Nuclear Taskforce’s Post

Submarine procurement would be a signal we take our sovereignty seriously. Absent hard decisions on funding and builder choice, claiming submarines are "inevitable" consigns them in the same bucket as a self-balancing budget: a vague wish with no action.

'[White] suggests that an alternative to the acquisition of submarines could be to "focus our defence closer to home, relying on a shallower but denser defensive shield" ... Why would an adversary attack Australia, when our trade – or, more accurately, our critical seaborne supply – is left undefended and ripe for the picking, as White suggests would be prudent? As the famed maritime strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan highlights, "wars are won by the economic strangulation of the enemy from the sea", particularly wars against island nations. 'But unlike the Russian experience in the Black Sea, efforts of the United States and other allies and partners [in the Red Sea] show that a well-defended ship with a well-trained crew can defeat these capabilities [of the Houthis]. '[Australia] only needs to protect essential seaborne supply, comprising the fuel, ammunition and critical supplies ... One look at Australian geography would show that carefully positioned submarines in the vicinity of key chokepoints would put at risk any adversary seeking to hold Australian seaborne supply at risk. '... White’s logic misunderstands the capability, its employment and the basic tenets of maritime strategy, and so must not be allowed to proceed unchallenged'. https://lnkd.in/gJufpW6J

Our latest publication examines the development of China’s tactical airpower and explores the implications that an increasingly capable PLAAF has for the US and other Asia-Pacific air powers. Read the IISS analysis by Douglas Barrie and Ben Thornley: https://bit.ly/3VrDoLZ

Interesting framing. Target audience and domestic political context aside, it's striking to me that Richard Marles presents AUKUS defence trade control reforms here as primarily enabling bilateral alliance initiatives, including munitions co-production and federated maintenance and sustainment. There's zero mention of their relevance to submarines under Pillar I or advanced capabilities under Pillar II.

The AUKUS partners point to real progress in the past year but many of the challenges in delivering nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and co-developing a range of advanced defence technologies look as great as ever. https://lnkd.in/ddsgpQ-Y

#TotalTek ventures to Capitol Hill this morning to meet with Wisconsin officials to speak about the critical imperatives reflecting our #maritime defense regarding the submarine base today. It’s absolute that we get the budget passed. More importantly the #DefenseIndustrialBase has atrophied and this funding to continue our supply chain resilience is a key topic. We also need to see overwhelming support to enable the AUKUS agreement set into motion. #SIBC #maritimeindustry #maritimeengineering

Rob points out how rebuilding our industrial base to meet the China threat is a sprint! He offers a number of great suggestions to make up ground but there is more we can do to cast a wider net and accelerate several areas in parallel. I offer some additional thoughts based on my experience bringing in the BAES (Armor Holdings) MRAP on time and cost - the only one of four but we did get the second BAES program back on track as well. And we did it using the The Defense Production Act (used during COVID for the first time in 50 years). We can rapidly grow capacity networking small producers and investing heavily in workforce over facilities. We need to start w all the young workers leaving school without a job. CNC programming, robotic welding and digital engineering are where our talent is need especially as AI begins to shape the future workforce. We also need to look more broadly for slack capacity like the Austal w shipyard in Philippines and Vietnam. Basic manufacturing of dumb munitions casing can be done across Europe, South America, Oceana and Sub-continent IF DONE SMART. We need somebody to step up and lay out a real strategic plan based on a survey of current capabilities sitting dormant or easily developed. I would like to see heritage partner with a few other experts to lay out a roadmap we can fight for.

Good (vitally important) question and a “promising” good answer.

Published last night, some thoughts on the Trident 'anomaly'. ➡ Failure caused by test issues, i.e. would not have occurred with a warshot ➡ Believing this (as I do) is key to deterrent credibility ➡ But cred being stretched by other big-ticket issues (boats on long patrols, QEC shafting etc) ➡ Trident remains a reliable system (6%) failure rate (compared to 30%+ for Russian equivalent) ➡ Communications better than in 2016 (not hard) but still being led by The Sun not MOD ➡ All this continues to be recruit/retain negative ➡ Closing paras: In the meantime, this incident presents an opportunity to the Government today; for clear and concise communications around what happened, not hiding behind secrecy, so that we have a better chance of believing that there isn’t an issue here. If a missile, designed to fly into space before re-entering and unleashing armageddon falls out of the submarine instead, the “nothing to report, time to go on patrol” line has a lot of work to do if people are to believe it. And they have to believe it – the credibility of our most important defence asset depends on it. https://lnkd.in/e7y3vrpU

Very interesting short video from the House of Lords regarding AUKUS and ITAR.