AUKUS has been sold as a plan to strengthen Australia’s defence. Its deeper purpose is to bind Australia permanently into US military strategy against China and make American security dependent on Australian participation.
Let’s hope that the report of Peter Garrett’s public inquiry into the AUKUS pact, to be released on 4 November, captures the enormity of its deception of Australians. And appreciates that the pact is only the latest in a sequence of measures designed to manipulate the United States into guaranteeing Australia’s security.
Australians must understand that the purpose of our mind-boggling expenditure to acquire nuclear submarines is not to defend the continent of Australia but the American homeland. By acquiring hunter-killer nuclear submarines, Australia will be equipped to join critical US naval operations in Asian and Pacific waters to counter China’s growing submarine-launched strategic nuclear missile capability. Our new submarines will track, and destroy if commanded, Chinese submarines meant to deter a US nuclear first strike on the China homeland. That capability is a priority for the United States, which it is finding challenging to maintain as China’s submarine numbers grow.
Australia is footing the bill entirely for submarine construction and decades of embedded operations with the US Navy. We have already sent some $2 billion to the US and UK. There is precious little overlap between the US naval operations and our own needs for direct defence of our own continent. A pretence has been made that it would enable Australia to strike precisely at China’s territory with conventional explosive, revealing an absurd disconnect between cost and effect.
That Australia’s nuclear submarine project is a gargantuan Australian subsidy of America’s own defence has been hidden from Australians, deliberately.
Anyone interested in Australia’s security knows that our defence budgets have been about adequate for our own defence needs when astutely managed. But we have a big continent to defend, with no guarantee of US assistance. And no shortage of fiscal challenges. So how can it be that taxpayers now are asked to spend ruinously to protect the American homeland forevermore? It is now clear that AUKUS is the most recent step in a duplicitous strategy to make Australia critical to US survival, thereby to ensnare the United States into effectively guaranteeing Australia’s security.
At this stage a little history of our defence policy is necessary. After the experience of Vietnam and the US declaring that America’s allies should not plan on US military assistance (Guam doctrine), Australia set out on a purposeful path to defence self-reliance. The logic and plans were explained openly in the first ever defence white paper of 1976. Much was achieved in the ensuing three decades. But there were doubters. Kim Beazley, once a defence minister, has said that Australia could not defend itself and having US forces stationed here would increase our chances of not being abandoned in time of need. When President Obama won office, Beazley became ambassador to Washington in 2009 and no doubt was concerned with Obama’s visit in 2011 – which climaxed with our Parliament standing in ovation for the American president announcing the basing of US marines in northern Australia.
Thereupon America helped itself to Australia’s sovereignty, big time – documenting territorial and access entitlements over the ensuing five years in the Force Posture Agreement (FPA). Our Washington ambassador prior to Beazley, Dennis Richardson, had returned to head the Defence Department and oversaw the manufacture of the FPA.
But none of this really meant much for America’s homeland security, more to its global pride which was being tested by a blossoming China. The FPA can be dispensed in the blink of an eye by America without its homeland being jeopardised. So Beazley’s strategy of US basing here being the answer to Australia’s insecurity didn’t really do the job. Something more was needed.
Then AUKUS was announced in 2022 by the Morrison government, elevating the national neurosis with submarines to another fantasy land. No longer would we be accused of contributing token forces to assist the US against China. We would demonstrate our fealty to US leadership by assisting directly in countering the growing fleet of China’s second-strike nuclear. The AUKUS submarines would be built here at Australia’s expense to join US naval operations in Asia and the Pacific, for a lifetime tracking China’s underwater fleet to thwart China’s second strike.
But that is not how AUKUS was presented to Australians. Rather as just another even bigger, better submarine (than the French) for Australia to defend itself. It’s pretty clear that the concoction was heavily influenced by the Five Eyes intelligence milieu, forever into each other’s business with little accountability, with strategic imaginations unencumbered by fiscal reality, enjoying privileged access to the top of government. Andrew Shearer, then not-long head of Australia’s National Intelligence, had a key role in directly influencing the Biden White House in 2021, arguing that Australia sought the power to pose a direct threat to China’s forces and the Chinese mainland.
The Americans were receptive but had reservations, knowing the Australian people would be uneasy given the cost and forever time span. Shearer reportedly claimed that Australians’ attitudes had changed and public opinion need not be a factor. The US demanded the Morrison government work its proposal through with the Labor opposition. But nothing was said by the Morrison government for five months. Then Labor was given material to respond to within days. What that brief contained has never been made public, but Albanese expressed his satisfaction with it and his ability to comprehend AUKUS so quickly.
It is clear that not even prominent politicians, past and present, have grasped the deception behind the AUKUS submarine. Former PM Malcolm Turnbull’s railing against the project’s construction difficulties simply misses the point that it is for America’s security that the fiasco exists, not Australia’s. Criticising the hardware side is just a distraction and suits the government as diversion from its grievous deception. And who in the government itself even knows the score? Witness the recent spectacle of Deputy Defence Minister Conroy on the ABC’s 7.30 maintaining that the US nuclear submarine presence in Western Australia will effectively end in the early 2030s. Then retracting it without explanation next day. Then Minister Marles woodenly explaining “The Submarine Rotational Force West in WA will be an enduring feature of America’s force posture in Australia”. Of course, the 2030s will see increased US submarine basing and maintenance in WA to confront China, while America’s new free AUKUS vessels are being put together in Port Adelaide.
Over the last 15 years, Australians have elected successive governments each of which offered another layer of duplicity on defence policy. They ceded sovereignty for US forces to mount air, sea and land strikes, nuclear even, from Australian territory. China has been concocted as enemy in our military planning, coalescing with the priorities of the US. Thereby rendering our cities of Perth and Darwin as necessary ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) targets for China.
Every government since Julia Gillard has been an agent in secretively shattering decades of planning and acquisition for Australia to defend itself independently, in order to entwine the United States’ security with our own.
Not a policy word has ever been uttered by any Australian government as to why the decades of pursuing self-reliance were no longer the way. Nor of manipulating Washington such that it could not ever decline to come to our security assistance. Nor will there ever be any such words, so long as Australia’s leaders treat national security primarily as an electoral tool. As Foreign Minister Penny Wong once observed, “there’ll be no khaki election on my watch”. The Albanese government is accelerating Australia’s embrace of US war planning against China, incapable of separating the nation’s security from its own political prospects.
Dr Mike Gilligan worked for 20 years in defence policy and evaluating military proposals for development, including time in the Pentagon on military balances in Asia.