Marles and Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd also met President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, at the White House, as well as Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
At a news conference, Marles confirmed the second pillar of the AUKUS agreement – under which Australia, the US and United Kingdom share advanced defence technologies – will be slimmed down. The move follows industry complaints that the venture has become too broad, unwieldy and slow.
Pillar two deals in capabilities as wide-ranging as artificial intelligence, undersea technology, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities and information-sharing.
“Focusing on particular projects is something that we need to be doing,” Marles said. “Without going into what they are, that was a focus of our meeting today – giving a sharpness, if I could put it that way, about what we are seeking to do in relation to pillar two.”
Marles has refused to speak publicly about the contents of the Pentagon’s AUKUS review – which is classified – but on Thursday (AEDT) said it contained specific proposals on how to “do AUKUS better”, rather than dealing generally with issues or concerns.
“It is very much within the frame of being full steam ahead of delivering AUKUS and how we can do this better, and it is granular and it is specific about how it looks at that,” he said.
Marles added that Australia approached the process in “a very self-critical way … we want to make sure that we are learning, and we are improving”.
Ahead of their trilateral meeting at the Pentagon, UK Defence Secretary John Healey said AUKUS was “quite simply the most important military collaboration for the last 70 years” for Britain. The three countries were determined to “reboot” AUKUS, Healey said.
The ministers did not take questions at their joint appearance. It comes days after a former British navy chief, Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, said AUKUS should be cancelled immediately.
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“The UK is no longer capable of managing a nuclear submarine program,” he said, as reported by the London Telegraph. “SSN-AUKUS is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.”
The SSN-AUKUS is a new class of nuclear-powered submarine to be developed by the UK and Australia in the 2040s. Healey said it would be “the most powerful, most feared attack submarine the world has ever seen – the apex predator of the seas”.
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