In a submission to the public inquiry into AUKUS, former foreign minister Gareth Evans argues the submarine project is not in Australia’s national interest, warning that doubts over delivery, excessive cost and loss of sovereign agency demand an urgent Plan B.

The AUKUS Pillar I Submarine project was misconceived from the outset, and the passage of time since its announcement in 2021 has served only to make more compelling the conclusion that it is not in Australia’s national interest to continue our commitment to it. For three main reasons: there are huge doubts about its deliverability, its cost to Australia manifestly outweighs its benefits, and its implementation would profoundly limit Australia’s independent sovereign agency.

Other concerns have been raised about the project, most importantly its potential contribution to nuclear weapons proliferation, the environmental impact of nuclear waste disposal, and the likely difficulties that will be experienced recruiting and sustaining a much-expanded submariner force.

While real, these problems are all likely to prove reasonably manageable – through, respectively, the negotiation of IAEA safeguards protocols, creative underground engineering solutions for the relatively small amounts of waste involved, and sufficiently attractive financial incentives for personnel. Others will have a different view, but for me the really critical objections remain deliverability, cost-benefit and sovereign agency.

There has been from the beginning zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight promised AUKUS boats, and every piece of evidence now available on the public record reinforces scepticism as to whether any of them will be delivered on time, or indeed at all.

The first tranche, of three existing Virginia-class boats, is to be supplied by the US from 2032, but that has always been premised on the assumption that the Pentagon had its own inventory requirements, and meeting the Australian requirement would require an increase in the annual build rate from 1.2 to 2.3. Despite our contribution already of some $US2 billion to enhance the US shipyard capacity, with more to come, that hasn’t happened. On the calculation of retired Rear Admiral Peter Briggs, one of Australia’s most credentialed submariners, by 2032 the US Navy will have only 41 platforms, as against its ‘safe minimum’ of 48, and its target of 66.

The first consequence of that US industrial reality is the recently announced agreement that all three of the promised Virginias, not just the first two, will be second-hand, with that meaning (given the finite 33-year life of the sealed HEU nuclear-propulsion units) a likely available remaining life for the Australian navy for each of them of no more than 15-20 years.

Even more troublingly, the US determination to maintain and expand its own nuclear fleet size, as regularly, forcefully and influentially articulated by the Pentagon’s Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, compels the conclusion that the delivery to Australia of any of the first tranche simply cannot be assumed – except on the assumption by the US that they will remain for all practical purposes just an extension of its own fleet, which starkly raises the sovereign agency issue addressed later in this submission.

An even bigger question mark hangs over the deliverability of the second tranche of the AUKUS submarine project: the five new-design SSN-AUKUS attack submarines to be jointly built by the UK and Australia (the hulls to be built in Adelaide, and married to reactors built in Barrow-in-Furness) with the first Australian boat entering into service in the early 2040s. Meeting even that very protracted delivery timetable would require the UK to deliver a completely debugged, wholly new SSN-AUKUS design by the late 2030s, with the Osborne shipyard in Adelaide being completely capable of playing its part thereafter.

Believing that any of this will happen requires even more heroic levels of optimism than needed for the US Virginias. Every report coming out of the UK indicates that its defence-industrial base is presently under extraordinary stress, with submarine building schedules tightening and costs increasing, and with every prospect of further deterioration, notwithstanding Australia’s commitment to spending $4.5 billion over 10 years to help boost production rates. Barrow-in-Furness is struggling to attract and retain the skilled workforce – nuclear qualified engineers, designers and tradespeople – needed to meet existing orders, let alone the massive new demands associated with SSN-AUKUS.

And when it comes to the capacity of the Australian end to deliver, in terms of the hugely skilled workforce and technological sophistication required, it is difficult to contest in this context (however much I might in others) the judgement of and my long-serving successor as foreign minister, and very much South Australian native, Alexander Downer, who said in 2023 that building nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide was a ‘fairytale’, and as recently as last weekend (The Australian, 6 June) a ‘mirage’ which is ‘just not going to happen’.

Even in the wholly unlikely event that everything falls smoothly into place in the whole vastly complex enterprise – transfers of US Virginias, British design and UK-Australia joint build of the new SSN-AUKUS boats, human resource availability, manageable costs and all the rest – Australia will be waiting decades, until well into the 2050s, for the last boat to arrive. And that poses real capability-gap issues for us, given that our existing six-boat Collins-class fleet, which first came into service from the late 1990s, is already on geriatric life-support: even with the recently announced Life-of-Type Extension program, it cannot be operationally sustained beyond the early 2040s.

It is unquestionable that nuclear-propelled submarines are much more capable than conventionally powered boats when it comes to speed and endurance, and that both the Virginias and new SSN-AUKUS class boats would be able to deploy significantly further afield, for much longer, with more capacity to move quickly away from risk situations than any conventional alternative, and with their size enabling them to deploy significantly more attack firepower.

Perhaps their greatest claimed advantage is their much superior undetectability, not having to periodically surface or snorkel, although it is a very large assumption that this advantage will remain immune from technological challenge in the decades ahead.

It is........

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