers of Australia and UK release details of planned submarine fleets to contain China
President Joe Biden met leaders of Australia and the United Kingdom in San Diego Monday where they announced early details of the landmark AUKUS security agreement to jointly develop nuclear submarine fleets as a counterweight to China in the Indo Pacific region.
Speaking at the U.S. Naval Base at Point Loma, Biden said the U.S. will sell at least three and as many as five new, Virginia class attack submarines to Australia in the near term.
Over the longer term, Biden said the U.S. would work with two allies to develop a new class of nuclear powered submarine, the SSN AUKUS, providing design, propulsion and other technology. The new AUKUS class will be operated by Australia and Britain.
Anthony Albanese and Rishi Sunak, the prime ministers of Australia and Britain, respectively, both announced significant increases in defense spending to meet the new trilateral security agreement – the Australian commitment being the largest defense outlay in the country’s history.
Everything about the joint announcement pointed to the investment the U.S. and its allies are making in an effort to counter China’s rapidly expanding military and the threat it presents not only to Taiwan, but to the region’s critical sea lines.
The leaders promised the military construction and exchanges would amount to a boom in military and high tech employment across all three countries.
In spite of promises of high paying jobs and greater defense spending, all three countries face steep challenges to jump-starting the high tech industrial base that underlies the manufacture of complex nuclear powered submarines. Australia, which will be replacing a fleet of obsolete diesel submarines purchased from the British, will be starting from scratch.
Early in his remarks, Biden recognized U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, the second district Democrat from Connecticut, who was a driving force in the development and acceptance of AUKUS.
Courtney’s eastern Connecticut district includes both the U.S Naval Submarine Base and the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics, the nation’s foremost designer and builder of submarines, which will likely build and sell one or more Virginia class submarine to Australia under AUKUS.
EB designed the Virginia class is and building them jointly with Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries. Each submarine takes five years to build and the latest iteration, which carries torpedoes and vertical tubes from which to launch missiles at land targets, costs $3.5 billion
Electric Boat was following the AUKUS talks closely and it has spent billions over the last year or so on high tech manufacturing improvements, which launching a recruitment campaign with a hiring target of 5,000 hires a year for the foreseeable future.
“We look forward to working with the Navy and our industry partners to use our knowledge and expertise to support Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines and the development of that country’s shipbuilding infrastructure,” said EB President Kevin Graney. “The AUKUS agreement underscores the critical role submarines play in the defense of our nation and our allies and calls attention to the importance of continuing to grow our submarine industrial base here in the United States.”
Courtney said the attack submarines Australia will buy from the U.S. are to provide the country an interim defensive capability while it develop a submarine manufacturing base of its own, through the assistance of the U.S and United Kingdom. The agreement also includes plans for a greater U.S. submarine presence in Australia through routine port visits.
“Today marks a seminal moment in America’s history, and in the deep, enduring democratic values we share with the U.K., Australia, and all of our allies who uphold peace, prosperity, and the international rule of law,” said Courtney. “Unfortunately, the strategic environment in Europe and the Indo-pacific has shifted in a direction that threatens those shared values.”
The submarines Australia will get will be nuclear propelled, but armed with conventional armament, in line with the country’s non proliferation agreements. The U.S. nuclear propulsion technology, which the U.S. has shared only once before with Britain in 1958, gives the ships the range to patrol vast area and the ability to avoid detection by staying submerged for unlimited periods.
China has argued that the AUKUS deal violates the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. It contends that the transfer of nuclear weapons materials from a nuclear-weapon state to a non-nuclear-weapon state is a “blatant” violation of the spirit of the pact.
Australian officials have pushed back against the criticism, arguing that they are working to acquire nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed, submarines.
“The question is really how does China choose to respond because Australia is not backing away from what it — what it sees to be doing in its own interests here,” said Charles Edel, a senior adviser and Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I think that probably from Beijing’s perspective they’ve already counted out Australia as a wooable mid country. It seemed to have fully gone into the U.S. camp.”
In a joint statement before the formal announcement, the leaders said their countries have worked for decades to sustain peace, stability and prosperity around the globe, including in the Indo-pacific.
“We believe in a world that protects freedom and respects human rights, the rule of law, the independence of sovereign states, and the rules-based international order,” they said in the statement, released before their joint appearance in San Diego.
“The steps we are announcing today will help us to advance these mutually beneficial objectives in the decades to come,” they said.