Washington: Australia, the United States and Britain are preparing to announce a significant collaboration on uncrewed underwater vehicles as part of AUKUS, a move that proponents hope will tamp down industry disquiet about the slow progress of the pact’s second pillar.
The marquee project will be announced at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security conference, at the end of this month, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who were not authorised to speak publicly.
Three of the people said the project related to unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), which have recently been the focus of joint testing and maritime exercises by the three countries off Australia’s east coast.
One person familiar with the plans said the project would involve sharing critical payloads for a range of UUVs, such as submarine-detecting sensors, equipment or weapons. Such technologies would typically be classified.
Defence Minister Richard Marles is expected to meet his US and UK counterparts at next week’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
At an AUKUS roundtable at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday, held under the Chatham House Rule, a person confirmed a significant statement on pillar two was expected at that meeting.
Now that the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS had been completed, “we are getting back to normal, we are getting back to business on delivering”, the person said.
The imminent announcement was also discussed at a recent AUKUS industry conference in Washington hosted by Pyne and Partners, the defence lobbying outfit founded by former defence minister Christopher Pyne.
“On the AUKUS pillar two signature project announcement – because it’s pre-decision, I can’t go into a huge amount [of detail] on that, but there’s already been more than one project discussed,” one person told the summit, also held under the Chatham House Rule.
“The idea is for it to be a drumbeat [for more projects]. The idea is that there will be both things that are relatively low-cost and high-production, in terms of scale, and other things that are going to be very high-cost but lower-batch quantities of items.”
The Pentagon declined to comment.
A spokesperson for Marles confirmed he would attend the dialogue in Singapore, “where he will have the opportunity to meet with counterparts from across the region and the world”. They did not otherwise comment on the plans.
Marles noted at a Lowy Institute forum this week that Australia was a world leader in autonomous underwater systems.
Natural marquee project
Democratic US senator Tim Kaine, who sits on the US Senate’s armed services and foreign relations committees and is heavily involved in AUKUS in Congress, said UUVs would be a natural marquee project for pillar two.
“Underwater, uncrewed systems can be really helpful in the straits; they can be helpful in so many places, and there’s already significant expertise,” he said.
“As I think about marquee [projects], I think about something that has enormous capacity that we already have enough expertise that we can convert it into something useful and deployable promptly. As I think about that, I do think about underwater platforms.
“It doesn’t have to just be one thing. If you do one or two things, and you show success, then success begets success.”
The second pillar of AUKUS, which involves the three countries sharing and developing advanced capabilities, differs from pillar one, which is about the use, development and construction of nuclear-powered submarines.
An absence of marquee projects has plagued pillar two, with industry leaders regularly complaining about the lack of focus and strategic direction from the government.
Abraham Denmark, who, as senior adviser to former US defence secretary Lloyd Austin, was one of the key architects of AUKUS, said last week that the second pillar of the agreement had been widely neglected.
“It has been underperforming, pillar two,” Denmark told the Capitol Hill Pacific Defence Outlook Summit in Washington. “Despite the enthusiasm with which it was initially announced, it has not gotten the focus, resources, senior attention that it needs to be successful.”
Troy Duggan, the chief executive of Australian company C2 Robotics, which recently sold three of its Speartooth uncrewed underwater vehicles to the US, said the point of AUKUS pillar two was to gain efficiency and accelerate development of these technologies.
“The potential is that we would then work on different payloads and then share them,” he said. “I’m hoping it is heading in that direction.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.