US production shortfalls, Britain’s submarine crisis and Australia’s own infrastructure delays are eroding the assumptions behind AUKUS. It’s time to take a different path.

The AUKUS ‘optimal pathway’ was supposed to deliver a seamless transition from our Collins-class fleet to US Virginia-class SSNs, followed by a jointly built SSN-AUKUS. Today, that pathway looks structurally undeliverable, operationally fragile and fiscally irresponsible.

The core assumptions of AUKUS are unravelling across both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, shipyard output stubbornly hovers between 1.1 and 1.2 attack submarines per year, far below the 2.0 rate required to sustain the US Navy’s own force structure. Under US law (10 U.S.C. § 8677), no US president can transfer second-hand Virginia-class hulls if doing so degrades American undersea readiness. Australia is counting on submarines that the US Navy simply cannot afford to give away.

In the United Kingdom, the situation is even more dire. The Royal Navy’s attack submarine capability has effectively collapsed. By mid-2026, public fleet tracking revealed an unprecedented crisis: all five in-service Astute-class SSNs were tied up alongside simultaneously due to severe maintenance backlogs, dockyard shortages and cannibalisation for spare parts. HMS Ambush has not put to sea since August 2022 and HMS Artful has been inactive since May 2023.

This is not merely an Australian assessment. Former British director of nuclear policy, Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, recently delivered a scathing verdict on the state of the Royal Navy fleet, warning that:

“Britain’s nuclear submarine........

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