With more than a third of the US fast-attack submarine fleet sidelined by maintenance delays, the assumptions behind AUKUS Pillar 1 are looking less credible by the year.

More than 18 of the US Navy’s 48 in-service nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) are alongside, idle awaiting docking. This is a clear indicator of a structural crisis threatening the core of American undersea power. While official communiqués refer to these setbacks as “cyclical maintenance bottlenecks,” primary-source data from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) paint a more difficult and worsening picture.

The limited public data indicates the problem is deteriorating. In 2018, the GAO reported that nearly 30 per cent of the attack submarine fleet was out of service and awaiting or undergoing maintenance, against a target of less than 20 per cent. The July 2026 GAO report, Navy Readiness: Attack Submarine Fleet Readiness, confirms that this has worsened: at least 37 per cent of the US Navy’s fast-attack submarine fleet is non-operational while awaiting maintenance.

For Australia, this poses a pressing challenge. The planned sale of three Virginia-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) starting in 2032 is tied directly to the health of the US submarine capability and its related industrial base. The latest metrics indicate that the probability of this sale occurring, already minimal, continues to decline based on primary source data.

The root causes: strategic contraction and planning failure

Today’s US shipbuilding crisis is not merely a transient operational failure; it is a self-inflicted, multi-decade structural legacy of decisions made in the early 1990s. Following the end of the Cold War, US defence leadership sacrificed shipbuilding capacity and long-term industrial reconstitution planning in pursuit of a post-Cold War “peace dividend.”

During World War II, as early as 1943, US planners systematically evaluated how to transition industrial capacity and workforce skills to a peacetime economy and back. Conversely, during the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s, public oversight personnel and shipyard infrastructure were slashed without planning for how the enterprise would reconstitute shipbuilding capacity when required. The primary focus became personnel reductions and short-term efficiency rather than cradle-to-grave industrial management. Lacking elasticity, the current industrial base cannot support concurrent major........

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