Australia's 'barking mad' bet on nuclear submarines

0:00Well, good morning from Australia. I'm very pleased to join two great friends of Freedom. It's 2021, an Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was beamed up on a screen next to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson. So friends, Orcas is born. Orcas, the defense deal between the US, UK and Australia, is one of the most significant in our modern history. The three countries wanted to curb China's growing military presence in the Indo-Pacific, and to do it, Australia was going to get new nuclear-powered submarines. But in the five years since, it's been anything but smooth sailing. A former Prime Minister has now slammed the Orcas submarine deal as a colossal sacrifice of sovereignty. Orcas has made Australia more reliant, more dependent on the United States. His three latest data. Honey won his pain.

1:02Alblok, elbow. I'm Justin Bergman, international editor at the conversation in Australia, and this is the conversation weekly, where experts explain how he ended up here. Today, how the secretive defense pact was struck, and why it's proving so controversial. Do you, white, you're a longtime defense and security analyst at the Australian National University, an author of the new book, Hard New World, Australia's Post-American Future? Take us back to the moment five years ago this week, when Orcas was first announced. Do you remember it? Oh, yes, quite clearly. I remember hearing the night before somebody told me there was going to be a big announcement the next morning. And I sort of more or less dismissed it, because I wouldn't normally be watching TV at 7 o'clock in the morning. That's not my lifestyle. And sure enough, there it was, and I thought to myself, this is backing that. This won't work.

2:02But I was very much in a minority. Back then, I'm going to say I was very struck by the style and tone and the level of the announcement. I mean, to have something like that announced by bringing the three heads of government together, not in the same room, but at the same broadcast moment, was a very striking piece of political and strategic theatre. So this deal really came about as a big surprise, and a lot of people at the time were upset, concerned that it was negotiated in secret, isn't that right? Certainly, people were staggered that such a big thing could be kept so secret until the moment of announcement. The idea was very much cooked up by a very small group of people at very senior levels, who more or less by definition didn't know much about submarines. And so it was a very unusual example of a very big decision being made with almost no expert input from the people who really knew about these things. And I've just been the Navy and the submarine operators. But the project managers and the people who understood what operating nuclear-powered submarines

3:02might mean and all of that. So I think the price that was paid for the secrecy was what I think historians would judge was a very sketchy, very sketchy job of analysis and assessment, and you might say due diligence. Of the issues that were going to be involved. What was in the deal then that they announced that day? What details did we know? In 2021, it was just Australia's going to get nuclear-powered submarines. We're going to cooperate with the British and the Americans to get nuclear-powered submarines. Full stop. End of story. That was it. We intend to build these submarines in Adelaide, Australia, in close cooperation with the United Kingdom and the United States. It was brought forward with so little detail. It's important to remember that the Orcas as we know it now was not the Orcas that was announced in 2021 because back then there was no idea of what submarines we were going to buy. There was no idea whether it was going to be British or American. There was no timeline. There was no price. And there was no understanding of how the transition from the Collins to the Orcas submarines

4:05was going to be managed. But one thing the government was very firm on back then was that there wouldn't need to be an interim boat that we could move straight from the Collins class submarines straight to a new class of nuclear-powered submarines. The whole project looked in a sense because there were no details. It was easier to sign up to because there weren't so many obvious snags to criticize. Now once we saw the subsequent announcement in March of 2023 of what they call the optimum pathway, then that began to bring people to understand what a complex process is, which was going to be, had difficult it was going to be to manage. And of course it was only in March of 2023 that we got the price tag. The security deal quickly caught the eye of China. And it comes with an eye-watering price tag, $368 billion. And I think people then started asking a whole lot of different questions, what's this going to do to the rest of their force structure? Can these submarines be delivered?

5:06And the United States actually provide us with a Virginia class submarines that the plan proposed. And can the British produce the boat that we're meant to be building with them in the 2040s? All of those questions have now loomed very large. And Australia already had a submarine deal with France at the time, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, part and parcel of the decision to go with Orkets was to abandon the contact we'd signed with the French to build 12 conventionally powered versions of their nuclear-powered attack submarines, what was going to be called the attack class. And this was a huge deal. Australia had made a great play of what a significant thing it was for us to be working with France to develop these capabilities. And one of the reasons for the secrecy was not just to keep it, so to speak from the Australian public, but to prevent the French from knowing. And I think there was a genuine concern that they might try and make an end run around it, and block it happening in some way. But also I think politicians do love to spring surprises. And I think it made a big difference to the impact that the Orkets announcement had,

6:07particularly domestically here in Australia, that it came as such a bolt from the blue. And it was in many ways the biggest most radical force structure decision, capability decision Australia had made in the post-war era, perhaps ever actually, because the idea of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines was such a radical departure from where we'd been before. And I think part of what was going on was the government was eager to enjoy the political theatre of springing this coup on an unsuspecting public. And I think it worked in the sense that the initial response to the announcement in Australia was overwhelmingly positive, even amongst many people who you'd expect to be very critical of it, including, of course, the Labour Party. And so at the time, why was this deemed so necessary? Well, that's a really interesting question. I think there were three factors involved. The first is the government was becoming very conscious of deep problems with the French submarine project. The idea that we should take a perfectly good nuclear-powered submarine that had been

