AUKUS Pillar One will keep Australia in a shrinking group of countries operating submarines in coming decades, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles told the ASPI Defence Conference on Thursday.
Submarines would become harder to operate, so they’d need to be better, said Marles, who is also Australia’s defence minister.
Responding to critics who he said were just not engaging with details, Marles set out a simple train of logic behind Pillar One, the submarine element of the AUKUS defence partnership with Britain and the United States.
If Australia didn’t have a long-range submarine capability, it would be far more dependent on the US, Marles told the conference in Canberra.
‘… To have a long-range capable submarine in the 2030s and 40s, it will need to have nuclear propulsion. And the one avenue which gives us the greatest sovereignty to achieve that is through a technology transfer from the United Kingdom and the US jointly to Australia.’
‘The fact of the matter is it’s just going to be harder to operate submarines in the 2030s and 40s than it was in the year 2000. In order for them not to be detected, they will need to be so much more capable.’
Marles did not elaborate on technical reasons, but former defence minister Peter Dutton, a member of the government that launched AUKUS in 2021, spelled out the case in 2022. He wrote in The Australian that experts had advised that diesel submarines would be unviable against China in the South China Sea beyond 2035. New radar technologies would detect them when they extended breathing pipes, called snorts, above the waves to run engines for battery recharging.
Nuclear submarines don’t need to do that.
At ASPI’s conference Marles drew the conclusion that Australia would be part of a shrinking submarine-operating club.
‘It’s just a harder capability to engage in,’ he said. So Australia had a choice, he added. On the one hand, it could work to maintain submarine capability despite the challenges. ‘And that will mean that we will be part of a smaller group of countries which do it, with more sovereignty as a result.’
‘Or do we let it go, in which case we are operating at a capability less than what we had in the year 2000?’
This is also a large issue for Japan, which operates more than 20 diesel submarines. The Japan Innovation Party, part of the ruling coalition, called last week for a switch to nuclear propulsion.
South Korea, with a similarly numerous fleet of diesel submarines, has already launched a project to build nuclear boats.
The United States, Britain and France gave up on diesel submarines decades ago. All their submarines are nuclear. But China still builds diesel submarines, as well as nuclear ones. Several Southeast Asian countries have acquired their first submarines since the 1990s – all diesels – and presumably operate or intend to operate them in the South China Sea.
Under AUKUS Pillar One, Australia is due to receive three second-hand submarines of the US Virginia class in the 2030s and, beginning in the 2040s, five boats of the SSN-AUKUS class to be built in a joint program with Britain. They are to replace six diesel submarines of the Collins class, which were commissioned from 1996 to 2003.
