Senators on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations have raised concerns that the U.S. fell short of its nuclear submarine target during a Wednesday morning hearing on a trilateral security partnership.
In September of 2021, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. signed the defense deal referred to as AUKUS. They announced an arrangement for Australia to acquire “conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered” submarine capability through the AUKUS partnership in March of 2023. As part of that arrangement, Australia agreed to invest about three billion dollars in the first four years of the agreement into U.S. shipbuilding.
The AUKUS agreement is intended to help Australia develop nuclear powered submarines while enabling allies to safely share the relevant technology with each other.
During the Senate hearing, lawmakers questioned whether the U.S. had the capability to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. The U.S. Navy currently has forty-nine fast attack submarines. This puts it seventeen submarines short of the sixty-six vessel goal that the military branch has previously told Congress it required to properly defend the U.S.
Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Neb) said, “We are grateful that the Australians want to invest $3 billion. What are we gonna have to invest to get to 66 submarines?”
Mara Karlin is the Assistant Secretary of Defense. She said that the submarine industrial base was downsized after the Cold War. However, the current government’s investments allow for a substantial rebuild. Karlin said, “Post-Cold War, we closed down a whole bunch of the submarine industrial base and consolidated given the post-Cold-War peace dividend. There’s been really important investment by this Congress, by the administration to try to build it up and make sure that we can put it in the right places and then see what fruit grow from that. It is a priority, it will continue to be a priority going forward.”
Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn) shared a similar concern. He emphasized that the promise to sell submarines to Australia would put the U.S. Navy in a difficult position to reach the sixty-six submarine goal. Hagerty said, “Today, the Navy has 49 attack submarines, that’s roughly 25 percent short of its goal of 66 submarines. The pace of constructing submarines as I’ve read is maybe 1.2 submarines a year. By giving these submarines to Australia, that will put us three-to-four years behind in our production process. With the current production process and the proposed sale of submarines to Australia, the Navy will not be able to reach its goal of sixty-six submarines until 2049.”
Karlin said that the Navy’s fleet could be strengthened and that the process is underway with Congressional and administrative support. She added that “We are all working through Congress’s really important support and through the administration to build up an industrial base that frankly was not strong as anyone hoped it to be.”
Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va) had a more positive outlook on the state of the AUKUS partnership. He argued that Australia’s three-billion-dollar investment into the shipbuilding industry would supercharge the U.S. production pace. He said that “If they make that investment, it will help us increase our pace of production. If they don’t make that investment, it will be harder to increase the pace of production. Each side has resources that can help each other. We have to get the timing right.” Kaine argued that Australia “not going to make the investment unless they have surety that there’s gonna be a deliverable for them. We should use this historic opportunity to enhance our ability to meet the production goals that we are talking about.”