Australia’s $300b AUKUS bet hinges on Britain’s submarine capacity

Arrival of Britain’s HMS anson Vince Hooper writes in Western Australia that Australia highlights the historical ties, industrial risks and strategic interests behind the $300 billion AUKUS submarine deal.

WHEN HMS ANSON Arriving off Garden Island in Western Australia on February 22, an indigenous elder named Barry Winmar held a Welcome to Country for a nuclear-powered attack submarine.

It was a moment that compressed several centuries of history into a single image: the world’s oldest continuous culture greeting the newest expression of an alliance that traces its origins to the Devon port of 1768. Commander Aaron WilliamsAnson’s commander, said His crew had sailed more than 8,000 nautical miles unsupported via Gibraltar, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the assembled dignitaries said. “Showcase what HMS Anson has to offer”.

What it clearly has to offer are Tomahawk cruise missiles, Spearfish torpedoes and 250 years of joint maritime mission between Plymouth and Sydney. The question Australians need to ask is whether these will be enough.

The historical issue is not just about sentimentality. Lieutenant on 26 August 1768 James Cook HM Bark sailed Endeavor out of Plymouth Harbor carrying 94 souls and sealed Admiralty orders. He mapped Australia’s eastern coastline and suggested Botany Bay for settlement.

Less than twenty years later, the First Fleet sailed from Portsmouth – two of the transports, Friendship and Charlotte, were mustered from Plymouth, while the naval garrison was drawn from the Plymouth and Portsmouth divisions – and established the penal colony at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788.

Cook’s second and third voyages also left Plymouth in 1772 and 1776. No port in the world launched such important voyages: Mayflower, Drake‘s circumnavigation and prisoner transports that laid the seed for modern Australia. Sydney grew from the anchorage and settlement drawn by Cook. Arthur Phillip was built. These two cities are literally the parent and child of British maritime endeavors.

This genealogy is important now because AUKUS – The tripartite submarine agreement between Australia, the UK and the US, announced in September 2021, is not a diplomatic abstraction. It’s an industrial bet of staggering proportions, and Plymouth’s Devonport Shipyard is at its mechanical heart.

Devonport is the Royal Navy’s only facility for nuclear submarine repair and refueling. Every Astute class boat goes through dry dock. The shipyard has been operating since 1691. Edmund Dummer He built Europe’s first stepped stone dry dock in Hamoaze. It is the largest naval base in Western Europe. It provides roughly ten percent of Plymouth’s revenue.

And it is now the choke point on which the credibility of a $300 billion Australian alliance rests.

Here’s the disturbing arithmetic. Royal Navy Submarine Service It celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. Not a single attack submarine was at sea for part of that anniversary year. By the end of 2025, HMS Ambush It had been dismantled to make its sisters work – a multibillion-pound warship reduced to a donor vehicle, like a cannibalized Holden wrecked in an outback.

HMS Audacious After a record deployment, it sat in Devonport dry dock for more than 16 months, waiting for space and resources for repairs that did not materialize in time. HMS Anson, now occupied by a hundred personnel from three countries at HMAS Stirling, was the only operational Astute-class submarine the Royal Navy had.

Sending it to Australia was a calculated gamble: trading short-term availability in the North Atlantic, where Russian submarine activity was concentrated, for long-term alliance reliability in the Pacific. It was the kind of exchange that would have sounded familiar to Admiralty lords who were fighting for supremacy in European waters while sending Cook into the unknown southern ocean. But Cook’s Endeavor cost the Crown £2,840 (AU$5,398). HMS Anson cost approximately £1.6 billion (AU$3 billion).

AUKUS demands that we take this gamble seriously because the risks for Australia are existential in a way they are not for Britain. The SSN-AUKUS class, a next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine based on a UK design and incorporating American propulsion and combat systems, will be operated by both the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy.

Britain plans to build up to 12 of these. Australia will build at least five at a new shipyard in Osborne, South Australia, to which Canberra has committed. $3.9 billion down payment In February. Australia has also pledged $4.5 billion over a decade to boost Britain’s nuclear submarine industrial capacity and last week announced $310 million for long-term reactor components from Rolls-Royce in Derby.

This is not a gun purchase. It is an industrial marriage and, like all marriages, it is based on trust that neither party can fully verify in advance.

Trust is currently being built in the most mundane ways imaginable. At HMAS Stirling, Australian engineers are learning to work on Anson’s hydraulic systems. They are conducting simulated emergency exercises and carrying out in-water engineering studies alongside Royal Navy experts and American technicians. Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

Five local businesses in Perth produced components to be installed on the submarine; It’s a small detail, but it’s exactly the kind of supply chain integration that will turn a political agreement into an industrial reality. There are two Royal Australian Navy officers based in Anson. More than 50 Australians are based in the UK Defense Nuclear Enterprise.

