AUKUS Has Put Australia's Submarine Effort Back on Track

The first question to consider when thinking about a major defence program such as AUKUS is this: defence against whom?

Prime minister Bob Hawke’s government said in 1987 that Australia would have a ten-year warning window within which to prepare against an emerging regional threat.

It did not mean the Soviet Union. Rather, it was concerned about the remote threat of the re-emergence of an aggressive Indonesia, something that had concerned Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.

By contrast, the government of Kevin Rudd said in 2009 that Australia would need to significantly build up its military capability by 2030 as a hedge against the prospect of major war where Australia might have to defend itself for a time with minimal combat assistance from the United States, which would likely be stretched and not able to spare much for the defence of Australia.

In defending against a regional military power (say, an aggressive Indonesia that was led by an authoritarian and nationalistic former general), we would almost certainly be fighting on our own.

Australia would favour fighting an offensive campaign, without having to call on the combat forces of the United States or anyone else. The objective of the campaign would be to rapidly destroy as much of the enemy’s fighting power as possible, with a view to dictating the terms of war termination and, hopefully, peace.

Australia would be a vital southern front for the U.S., as a sanctuary and as a base from which to launch strikes. That is why Washington is so keen on establishing operating locations for its forces across Australia.

Australia would have to fight a defensive campaign until allied help arrived, until the United States prevailed to the point where it could dictate terms or until conflict was contained in an uneasy truce that arrested a slide into the nuclear abyss of planetary destruction.

Whether Australia was facing a regional military power on its own or a major power as part of a U.S.-led alliance, dominance in undersea warfare would be critical in order to deny the sea to the enemy’s naval forces, to hunt and kill its submarines and sink its commercial shipping, to collect intelligence and for other missions, such as seabed warfare.

Had it been seen through, the Rudd government’s 2009 submarine plan would have served us well in both war scenarios. By the mid-2020s, Australia would have had six refurbished Collins-class submarines, six new Super Collins-class submarines (with six more on order) and an emerging fleet of uncrewed underwater vessels (UUVs). Consideration could have been given in the 2014–19 Defence planning cycle to the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs).

But this path was not taken. Under later governments, a decade was lost.

The AUKUS program puts us back on track.

Acquiring submarines of the U.S. Virginia class and then the Anglo-Australian SSN-AUKUS class – or if the latter fails, joining the USN SSN-X program – will give us a pathway to undersea warfare dominance. The initial acquisition of three Virginia class Block IV submarines from 2032 to 2038 will be our entry ticket.

More crucially, by integrating our submarine industrial and technology base with those of the United States and Britain, we will forge an exclusive club of undersea dominance.

Undersea warfare will increasingly resemble the world of the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Large and fast SSN that can deploy UUVs and other autonomous systems will dominate under the sea. They will remain on station for much longer than conventional submarines and be able to conduct a variety of different missions, using an increasingly diverse array of droid and drone undersea systems, that even Jules Verne hardly could have imagined.

None of this is to say that the rest of the Australian Defence Force should be starved of resources. On the contrary, whether we were fighting on our own or holding out against a major power until allies arrived in force, we would need a surface navy, an army and an air force that can fight decisively in their domains.

To be sure, the program and industrial challenges of AUKUS are enormous. That is why the government pays its Defence leaders their million-dollar salaries.

Enough time has been lost. It is now time to ruthlessly hold people to account so that we can become an undersea superpower.

Michael Pezzullo is a former deputy secretary of defence and was secretary of home affairs until November 2023.

This article is based on the author’s opening statement to the AUKUS Public Inquiry on 2 September 2026. It was first published by News24 and has been lightly edited for The Strategist.

Image of Royal Australian Navy Collins-class submarine HMAS Dechaineux: Rikki-Lea Phillips/Department of Defence.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).