Bradley Perrett | AUKUS submarine plan is far too slow

The nuclear submarines plan is nowhere near good enough. It's dangerously slow, designed for administrative and industrial convenience rather than our urgent concern for national survival.

We don't need this elegant plan for submarines built at regular, unhurried intervals into the second half of the century; we need a crash program, a hell-for-leather effort to build up the Royal Australian Navy's undersea force as soon as possible.

Consider the discussion in this column two weeks ago: the CIA says Xi Jinping has ordered his forces to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027, meaning not that war will happen then but that the risk will start rising dramatically. And in this column we looked at how we might rush to build up the air force by 2027 by ordering aircraft now.

Yet here's the government talking about reaching the targeted force of eight nuclear submarines by the 2050s.

The 2050s? Are they kidding? War could easily come long before then, with a terrifying aftermath. China could take Taiwan, then achieve lordship over East Asia and assemble forces on the islands to our north, demanding our obedience. That's a sequence that quite realistically could culminate around 2040.

And as for the 2050s, if we get there, no-one has the slightest idea of the number of submarines we will need then. It could be eight; it could be 16.

Only two things mentioned in the subs plan are commendable: the Virginia class and 2033. That's the year when we will get our hands on the first sub, and indeed it's probably the earliest possible year. The timing can be achieved because the boat will be a unit of the in-production Virginia class.

But after that quick start the submarine plan shifts to slow motion: one boat every three years out to 2063. After a third Virginia arrives in 2039, the plan also shifts from made-in-USA dependability to the sky-high risk and heightened cost of a new British design partly built in Australia.

(Seeing the risk of the Anglo-Australian effort going awry, the government is taking options on two more Virginias.)

Now it may be that, despite our intended investment in boosting its building capacity, the US refuses to sell us more than one Virginia every three years, to protect its own supply. Maybe.

But it's much more likely that the RAN just does not want them any faster. After all, we could expand the US industry even further so it could supply us faster while satisfying the US Navy.

Why won't we? Well, the slower the program, you see, the easier it is for the RAN to execute. So, one reason for this dawdling is almost certainly administrative convenience.

Then there's industrial convenience, these days an entrenched and pernicious influence in our naval programs: we now routinely plan to get warships not when we need them but when an optimal industrial set-up can comfortably deliver them.

So here we see that Australia and Britain intend to build the British design, SSN-AUKUS, at a steady rate of one boat every 18 months, with deliveries alternating between the two countries.

If the rate never changes, production is easier to manage and, it must be said, cheaper and more dependable. And if the rate is slow enough, as in this case, the building effort never ends: when the last unit of a class is completed, it's time to build a replacement for the first.

Ain't that elegant?

We don't have time for elegance. Warship construction at low and steady rates is for countries whose security risks are also low and steady. But ours are rocketing.

When countries see a heightened risk of war they throw themselves into crash armaments programs, building as quickly as they can and expecting to sort out the industrial disruption later.

What would a crash nuclear submarine program look like for Australia? A stream of US-built Virginias as fast as we could get them, of course.

Our Collins class diesel-electric subs were commissioned at an average rate of one every 16 months. Admittedly, nuclear subs are new to us and vastly more complicated, and they require many more people. But Australia is larger now, has access to US guidance on how to commission Virginias, and, above all, simply must try harder, because it is facing a possible security crisis.

With great national effort and a decade of preparation, it should be possible to commission one Virginia a year, so we would have eight nuclear submarines by 2040 - not 2054.

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And if we imported Virginias we would not have to worry about maintaining work at our submarine shipyard, because we would not have one.

Even SSN-AUKUS subs could be built much faster than currently planned. In the 1960s, when the whole concept of nuclear submarines was new, Britain built about one a year. Its population then was around 54 million.

SSN-AUKUS is bigger and more sophisticated than 1960s designs, but so are today's economies. With about 100 million people between them, it is surely possible for Australia and Britain together to bang out one sub a year, with two-thirds of the deliveries coming to us until we filled our requirement. Then the program could slow to a trickle to preserve skills.

If we also demanded quicker building times for each boat, we could realistically hope to get a fifth SSN-AUKUS - our eighth nuclear submarine - by 2047.

This submarine plan is no good. We should just import Virginias. And if we must create a domestic industry, it should go work flat out - even if speed is inconvenient.