‘The optimal pathway’ is a clean-sounding phrase until it encounters a shipyard schedule, a dry dock queue, and a lack of qualified personnel. Over four years since the launch of AUKUS by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the submarine component of the AUKUS agreement remains contingent on an industrial reality that is simple to articulate and hard to remedy: nuclear-powered submarines are constructed by very skilled individuals, and these individuals cannot be conjured up. Retired Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, a former defense official in the United Kingdom and a commanding officer of a nuclear-powered submarine, has warned that the United Kingdom component of the project is in danger of falling short because policy and money don’t build nuclear submarines. People do that, and there aren’t enough of them with the right skills and experience.
With the 2023 plan, Australia is supposed to get used Virginia-class submarines from the US in the early 2030s as a bridge, while the UK and Australia collaborate on the development and construction of the SSN-AUKUS class of submarines to begin delivery in the late 2030s. The bridge is not the same thing as the destination. The most difficult work in terms of engineering and program management is in the British-Australian construction phase, where one has to lock down design, place orders for long-lead items, train personnel, and develop sustainment capabilities while the Royal Navy is trying to keep today’s fleet in the water.
Mathias has reported that the availability of the Royal Navy is “shockingly low” in a way that has direct knock-on effects for any new programme. The pressure on the fleets means that there are longer patrols and more maintenance debt, which in turn sucks resources from the same pool of technicians, planners, and supervisors who are required to deliver a new class from paper to steel. A commonly quoted view of readiness is that only one of six attack submarines in the UK is available, with several others at very low levels of readiness.
Even as officials have declared SSN-AUKUS to be “mature” in the SSN-AUKUS program, there is little information publicly available on the dimensions and component selections that will drive construction complexity. The head of the Australian submarine agency, Vice Admiral Jonathon Mead, has indicated that the design is “about 70 percent mature” and has also indicated that the submarine will be 10,000 tons, which is in the same weight class as the Block V Virginia but significantly larger than the previous Virginiaclass submarines. However, dimensions such as beam and length have not been publicly defined.
The combat system architecture shows the promise and the dependency that are part of the deal. The UK has accepted the AN/BYG-1 as the combat control system for the SSN-AUKUS, which brings the boats into line with a successful system already in place and known to the Collins-class submarine operators in Australia. The responsibility for integration in the UK’s approach is with the shipyard, which can maintain control over interfaces and weapons but is also forced to work to a multi-national beat that is unrelenting when the yards and shore facilities are already full.
The US “Virginia bridge” also has its own set of industrial challenges. The US submarine-building industry has been struggling to meet the planned levels of production, and there is a backlog of submarines even before any transfers. The Australian government has contributed $1.6 billion towards US shipbuilding capabilities, and this is a clear indication that the AUKUS deal is not only about strategic alignment but also about industrial triage. The longer the industrial system is stressed, the more the bridge becomes a bottleneck.
In the UK, there is a start to the articulation of availability as a recovery task. First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins has called for a 100-day maintenance recovery campaign to cut delays and “cut through bureaucracy” that is hindering readiness. For AUKUS, such efforts are less about the rhetoric and more about the capacity: every submarine restored to the fleet, every refit completed early, and every expert retained increases the window for a new-build program that cannot afford friction.
The key warning here is that Australia’s plan may look sound all the way until it requires a viable UK submarine industry to deliver. It is then that the most ambitious commitment of the agreement, an SSN constructed on a shared industrial base, will be proved, not in press releases, but in throughput.
