Tag Archive for: AUKUS

AUKUS Defense Ministers Meeting Joint Statement > U.S. Department of Defense > Release

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Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III hosted the Honourable Richard Marles MP, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, Australia, and the Right Honourable Grant Shapps, Secretary of State for Defence, United Kingdom, at the Defense Innovation Unit Headquarters in California today to discuss the AUKUS enhanced defense and security partnership.

For more than a century, the three nations have stood shoulder-to-shoulder, along with other allies and partners, to help sustain peace, stability and prosperity around the world. The Secretaries and Deputy Prime Minister acknowledged that, in the face of an evolving security environment, AUKUS presents a generational opportunity to modernize and enhance longstanding partnerships and cooperation to address global security challenges and contribute to stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond. The Secretaries and Deputy Prime Minister reaffirmed that at the core of this partnership is the shared resolve to bolster security and stability and ensure that the Indo-Pacific remains a region free from coercion and aggression.

For Australia’s acquisition of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines (Pillar I), AUKUS partners are collaborating to deliver this capability at the earliest possible date while upholding the highest nuclear non-proliferation standard. For Advanced Capabilities (Pillar II), AUKUS partners are substantially deepening cooperation on a range of security and defense capabilities, making sure that each nation has the capabilities needed to defend against rapidly evolving threats. Through these efforts, AUKUS contributes to integrated deterrence by pursuing layered and asymmetric capabilities that promote increased security and stability.

The Secretaries and Deputy Prime Minister reaffirmed the three nations’ commitment to maximize the strategic and technological advantage of AUKUS by combining national strengths and pooling resources to deliver game-changing capabilities. They agreed that advancing AUKUS requires continued commitment to streamlining defense trade controls and information-sharing while minimizing policy and financial barriers across public and private…

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AUKUS pact expanded to base hypersonic missiles in Australia

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On the eve of calling a federal election, Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week took another critical step to placing Australia on the frontline of US preparations for war against China.

Morrison heralded a major expansion of last September’s AUKUS military pact, an agreement that has bipartisan support from the opposition Labor Party, which is equally committed to the intensifying US military alliance.

In a joint statement, Morrison, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that the AUKUS treaty between the three governments would be extended to include the development of ­“advanced hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities” and electronic warfare technologies.

The UK Carrier Strike Group 2021, led by HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, departing the UK (credit: Royal Navy/Flickr)

Land-based hypersonic missiles, which would have a range of more than 2,000 kilometres, would be stationed in Australia, while air and sea versions could be deployed on the country’s jet fighters and warships.

This would make Australia an even more crucial base for the US, from which to launch a potential nuclear war against China, which is regarded by Washington as the chief threat to US global dominance.

Hypersonic missiles are capable of travelling at least five times the speed of sound, dramatically reducing the warning time. Coupled with their manoeuvrability, this makes them virtually impossible to intercept. They can carry nuclear warheads.

No price tag was mentioned. But these programs would require the spending of billions more dollars, on top of the near $600 billion already allocated for Australian military weaponry over the current decade.

Bloomberg reported last November, based on internal Pentagon estimates, that the missiles would cost more than $100 million each, adding about $30 billion to spending to develop some 300 missiles, starting this year.

CNN revealed on Wednesday morning that the American military had secretly tested hypersonic missiles last month.

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What other technology is in Australia’s AUKUS pact with US and UK?

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Imagine a flying machine-gun that can recognise faces – and pick its own targets. Or a new kind of computer chilled to the temperature of space and able to calculate in seconds what a supercomputer would take millennia to solve. Then suppose you could beam co-ordinates from a satellite to an army base using an unhackable encryption key, or send a swarm of undersea drones to lie in wait for a stealth submarine.

These technologies are no longer in the realm of science fiction; some are already cresting the horizon.Talk of artificial intelligence, quantum technology, hypersonic missiles, cyber weapons and other “undersea capabilities” may have been missed in the fanfare (and shock) of Australia’s plan to build its first fleet of nuclear submarines, but such things are also listed as part of the new technology-sharing AUKUS pact between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The fields are not new, and not just the domain of the AUKUS trio; many also appear in China’s latest five-year plan, for example. But experts say some of these technologies could disrupt the traditional battlefield before Australia’s nuclear submarine fleet is even online.

So how developed are they? Who else is working on them? And how might they change the face of war?

China is building a hypersonic wind-tunnel in Beijing to help it test faster aircraft at up to 30 times the speed of sound.

China is building a hypersonic wind-tunnel in Beijing to help it test faster aircraft at up to 30 times the speed of sound.

What does ‘cyber’ have to do with warfare?

War has already changed in one big way. The first act of a major conflict will now play out in cyberspace, says Professor Michael Webb, director of the Defence Institute at the University of Adelaide. “If you think back to the Gulf War, we were fighting first for supremacy in the air.” Today, because of how connected the world is, “we’ll be fighting for supremacy in cyber”.

If you can jam an enemy nation’s satellites to mess with their GPS navigation, or blind their air radar systems, or even shut down their electricity grid, you can sow chaos before you’ve fired a single shot.

The world’s first digital weapon was unleashed in 2009, a highly advanced computer worm known as Stuxnet, built by…

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The new AUKUS alliance holds some lessons for India

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In a surprise, virtual statement on September 15, the heads of government of Australia, the UK and US announced the formation of a trilateral security pact, to be known by the acronym, AUKUS. Without naming China, US President Joe Biden announced, in a press conference, that “in order to deal with rapidly evolving threats,” the US and Britain would share, with Australia, intelligence and advanced technologies in areas like artificial intelligence, cyber-warfare, quantum computing and nuclear submarine construction.

The surprise at the formation of AUKUS is for a number of reasons. Firstly, the three nations are already allied to each other, in more ways than one — the US and UK are NATO allies, and Australia, New Zealand and the US are linked by the ANZUS pact. All three are also members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. Secondly, this announcement, coming just days before the first in-person summit meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), places a question mark over the continuing relevance of this forum and its long-overdue actualisation. Finally, the inclusion of a much-diminished, post-Brexit UK in such a long-range alliance is bound to raise a few eyebrows.

China has made no secret of its neurosis about the Quad as well as the naval exercise, “Malabar,” both of which, now, have a common membership, comprising the US, India, Australia and Japan. Beijing’s apprehensions arise from the suspicion that this concatenation could be a precursor to “containment” – the Cold War strategy which eventually brought the USSR to its knees.

While frequently heaping scorn on their attempts at synergy and coordination, China loses no opportunity to send intimidatory messages to the Quad nations. This has led to palpable trepidation amongst members of this grouping, who have remained over-cautious in their utterances and tended to “tip-toe” around the “dragon” in their midst. The Quad has neither created a charter nor invested itself with any substance; fearing that it would be dubbed an “Asian NATO.” China, on its part, has dismissed the Quad as a “headline-grabbing idea which will dissipate like sea-foam”.

So far, China has had its…

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