A recent landmark deal to share U.S. and British nuclear submarine technology with Australia sets the table for “a melding” of the three navies, according to a senior White House official.
“I would think, in the next little while, we will have more British sailors serving on our naval vessels, Australians and the like, more of our forward-deployed assets in Australia,” Kurt Campbell, the White House National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific affairs coordinator, said Friday. “This leads to a deeper interconnection and almost a melding, in many respects, of our services and working together on [a] common purpose that we couldn’t have dreamed about five, 10 years ago.”
That alignment figures to be a mainstay of U.S. efforts to counter threats from China, where communist officials are at the helm of an economic heavyweight intent on building a world-class military. And while nuclear submarine technology sits at the center of the pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, or AUKUS, as the deal is known, officials remain conscious of the need to field military capabilities that would be relevant in a conflict well before those nuclear submarines are constructed.
“We realize and recognize that there are some immediate and medium-term challenges and that we can’t simply wait for long-term solutions,” Campbell told the United States Institute of Peace. “And I think there’s a deep recognition that that’s the time frame we’re working on.”
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China’s emergence as a wealthy and ambitious regional titan has raised the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan, which the mainland communist regime has never controlled but claims as sovereign territory. A senior U.S. military official revealed earlier this year that China could launch such an invasion “in the next six years,” stoking the anxiety of U.S. strategists who regard Taiwan as a key chokepoint in the region and a “cork” on Beijing’s ability to threaten other U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region.
“If we work together, it’s a force multiplier,” Australian Ambassador to the United States Arthur Sinodinos told reporters in Washington this week. “There’s capabilities that are coming on the line all the time, there’s no magic bullet, there’s no secret weapon, but there’s a whole panoply of things we’re doing together.”
Australian officials have unveiled a plan for major defense spending increases over the next decade, with an emphasis on anchoring more potent military capabilities in Australia that can reinforce the U.S. and other allies in a crisis.
“We’re in the process of standing up a guided weapons enterprise, guided weapons explosive ordnance enterprise, which will build up a sovereign capability in precision-guided munitions,” Sinodinos told the Defense Writers Group.
“In the context of a conflict, we have access on shore to, for example, precision-guided munitions that might otherwise be in short supply,” he added. “And by having that capability, we’re actually stronger allies and partners because we can augment what allies and partners have got when we’re facing a common issue in the region.”
Campbell, the White House official, underscored the value of such allies for developing new military capabilities, too.
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“Each of our countries has certain areas of deep innovation — whether it’s in cyber, whether it’s in undersea capabilities, whether it’s military AI,” he said. “And so I think there’s a desire to engage to see what we can learn from each other, to see what can be harvested from that in applicable ways that will help engender a more effective security and deterrent approach.”
