Australian Crewing on U.S. Navy's Own Subs: Canberra's AUKUS Lever

There’s been plenty of criticism and consternation about reports Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon official running the Trump Administration’s AUKUS review, had asked for some kind of commitment about Australian involvement if there were a conflict with China over Taiwan.

While the actual request isn’t clear, Colby is an experienced professional who knows that U.S. policy towards Taiwan is one of ‘strategic ambiguity’ so he knows he won’t get an iron clad position from the Australian government about a potential future conflict.

What’s going on?  U.S. officials may be sensibly frustrated about an Australian reluctance to do serious collective planning around a conflict over Taiwan because this might ‘lock Australia in’ if something real happened.  That anxiety waxes and wanes over time. It almost certainly doesn’t stop with senior civilian or military officials but is shared by our political leaders.

So, if our American allies in the Pentagon are making potential operational plans to deter China over Taiwan and to defeat the Chinese military if deterrence fails, it’s very sensible for Australia to participate in that collective planning work.  Then we avoid false assumptions being made and we put our decision makers in a position of knowledge and strength should a crisis occur. Maybe Colby gets this and is bemused his Australian partners don’t.

The other reason Australian officials might be dealing with Colby’s awkward questions goes right to the heart of the AUKUS program’s design.

It’s not the question everyone is spending so much time on – whether Australia would or wouldn’t send the first few Australian-flagged Viriginia submarines into a war sometime from the mid-2030s.  Sure, that is an issue for the Pentagon, because those submarines will have come from the U.S. Navy’s fleet at a time they don’t have enough to meet their own needs. 

But the bigger more immediate risk to American freedom of action with submarines comes from the fact that, under the AUKUS ‘Optimal Pathway’ plan agreed by the Biden Administration, Australian personnel will be critical parts of the crews of the American Navy’s own submarines for the rest of this decade and into the mid-2030s. Whether Joe Biden understood this aspect of the deal is a question Donald Trump is likely to ask.

Dan Packer, the U.S. director of naval submarine forces for AUKUS, set this out very clearly back in May 2024, saying the U.S. Navy will have 440 Australians on 25 attack submarines.  12 per cent of the crew of each of 25 U.S. subs will be Australian.  And the U.S. Navy is unlikely to have more than 25 deployable nuclear attack subs at any time because the rest will be in maintenance.

Those Australian personnel won’t be in training billets. As Dan Packer put it, “This is something that has never happened before,” “We are completely, 100% integrating them into our crew, from a complete and utter perspective”.

For project planners, this makes absolute sense as the only way to solve the problem of getting around 3000 Australians trained up to operate nuclear powered submarines between now and 2035.  It also brings some advantages – as Vice Admiral Gaucher, commander of U.S. of naval submarine forces said, “We get the opportunity to leverage an ally who can help us with manning and operating.”

But it also brings a very practical and big political and policy problem into play right now – a problem that will last until – and if – Australia manages to build a separate training program for submarine crews. Without these Australian crew members, the U.S. Navy’s own fleet of Virginia submarines will be disabled. And if an Australian government decision on whether Australians can serve on U.S. submarines in particular operations, crises or conflicts can only be made in the moment of crisis, then America’s security is at risk in a much bigger way than if 2 or 3 Australian-flagged submarines do or don’t join an operation.

Both our American and UK AUKUS partners know how Australia has handled decisions on Australians in line positions within each of their militaries.  That won’t be reassuring anyone involved in the Pentagon’s AUKUS review. There’s an elaborate bureaucratic process for handling requests from our partners to have these Australians deploy with their U.S. or UK units when something real happens. These Third Country Deployment decisions can go up to very senior decision-makers and potentially include ministers. No is a frequent answer. 

To any informed American, like Elbridge Colby, this looks like a huge button labelled “Extreme Risk”. 

And as he absorbs the implications of the AUKUS training plan, he’s also reading our prime minister’s speeches about making our own decisions and saying no in previous conflicts.

Given this, if a senior U.S. official reviewing AUKUS like Elbridge Colby wasn’t enquiring about what an Australian government and military might or might not do should a conflict with China over Taiwan begin, he wouldn’t be doing his job. 

For the Australian Government led by Mr Albanese, there’s the serious question about what to do about Australian sailors being critical parts of the U.S. Navy’s use of its own submarines between now and the mid-2030s. 

We saw the problem on display in a simpler fashion with the prime minister working hard to avoid saying whether the joint Australian-U.S. facility at Pine Gap played any role in the recent U.S. B-2 bomber strikes against Iran. Mr Albanese told us that ‘this was a unilateral action by the United States’.  Whether that would withstand scrutiny of classified activities isn’t clear—but it will be impossible for an Australian government to claim that a U.S. Navy Virginia class submarine with a mixed American-Australian crew sinking a Chinese aircraft carrier during a war over Taiwan is a ‘unilateral’ U.S. action.

Maybe our political leaders here in Canberra and the senior defence civilian and military bureaucrats need to think through a better answer than ‘How very dare you!’ to Colby’s question.  AUKUS may depend upon it.

Michael is Director of Strategic Analysis Australia. From 2018 until September 2022, he was the Director of the Defence, Strategy and National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra.

A version of this article was first published in The Australian.

This article appeared originally at Strategic Analysis Australia.