A stillborn agreement treated as thrivingly alive; an understanding celebrated as consensual and equal. The AUKUS security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, envisaging the transfer and building of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, continues operating in haphazard fashion. So far, the stream has flown away from Australia and into the military industrial complexes of the UK and the US, both desperate to keep the production of these absurd boats steady.
Australia has yet to see the fabled white elephants of the sea and remain at the mercy of the US Congress. In the meantime, the country is becoming garrisoned, billeted and appropriated to Washington’s geopolitical vanities. Not being a natural enemy and adversary in any sense, and being the most lucrative trading partner, China has become a fantastically idiotic target for Canberra’s foreign policy dunces.
Announced in September 2021 as “an enhanced trilateral security partnership,” AUKUS has hobbled and stuttered its way into 2025. Commentary from the pompom holders for war at such outlets as The Economist continue with such mild remarks as “ambitious but expensive”. The Australian, armed and eager to do battle in print and digital media against the Yellow Peril, features an article about feeding the military industrial complex by politely calling it “a defence revolution.”
19FortyFive fastens onto the idea that Australia’s naval modernisation is central in this endeavour, though never mentions the obvious beneficiary. (In two words: not Australia.) “Nevertheless, AUKUS allows for a broader integration of technological advances in its partners and much-needed modernization of the Australian navy.”
This optimistic glow, despite the limping, the delays, and the blunders, can also be found in Australian Defence. The military industrial complex never needs concrete reasons to exist. It’s a creature onto itself. “Global firms are partnering with Australian based entities in a bid to position themselves for lucrative AUKUS submarine contracts, despite law reforms needed to progress.”
One of them is the Texas-based Fluor Corporation, an engineering and construction firm proud, in the words of its Australia & New Zealand president, Gillian Cagney, of its “thousand engineers who have nuclear capability.” Cagney, like most chiefs and CEOs in this line of work, is good at saying nothing about nothing in particular. When doing so, the language can be guaranteed a good mauling. “We have that experience and capability that we will be supporting the joint venture to bring to bear and making sure we’re bringing the best in class globally.”
Even then, Cagney concedes that the whole business of nuclear-powered submarines for the RAN, known in military planning circles as “Pillar One”, is dicey. Hardly a reason to panic, as this tortured statement testifies: “One of the things as Worley Fluor Australia we are able to do is in multiple sectors globally is to ramp up to meet our customers needs so it’s no different.”
From the United States Studies Centre, that comfortable, uncritical bastion of Pax Americana, a senior research associate, Alice Nason, is found telling France’s Libération that hiccups are bound to take place when the tasks are large. “In a project of this size, length and complexity of AUKUS, it’s no surprise that disruptions and delays are going to arise.” The truism here is intended to excuse the unpardonable. Why projects of such scale are ever needed is left dangling in ether.
These dreary excuses for justifications dressed up as analysis never hide the fundamental defect of AUKUS. It remains, almost entirely, governed by US domestic and foreign interests. It says almost nothing about Australia’s needs, merely speaking to confected Australian fears. It advances the agenda of insecurity, not security. The analysts, lined up from one row to another, cannot assure anybody about what Congress will do if the submarine supply quota lags, or if there will be a war over that strip of territory known as Taiwan.
No publication, however lovingly disposed to the business of war, can avoid the teasing worries. Even that pro-Washington, and US defence industry funded outlet based in Canberra, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has gone so far as to consider a heresy. In December, it ran an article by Peter Briggs, past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, suggesting that Canberra consider acquiring “at least 12 submarines of the French Suffren design. The current AUKUS plan for eight nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) has always been flawed, and now its risks are piling up.” And so we return to where we began: a Franco-Australian agreement to acquire submarines that was sunk in 2021 by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
All in all, forget the submarines, Pillar One, or whatever pillar the strategists tie themselves in knots about. Focus, instead, on the second “pillar”. Australia has become captive – aided through its dim bulbed representatives – of an empire that fears growing old, haggard and weak. It has been enlisted as servitor, grounds keeper and nurse. Retirees from the US Navy are being given astronomical sums in consultancy fees to divulge wisdom they do not have on junkets Down Under. Think tankers from Australia purporting to be academics make similar trips to Washington to celebrate a failing agreement with treasonous delight. The price Australia is paying is already savagely burdensome. It may well, in the long run, prove worse.
Also by Dr Binoy Kampmark:
Join the Army; Travel to Exotic, Distant Lands; and Radicalise
Frail Egos and Sandpit Colonialism: Australia, the United States and Invading Iraq
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This is and always was a stupid, chldish, fantastic non-deal, as the USA always tries to sell off shit as gold and jewels, always overpriced, over budget, over here, at ruinous cost. We cannot build houses for our people, make and sell a reasonable marketable car, bike, frig., white goods, electrics, etc. and we probably cannot panel beat a dent soon. Our skills base got crippled by Abbott the brainless and Aukus is a Mad Morrison brainbumblurt. Dutton is so Dullard, cloddy, loudly incompetent, that his rise to office would see this nation reduced to tearful derision and snide talk universally. Dutton’s Dunceland would be far worse than T Model Albanese in progress.
Amen to your article,Binoy.
Gillian Cagney? Is she Jimmy’s great grand daughter?She comes across as reading lines from a bad movie.Either that or she’s suffering from terminal corporate speak.As for the dim bulbs behind this horrendous boondoggle,there is none dimmer than 2w.Marles.
An interesting comment from a retired US Naval officer on 7.30 about phase one of AUKUS : the supply of Virginia Class nuclear submarines. He said when asked about these assets that ‘they will at all times remain US tactical assets’ [based in Australia].
Seems that the US will at a very minimum embed software that will be US controlled. Why would they not ?