Royal Navy provided nuclear safety training to more than 950 people Australian Submarine Agency employee. This is the boring, basic plumbing of an alliance: people learning each other’s procedures, security protocols, and paperwork. It’s not dazzling. This is what makes the difference between a partnership that works and one that doesn’t.

Plymouth’s role extends beyond the maintenance of the existing fleet. Devonport is the site of the Royal Navy’s first uncrewed submarine. ExcaliburIntroduced in May 2025 AUKUS Column II – The “advanced capabilities” arm of the agreement covering artificial intelligence, quantum computing, autonomous systems and hypersonics.

During Talisman Saber Exercise Last August, Excalibur was controlled from a remote operations center in Australia, more than 10,000 miles away from its home port of Plymouth; this was the first time Britain and Australia had demonstrated autonomous submarine interoperability as a single combat force. This was a 21st-century echo of Cook’s observations of the Venus transit in Tahiti: practical science in the service of national power, government-funded and practiced at the farthest edge of the world.

Submarine Rotation Force-WestIt will see British and American nuclear submarines, scheduled to become operational from HMAS Stirling in 2027, rotate semi-permanently in Western Australia, with up to one British and four American boats openly framed as a rotation rather than a permanent base. It offers submarines an operational overseas mission and the weather is suspected to be better than Faslane.

For Australia, it provides something no classroom education can replicate: the institutional muscle memory of maintaining nuclear reactors, managing radioactive waste and keeping highly complex machinery safe under the ocean. For both countries, this represents the deepest defense integration since the combined operations of World War II.

Australian readers should understand what is at risk if this situation breaks down. The ambitious target of building a new AUKUS submarine from Barrow-in-Furness every 18 months requires sustained political commitment throughout election periods in the three countries. Devonport’s dry docks are already a bottleneck; An Astute boat was idle for months in Plymouth for dock space. And South Australia’s Osborne shipyard, which will become the only facility in the southern hemisphere capable of building nuclear submarines, should replicate Barrow’s production methodology; It’s a remarkable industrial initiative for a country that closed its last car factory less than a decade ago.

At least the scale is beyond doubt. The Osborne fabrication hall alone will extend 420 meters (two and a half times the length of Adelaide Oval) and the shipyard will consume 126,000 tonnes of structural steel, the equivalent of seventeen Eiffel Towers.

Prime Minister of South Australia Peter MalinauskasThe person who put South Australia’s economic future at risk with the program put it this way: characteristic frankness: the scale of what’s coming “Hard for most people to understand”. He’s not wrong. Seventy Australian companies are currently eligible for the AUKUS supply chain study.

Pacific Marine BatteriesThe company, based down the road from Osborne, already supplies batteries for British Astute-class submarines and has been contracted for SSN-AUKUS, not just for Australia’s boats but for Britain’s as well. This is the kind of two-way industrial integration that turns a defense deal into something much more difficult to unravel.

Critics (and there are many) argue that Australia is paying too large a premium for a capability it cannot have independently until the 2040s, while making itself dependent on British and American industrial competence, which is far from guaranteed. It has a meaning. But the counter-argument is equally clear: no other course can provide Australia with a credible submarine deterrent in the Indo-Pacific, where potential adversaries’ submarine fleets are growing faster than those of the democracies.

Diesel-electric boats, whatever their qualities, cannot match the durability, stealth or range of nuclear-powered submarines. If you accept the strategic proposition – and I do – then AUKUS is a necessity, not a luxury, and Plymouth’s shipyard workers are a critical dependency, not a quaint historical footnote.

Finally, there is a nice irony in all this. When the British First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788, it encountered the French expedition. La PérouseHe left Brest on orders in 1785. Louis XVIInspired by Cook’s voyages, it will arrive in a few days.

The first contest for the southern ocean was the Anglo-French rivalry. Today’s AUKUS emerged partly from the wreckage of the canceled French submarine contract with Australia; this was the scrapping of a $90 billion deal in favor of a tripartite agreement. Plus ça change.

Plymouth and Sydney have been connected by sea for more than a quarter of a millennium. Cook’s departure in 1768, Phillip’s settlement in 1788, convict ships, troop ships, trade routes, ANZAC departures; All of this forms the deep history of a relationship that has adapted over and over again to new circumstances and new threats. AUKUS is the latest adaptation and by far the most ambitious.

When Deputy Mayor Barry Winmar When he welcomed HMS Anson into Western Australian waters last month, he welcomed not just a submarine but a proposal: that two countries, separated by 10,000 miles of ocean, could jointly build, maintain and operate the most complex machines ever designed for decades to come.

The connection from Plymouth to Sydney continues. It has now gone nuclear. Whether the industrial base will match political ambitions will be the test of our generation.

Vince Hooper is a proud Australian/British citizen and professor of finance and discipline at the SP Jain School of Global Management, which has campuses in London, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney.

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