We don’t need those SSNs

The Toowoomba Chronicle this morning (20 May 2023) featured an 8-page liftout, Defending Australia, promoting those nuclear submarines (SSNs) that are central to the Morrison-Albanese AUKUS pact. Like previous rants in the Murdoch press it identified China as a growing threat demanding an urgent response.

It included a piece from Defence Minister, Richard Marles, that referred to the regional military build-up (code for China?) and ended with the exhortation: “In 2023 it is every Australian, young and old, transforming their lives by acquiring the skills to build and sustain submarines, ships and missiles, who will provide for our nation’s defence.” That appeared alongside a piece by AUKUS chief, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, warning about the rapid growth in China’s naval capability.

The implication is that China’s military build up directly threatens Australia. An alternative explanation is that China is responding to the regional presence of US bases and forces backed by US annual military expenditure that exceeds the combined total of the next nine countries including China. Imagine if China, or some other country, had bases in Cuba and Mexico, and regularly tested ‘freedom of navigation’ around the Channel Islands off the California coast. We don’t need to imagine it if we recall the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The USA would be apoplectic.

It is in this context that Australia needs to have the debate about SSNs that has been denied by both the Morrison and Albanese governments. A group of citizens has called for an urgent Parliamentary Inquiry into the AUKUS deal. We can hope that might get a response but, if not, perhaps the ALP national conference in August might encourage the government to consider the issue more thoroughly.

Meanwhile, a Parliamentary committee is examining proposed legislation to legitimate naval nuclear propulsion with submissions closing on 26 May. The more people who email them at fadt.sen@aph.gov.au to object to the whole AUKUS SSN project, the better. This piece is my preparatory thinking for a submission.

The AUKUS SSNs project is full of contradictions and challenges that should be apparent to any thinking person. These seem obvious to me.

The role of the SSNs is supposedly to protect our trade routes, presumably from China since it is being held up as the major threat to peace, but a large proportion of our trade is with China. The advantages claimed for SSNs include greater range and time on station allowing them to operate with the US navy close to the Chinese coast but any war with China will presumably cut trade with China and have us more concerned about trade routes closer to home where more and smaller conventional submarines would be more useful.

If all goes to plan, Australia may eventually acquire 8 to 10 SSNs by sometime in the 2040s. Most pundits suggest that allowing for essential maintenance and resting of crews we could expect a maximum of 3 SSNs in operation at any time. That hardly seems sufficient to patrol our essential trade routes and cables. Other solutions will be needed.

Many of those prognosticating about future war with China suggest that it is likely to be initiated by a Chinese move against Taiwan sometime before 2030. Unfortunately the earliest Australia seems likely to obtain its first (secondhand) SSNs is sometime after 2030. That will be too late to be useful if the conflict begins in the meantime.

On the other hand, it is possible that our fleet of SSNs will arrive in good time for any future conflict, sometime well into the 2040s. In that case China will have had 15 to 20 years to prepare countermeasures. If their current buildup is as rapid as the newspapers are suggesting we will be seriously outnumbered and outgunned by then. We would do better to seek solutions that don’t involve war with China or any other country.

By any measure the anticipated cost of acquiring SSNs is huge. If the history of Australian defence projects is any guide, the projected $338 billion is liable to blow out to a much larger figure. There needs to be much more careful consideration given to whether there are more effective ways of spending that money, whether on defence or on other services needed by our citizens.

Australia does not currently have the workforce with the necessary range of skills to build, maintain, and crew SSNs. Crewing our current Collins submarines has been a challenge and has sometimes required recruiting key personnel from other navies. What confidence can we have that we can crew the SSNs if we can find the skills to build and maintain them?

Although the government has claimed economic benefits from the SSN project, the first expenditures appear to be directed toward supporting shipyards in the UK and USA and the recruitment of retired US navy personnel as expensive consultants. There seems little direct benefit to Australia from spending money on UK and US facilities and it is at least questionable whether advice from former US navy officers will best suit the interests of Australia rather than the USA.

Finally, if it all happens, sometime in the 2050s and beyond Australia will face the problem of storing highly radioactive waste from the SSNs. Neither the US nor the UK has yet solved the problem of storing waste from their decommissioned SSNs, despite having had several decades to do so. Australia has not yet found a solution for safe storage of low level nuclear waste. Do we really want to kick the SSN waste problem down the road for our great-grandchildren to deal with?

Given these inherent challenges and contradictions, I can see no reason why we would want to acquire SSNs through AUKUS or elsewhere. There are manifestly too many intractable issues in that strategy and better alternative uses for scarce funds.