Hugh White provides an insightful overview into AUKUS from both a capability and political perspective:
I don't think any serious analytical work was done in defense to justify the decision to move to nuclear-powered boats and that really goes back to the point I made at the beginning: that in the end for the people involved it wasn't really about submarines.
A few comments:
I think White overstates the role of political calculation in Labor's ongoing support of AUKUS. The politics are certainly relevant, but at the end of the day the reason this Labor government continues to support AUKUS is because they support the political and strategic assumptions that produced it, even if not as universally, enthusiastically, or without reservation as the Liberal Party.
White's contrast between eight SSNs on the one hand, and two dozen SSKs on the other may be valid from an acquisition cost perspective, but the problem with large numbers of anything manned is always the manning. I suspect that a lower comparison ratio of perhaps 2:1 would be more suitable. The real differences emerge in the roles one envisions for the boats. If you want to lob cruise missiles at the Chinese mainland in Taiwan scenarios, conventional boats are going to struggle to be competitive owing to extended transit times reducing available time on station. If you want to maintain barrier operations across the northern approaches to Australia against encroaching warships and submarines, you will probably get a different result.
In retrospect, building the "Son of
Collins" is clearly something we should've done, and that we should've commenced work on probably more than fifteen years ago -- whether as a complete next-generation solution in its own right, or as one element of a broader solution. Nonetheless, I'm not confident that
Collins provides a suitable basis for future development
starting today.
