By Rich Abott
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday on Thursday said the effort to design, build, support and properly oversee Australia’s fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines under a new deal may take decades.
Last week, the U.S., U.K. and Australia announced the new AUKUS partnership to help Australia pursue procurement of its first nuclear-powered attack submarines. This announcement came with Australia’s intent to cancel a potential $90 billion program to replace its current fleet of six Collins-class diesel-electric attack submarines with 12 new conventionally powered submarines designed by France’s Naval Group.
The AUKUS partnership is starting with an 18-month period where the U.S. and U.K. wil help inform how Australia will approach a nuclear-powered submarine capability.
“I think strategically that’s a very, very important and I think brilliant stroke with respect to our posture in the Pacific, particularly vis-à-vis China,” Gilday said during a Defense One virtual conference.
The CNO said he thinks this will be a “very long term effort that’ll be decades, I think, before a submarine goes in the water – could be. I don’t see this as a short term timeline.”
The 18-month exploratory period aims to look at the details needed to have Australia build, support, and base nuclear-powered submarines as well as “help Australia come to grips with exactly what they need to do to get in a path akin to the United States Navy,” Gilday said.
Gilday said he expects the U.S. Navy to work very closely with the Australian Navy in this 18-month period and beyond to help the latter begin to determine “what the optimum path will be to safely deliver not solely the submarines, but the enterprise that has to support them. This is everything from a defense industrial base in Australia to a community inside the Australian Navy that’s able to man, train and equip those submarines, to sustain them, to the oversight mechanisms similar to what we have in the United States Navy to oversee those nuclear powered vessels.”
At the time the original announcement was made a senior Biden administration official said “It’s very hard to overestimate how important and how challenging this endeavor will be,” since Australia does not have any domestic nuclear infrastructure to start with.
This story first appeared in Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
