New alliance responds to Chinese threat — and U.S. complacency

Add a new acronym, “AUKUS,” to the history of military alliances — this one standing for the new partnership of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States against the unnamed but very real potential threat from China.

President Joe Biden unveiled the new pact in a virtual joint statement with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The AUKUS plan has been taking shape in secret since Biden took office, but rollout now fits Biden’s aim of showing that the United States remains a strong military ally, despite the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Biden, flanked by video-screen images of the two prime ministers, said the goal of the initiative was to enhance “strategic stability” in the Indo-Pacific region and shape “how it may evolve.” He didn’t mention China, the obvious but unmentioned focus of the effort to share sensitive military technology with two key allies.

The short-term goal of the Indo-Pacific alliance is to help Australia over the next 18 months prepare to build a nuclear attack submarine, which will be a stealthy, undersea weapons-launching platform at a time when surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to Chinese anti-ship missiles. An administration official said Australia may build up to a dozen such subs over the next two decades.

The deeper impact is that the three countries will cooperate, beyond the sub project, on a broad array of new military technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, cyberweapons and new undersea systems. This tripartite technology alliance could shake up the sometimes insular and slowmoving U.S. defense sector — as the Biden team hopes.

The AUKUS initiative should be an antidote to what sometimes seems an American addiction to legacy weapons systems, such as aircraft carriers and fighter jets, that will have diminishing effectiveness against China’s high-tech military. Last week, Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained in a session at the Brookings Institution that the Pentagon has been “unbelievably slow” with military modernization.

Defense analysts argue that this sluggishness results from the desire of the military services, defense contractors and members of Congress to protect existing systems and the jobs that go with them. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead with what Hyten told the Brookings audience is “unprecedented nuclear modernization,” along with new air, land, sea and space weapons systems.

The AUKUS plan for joint weapons development was welcomed by Christian Brose, former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee and a leading advocate of military modernization. “We need to think of this initiative as a common defense-industrial-technology base,” he said in an interview. “The only way we’re going to stay in this game is to move faster, in concert with our allies.” Brose is now chief strategy officer at Anduril Industries, a defense start-up.

Nuclear-powered submarines require sophisticated technologies that the United States has shared only with Britain, under a 1958 agreement. The U.S. Navy zealously guards these secrets and was initially reluctant to share them with another country.

Though the AUKUS alliance binds three English-speaking countries with Anglo-Saxon roots, the administration also plans to deepen its ties with the strategic partnership known as “the Quad,” which includes India and Japan as well as Australia and the United States. Leaders of the four countries will hold a summit meeting next week hosted by Biden.

Biden’s approach to China has had two faces. On the conciliatory side, Biden called President Xi Jinping to stress U.S. desire for cooperation with China in areas where their interests converge, such as climate change and halting nuclear proliferation. But the week after Biden’s outreach, he’s announcing a new military alliance aimed at deterring China’s growing power.

Biden has been saying since he entered the White House that “America is back.” That assertion seemed dubious after the pellmell flight from Kabul, but it’s a little more coherent now with the new Asia defense moves.