With alliance-averse former President Donald J. Trump returning to office, naval and shipbuilding interests from Connecticut to western Australia are watching the new administration for signs of support for the historic AUKUS security agreement.
Billions of dollars — some of which could reach southeastern Connecticut — are tied to the future of the trilateral agreement signed early in the Biden administration by Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
AUKUS was created as a joint commitment to contain an increasingly aggressive China — a priority of the first Trump administration — and to keep commerce flowing freely on important Indo-Pacific sea lanes. To do so, AUKUS set in motion an unprecedented transfer of defense technology between the three countries.
Significantly, it permits the sale by the U.S. to Australia of as many as five of the new, $4.5 billion Virginia class attack submarines, which are built in Groton by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics and packed with the country’s most advanced and closely guarded military technology. The transfer would enable Australia to carry a greater part of the far eastern security burden for the allies while developing its own naval design and construction program.
Constructed by Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Electric Boat Division, the Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarine is a primary underwater asset of the Navy.
There is bipartisan support for AUKUS in Congress. Opposition comes from those who believe that, in view of the furious pace at which China is expanding its Navy, the U.S. needs to concentrate on rebuilding its own before selling boats to Australia.
Language in AUKUS gives whoever is president at the time of submarine transfers the power to kill them in the interest of U.S. national security. Trump has so far been silent on AUKUS, but Elbridge Colby, mentioned frequently as a possible Trump administration national security advisor, created a stir last summer with remarks suggesting that the U.S. Navy should be the country’s priority and the jury is still out on AUKUS.
“The question is Trump,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, a leading AUKUS supporter and the Second District Democrat whose district includes both Electric Boat and the U.S. Naval Submarine Base three miles up the Thames River in Groton.
“I’m not sure he has ever uttered the word AUKUS. But alliances are always a little bit suspect with him. He doesn’t like NATO and people are worried about that in him,” Courtney said.
In the three years since Australia, where the economy can be subject to Chinese grievance, persuaded the U.S. and England of the value of the AUKUS concept, the agreement has produced results on both sides of the world.
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Electric Boat is hiring at record levels — more than 5,000 a year over the last two years — as it and its suppliers struggle to produce enormously complex submarines at a pace that satisfies both U.S. security requirements and its AUKUS commitment. Australian sailors are studying in the U.S. Navy’s sub school in Groton and training on active duty U.S. submarines. Courtney said an Australian was at the helm when the USS Hawaii, a new Virginia class ship, sailed into Perth in August.
Australia has committed $3 billion to build up U.S. companies in the industrial base that supports submarine production. It is spending billions more on Australian naval bases and shipyards that will support both Australian and U.S. submarines. Housing is being built for U.S. sailors at HMAS Stirling on the Indian Ocean near Perth, which would be the Royal Australian Navy’s principal base for U.S. and Australian Virginia class submarines patrolling the Indo-Pacific.
Courtney, just elected to his ninth term, has taken a leading role in shaping U.S. naval shipbuilding policy as a senior member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee and ranking member of its Seapower subcommittee. More recently he has been one of Washington’s strongest advocates for AUKUS and its strategic implications for Chinese containment.
He spent much of election night doing interviews with reporters in Australia, which is in a part of the world where there is deep concern over both Chinese belligerence and the incoming administration’s attitude toward AUKUS. Among other things, China — Australia’s largest trading partner — showed it can stagger the Australian economy when it blocked its exports because Australia supported an investigation of the origins of the coronavirus. Australian polling showed that trust in China plunged from from 52 to 16 percent as a result.
Since then, the Chinese navy has taken steps with Taiwan and the Philippines say threaten their sovereignty.
Courtney is co-chair and a founding member of the Congressional Friends of Australia caucus. Last month, he was named an honorary officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia, an award recognizing “extraordinary service” to Australia by non citizens. U.S. House Armed Services Committee
Rep. Joe Courtney Michael McAndrews | Special to the Hartford Courant
One of the arguments he said supports AUKUS is that, under the agreement, Australia is willing to spend billions on U.S. submarines and domestic military capacity in order to carry out naval missions in the Indo-Pacific that the U.S. would otherwise be doing alone.
“From a strategic standpoint it is really important to keep AUKUS in place,” he said. “There is a lot of momentum behind it in DC, a lot of Republican support. That makes me feel cautiously optimistic. It is in my opinion, the most potent counterbalance to China. China hates AUKUS.”
Other far eastern countries are pressing to join AUKUS and Courtney said Chinese displeasure was on display a year ago during remarks by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the International Institute for Strategic Studies annual far east defense conference in Singapore.
“China had a delegation there,” Courtney said. “The folks from South Korea were asking Austin during the plenary session, ‘When can we join AUKUS?’ and the Chinese delegation was just fuming.”
During an appearances with Courtney earlier this year, Australia’s deputy U.S. ambassador said he believes the “threshold motivation” behind moves such as China’s efforts to close parts of the South China Sea to shipping is to “expel” the U.S. from the waters inside what is known as the first island chain, an arc of island nations running through Japan, portions of the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia.
“I think in this it is important to emphasize that in the U.S. and Australia, we very much see ourselves as the status quo powers in this context,” Ambassador Paul Myler said then.“We are the ones that are trying to protect the environment which has created so much prosperity, including for China, over the last 70 years.
“I think China has made it quite clear that it is interested in shifting that status quo. And so then you get down to a contest of what we want the region to look like. And for Australia it is very much a region where countries have agency, where they are not subject to coercion, where big countries don’t dominate smaller counties, where sovereignty is protected and where the economic prosperity that we’ve generated is available for all.”
The future of AUKUS could turn on how quickly the U.S. can restore the industrial capacity the Pentagon believes is needed to build submarines fast enough to meet U.S. security needs. Restoring that capacity, after it was left to collapse at the close of the Cold War, has been a struggle.
The decades of flat defense spending shrunk the U.S. fleet by half and over more than generation, depleted the ranks of welders, shipfitters and riggers who build ships, as well as the companies that supply them..
The Navy now says it needs 66 Virginia class submarines. Electric boat has built more than 20 at the same time it is building a dozen of the bigger and more expensive Columbia class ballistic missing submarines.