This is why Trump is happy for AUKUS to proceed .
The only winners from this travesty will, of course, be the Yanks. We’ll be on the hook for billions of dollars for decades. A big quiet golf clap to both major parties unless, and that’s a huge “unless”, Labor has the guts to tell them the deal is off. Chances of that occurring? Zero springs to mind very easily.
Australia is Chester to the Yanks Butch (Looney Tunes cartoon “Tree for Two”) without the ending where the roles reverse. We’ll just continue on and on as the little yappy sycophantic Chester.
Dr. Kampmark’s article makes several important points:
1. the country is becoming garrisoned, billeted and appropriated to Washington’s geopolitical vanities.
2. the fundamental defect of AUKUS. It remains, almost entirely, governed by US domestic and foreign interests
3. The AUKUS gravy-train keeps on a-growing. See for example:
AUKUS propelled rockets to take off from Arkansas? What’s the scam?
[ https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-propelled-rocket-ships-to-take-off/ ]
I reckon we are overdue to pull the plug on the whole sorry mess.
Hotel California: Time to check out
[ https://johnmenadue.com/hotel-california-time-to-check-out/ ]
The ABC RN coverage on Global Roaming particularly the comments made by Malcolm Turnbull are quite revealing.
We need to get out of AUKUS now and certainly not hand over any more money.
The instigator, Morrison, was taken for a sucker and took us with him.
Terence, you said earlier that “the US will at a very minimum embed software that will be US controlled. Why would they not ?”
Exactly.
The very minimum indeed.
I’ll be surprised if there is not several US crew on board, including the skipper.
Terence Mills: Agreed. The USUKA sub debacle has only benefited Scummo (why is anybody surprised?) at enormous present & future cost to the Australian taxpayers. Just think ….. $368 BILLION buys a lot of free health care, state school education and public infrastructure built to combat climate change especially global warming.
Terence Mills got it correct ….. almost. I speculate that Scummo was an active participant in the discussions because he realised that getting any executive job in Australia post-politics would be enormously difficult given his track record of secrecy and deception. Think of the difficulties former Treasurer Costello had before he was taken under wing at the Australia Future Fund.
The Cocky has reappeared…thank Christ for that.I, for one was fretting over your whereabouts.Welcome to another worrying chapter in the misadventures of the upright ape.
Cheers, Harry.
One of the scariest aspects of the AUKUS ‘deal’ is the US’s imperial ambitions under Trump.
To seize Panama, to take Greenland, to make Canada the 51st state whether Canadians agree or not are part of the Imperial ambitions of the USA.
When we look at our region, we see that the USA has Hawaii , the Midway Islands, look at ‘our backyard’, the Pacific.
American Samoa
Guam
Northern Mariana Islands
US Virgin Islands
Are all permanently inhabited US territory.
Freely associated states with ‘special relationship with the US include
Federated States of Micronesia
Republic of the Marshall Islands
Republic of Palau
Each of these possessions or freely associate states form part of the militarised Pacific.
The US has some 400 military bases with around 300,000 deployed troops and 60% of its naval fleet in the Pacific.
Australia and The Philippines are included in that militarisation, a defensive, or could it under the ‘right’ president be offensive strategy of the American Empire?
The AUKUS deal merely strengthens the militarisation of the Pacific. The only part that is not covered is the South China Sea, and while the Chinese build up of military bases and naval presence in the South China Sea as well as providing aide to nations not under the thrall of the mighty USA in the Pacific, the idea that it is for defensive purposes is a bit of a lie really, it is to further intimidate China as it is seen as a threat to American power.
The extent of the American imperial presence in the Pacific adds to the cost of having such a wide flung empire, with the US spending more on its military than the combined total of most other nations, our involvement with AUKUS could be seen as helping the US pay for what could well be the economic decline of the mighty USA. Other empires have crumbled under the weight of protecting their imperial assetts… the decline of the British Empire, the French, and other European empires after WWII, Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of WWI…. and then go back in history, the list is very long.
Interestingly, China learned long ago that the cost of maintaining an empire was far too expensive, and so its imperial ambitions are virtually non existent, making a mockery of the fearing mongering applied to the their protection of the South China Sea.
Very eloquent comment Bert.
The turning of the geopolitical worm, and the desperate economic hegemonic grasp by the manicly dissembling and crumbling US imperium has set the whole world’s neighborhood watch on high alert.
Europe is shitting bricks and falling apart as it seeks to find a wholesome path to realignment amid the chaos. The anglophone ‘five eyes’ arrangement is increasingly not used as an implement of global detente, but more recently a tool of aggressive take-over manoeuvres by the leading imperium as it scourges the planet, as it has its own land, in a quest that cons and subjugates its people and decimates the environment.
And now the imperium has reached its peak hubris, with the implanting in its highest office, a lunatic narcissist, a racist, kleptocratic authoritarian surrounding himself in other high offices, with a conga line of other like-minded flunkies. The words from them all an indictment of the racist supremacist plutocracy they are setting in place. Like the collapse of economies and politics in Europe and Britain brought on by US neoliberal / neoconservative adventurism, this latest version of US lunacy is bound to bring on destructive brutal revolution (as is its wont) in its own states.
In such circumstances, Oz finds itself in an imposed pincer movement, with the febrile AUKUS at its core. The pantomime surrounding it only has strings to junkets, and seems to be desperately welded to and addicted by the antics of failed olde worlde imperialism and the horrendous monarchy to which we are precariously subservient via our Constitution.
We surely can’t be physician and psychologist to the broken imperia. We’d surely be better looking inward, and to our region to cure ourselves and rid irrational dependencies to crazed mobs on the other side of the world.