7:07designed and built by France and was already in service, and take the reactor out and put a conventional power plant diesel engines and the electrical generators and batteries into the submarine. Which sort of sounds simple when you put it like that, but in fact, it's an enormously complicated engineering task. And it was becoming clear by 2021 just how challenging this would going to be. And there was also real concerns about how serious the French were about Australian industry involvement, about whether they could stick to the timeline. And I think there were also quite a few tensions between the French designers who, not surprisingly, thought they knew exactly how to design submarines and didn't need much advice from Australia. And the Australian team that was very keen to be as actively involved as possible, then on top of that, we have to think about the strategic circumstances. This all happened during COVID times. And that was a special time in all sorts of ways. But this was the era in which the government in Canberra first really started to talk about how seriously our strategic circumstances had deteriorated.

8:07It was on the 1st of July 2020 that Scott Morrison as Prime Minister had launched a new defence strategic update, which had for the first time used a formulation which has now become a kind of a mantra on both sides of politics. And that is that we face the worst strategic circumstances since the Second World War. We have not seen the conflation of global, economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced here in Australia in our region since the existential threat we face when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. And this became a really big deal. It was a very radical thing for governments to say. And the second bit of context there is of course that we went through that period under Morrison starting in 2020 when our relationships with China really fell into a very deep hole. So I think in that context as the government looked at how they dealt with the problems they were seeing in the French project, they were eager to find a way to demonstrate that

9:12they were really taking this decline in Australia's strategic circumstances seriously. And we're here to do a big thing in response to it. And the third part of course is that they were looking for ways to build up the relationship with the United States as part of that. And I think there was a very strong determination which had gone back some way, you know, all the way back to President Obama's announcement of the pivot in 2011, the beginning of US rotational deployment of US forces to Australia. Today I can stand before you and see with confidence that the alliance between the United States and Australia has never been stronger. It has been to our past. Our alliance continues to be indispensable to our future. It was a general agenda of wanting to do more and more with the United States in the context of facing a bigger challenge from China. And Orkis I think were the idea of acquiring nuclear power submarines working with the United States and the United Kingdom really gave a framework in which that could happen.

10:14The last bit of context that one shouldn't overlook is that there was an election looming. When the announcement was made in September 2021, the 2022 election was so to speak just over the hill. And I think we'd be very naive not to imagine that Morrison and his colleagues thought carefully about how the politics of this would play out. I think there was very likely a view that Labor would find it very hard to agree to Orkis. And therefore by announcing Orkis and making such a spectacular fanfare of it, they would put Labor in the very awkward position of not being able to agree with it, but not wanting to disagree with it because it would make them look weak on their lines. They may have underestimated just how ruthlessly determined Albanese turned out to be to prevent anything getting in the way of a successful campaign in 2022, which as history now knows, prompted Labor on the basis of very little information into it very quickly to come out and express a very strong support for it. I think that was a very fateful decision on their part.

11:16But if we think of the context in which the announcement was first made, I think that domestic political context with a looming election was a very significant part of it. After the break, what's the likelihood Australia will even receive the summaries? Hi, I'm Anna Walker. Host of a new podcast called Jane Austen's Paper Trail from the conversation. From a scandal-filled bun shop in Bath to a wooden sweat walk along the cob in line regions, and even a glittering Regency Ball, we've travelled around England to bring Jane Austen's world to life through interviews with today's foremost Austin experts. Listen to Jane Austen's Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. Few five years on, it seems like public opinion in Australia is turning on Arches. There's new polling from the University of Sydney that shows that less than a quarter of Australians believe the government has properly explained the rationale for it. Does this surprise you?

12:17No, it doesn't. I think it was always very likely that support for Orcas would fall away as the difficulties and realities of the project became clearer. When the announcement was first made, it was in a sense too big to disagree with. That was easy because there was so little known about it. You couldn't criticise the price. You couldn't say, oh, is this the right submarine for Australia? You couldn't raise all the issues that people are now focused on because the effects just weren't there. Now what we know is that there are real doubts about where the United States is going to be in a position to deliver a Virginia class submarine to Australia because it's having so much trouble building enough to meet its own Navy's needs. You were real doubts about whether the United Kingdom can design, build, bring into service the Orcas class submarine in the time frame it has to do to meet our requirements because it has so much else going on, including it's having such a problem with its existing class of nuclear power submarines. It also must, like the United States, give priority over the next decade to building

13:19new ballistic missile firing submarines, also nuclear power, even bigger, even more complicated. And so as the time has passed, the challenges that both the Americans and the British are going to face and these challenges are becoming more clearly explained within the British and US system, the US Congressional Research Service, for example, and US Senior Naval Officers acknowledging that the press and build rate of submarines in the US yards, about 1.2 submarines a year, is about half of what's required for the Americans to be able to deliver enough submarines for them to have an interest to give to us. And that rate hasn't improved. Likewise, the British parliamentary systems issued reports that highlight how badly the British submarine, nuclear submarine industry is going and how difficult it's going to be for them, even to keep their press and submarines in service, let alone build the new ballistic missile firing submarines and then create the Orcas boats. And so the more we've learned, the more uncertain it's become that we're actually going to

14:24get these submarines. I think the other thing that's really added to uncertainty is the fact that right at the heart of Orcas is the idea that we should be equipping ourselves to align ourselves more closely with the United States as the United States pushes back against China's challenge and seeks to deter China from challenging the US position in the Western Pacific. And that was something that was relatively easy to go along with under Joe Biden, but under Donald Trump, of course, that becomes a much harder story to tell because Trump is very clearly just not interested in preserving America's role in the Western Pacific. He's very interested in economic rivalry with China, but he's not interested in strategic rivalry. For example, just the other day, he announced that he was going to scale back a major exercise with South Korea. The US President accused Seoul of refusing to take part in action against Iran, announcing America's plans to curtail exercises. We can go around and protect all of these countries, especially with their not-there-help

15:26us. These sorts of things very much destabilize countries in Asia and raise real questions about whether America's really serious about preserving its role here. And that, of course, undermines the really fundamental rationale for Orcas, which is that providing Australia with nuclear-powered submarines will increase our capacity to support the United States as the United States response to China's challenge. And then, of course, finally, there's the question of the price. Now nobody really knows where the $368 billion, which is the figure that governments used, really means anything. But what we do know is that nuclear power submarines are incredibly expensive and complex to build and operate. And this is going to make a huge impact on the rest of the defence budget. Now, the government talks a lot about increasing the defence budget, but in fact, the defence spending is not increasing that fast and certainly not increasing nearly fast enough to allow Australia to spend the massive sums we were already spending on Orcas and still

16:30maintain all the other capabilities that the ADF need. So I think when you add all of these things together, I'm not surprised that public opinion has become more skeptical, particularly because the government has found it very hard to explain really why nuclear-powered submarines are so much better for Australia than the old conventionally-powered submarines. Where does this leave Australia now with a deal that's going to span the lives of many US presidents, not just Donald Trump? What does this mean for the future? Well, I think there's a couple of really important angles there. The first is, I think it raises very serious questions about the future of Australia's submarine capability. Because our collins submarines are getting old. It's been revealed only one of Australia's six collins class submarines currently in service as the nation's naval capabilities are hampered by corrosion, maintenance delays and industrial strikes. For a long time, there's been a plan to extend their lives, which is a very difficult and complex process. You take the submarine apart, you look at all the bits and pieces within it, you see which ones are wearing out and work out how to replace them.

17:33If that sounds like a bit of a nightmare, it is from a project management and engineering point of view. Successive governments delayed the commencement of the life extension because it was looking so complicated. The government's now announced that it's going to go ahead but going to be in a very scaled-back way. So our capacity to keep the collins class submarines operational and at sea is getting weaker. At the same time as the risk that the Americans, for the reasons we touched on earlier, might not be able to deliver the Virginians is getting stronger. The chances that the British will be able to deliver the Orkish boats, or at least the design for the Orkish boats, for us to build them in Australia, that's very uncertain. And so there's a real prospect that the Collins class submarines will simply run out of service life before we have any new submarines available. There's a real question about what Australia should do about that. And one option is that we should turn around and go back to trying to buy conventional submarines. I'd either go back to France and say, sorry, it was all a misunderstanding. Please, can we have our submarines back? We go somewhere else. Both the South Koreans and the Germans are in this market.

18:36So that's the first big question. And whether or not if we do lose our submarine capability, we should try and replace them with new submarines or in fact just accept that that's not going to work for us and look for other ways to do the same things. You know, Orkish was very much a symbol of Australia's commitment to supporting the United States. Well now I think particularly under Donald Trump, it's clear that actually the United States is not serious about that. So whether or not it makes sense for Australia to invest so much money, take such huge risks in order to build a nuclear-powered submarine in order to support the United States in doing something, the United States is not serious about doing. Those are the really big questions we face today. Thanks Hugh. This has been wonderful talking to you. Really appreciate it. It's a great pleasure. Thanks Justin. It's it for this week's episode of The Conversation Weekly. Read more from Hugh White and his take on the August debate at theconversation.com. We'll also put a link to his articles in our show notes.

19:39This week's episode was written by me Justin Bergman. Isabella Podwinski was the executive producer. Sound mixing is by Dan Simo and our theme music is by Nita Sarl. Gemma Ware is head of audio. Ashlam Mugi is the head of editorial innovation and Misha Ketchal and Stephen Khan are our editors in chief. The Conversation is a nonprofit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts with a wider audience. If you like what we do, please support us at donate.com. Thanks for listening.