More than four years after the AUKUS security pact was unveiled with fanfare, serious doubts are deepening in Australia over whether its most ambitious promise — nuclear-powered submarines — can ever be delivered as planned. While the United States and the United Kingdom continue to reaffirm their political commitment to the trilateral alliance, growing industrial bottlenecks, workforce shortages, and strategic constraints in both countries are fuelling concern that Australia may end up paying an enormous price for capabilities that arrive too late, in too few numbers, or not at all.
At the heart of the debate is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s continued faith in AUKUS, even as critics warn that the gap between political rhetoric and industrial reality is widening. With projected costs ranging from AUD 240 billion to AUD 368 billion over three decades, scrutiny of the deal has intensified amid fears that Canberra is transferring billions of dollars to Washington and London without any tangible return so far.
Under the AUKUS framework, Australia has already begun making significant payments to bolster submarine industrial bases in the U.S. and the UK. Washington has reportedly received more than USD 4.6 billion from Canberra to expand American submarine construction capacity, while another USD 4.8 billion (around £2.4 billion) has been earmarked for Rolls-Royce’s nuclear engine facilities in the UK. Half of this British contribution must be paid by the end of the 2027–28 financial year, with the remainder due by 2032–33. Some of these payments have already been transferred.
Yet Australia has not received a single submarine, nor firm delivery guarantees, in return.
This imbalance has prompted sharp criticism from former Australian leaders. Malcolm Turnbull, who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2018, recently argued that the lack of transparent public debate on AUKUS has masked what he views as Australia’s exploitation under the pact. Speaking to The Saturday Paper, Turnbull said, “I think the UK saw Australia as a rich dummy that will basically subsidise their creaky submarine program.”
He echoed the words of another former prime minister, Paul Keating, who remarked when AUKUS was announced in 2021 that “there were three leaders of that announcement. There was only one of them paying.” Turnbull added that Australia’s parliament, despite having the most at stake, has been “the least curious and the least informed.”
AUKUS was signed in September 2021 by then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and US President Joe Biden. It was billed as a transformational security partnership designed to bolster deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and ensure what the three leaders described as a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”
The pact rests on two pillars. Pillar One focuses on providing Australia with nuclear-powered submarines through a phased approach. Under this plan, the United States would sell Australia at least three Virginia-class attack submarines in the early 2030s, with the option of two more. Simultaneously, the UK would work with Australia to design a new class of nuclear-powered submarine, dubbed SSN-AUKUS, incorporating advanced U.S. technologies and to be built in both Barrow-in-Furness in England and Adelaide in South Australia.
Pillar Two aims to deepen cooperation on advanced military technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, cyber warfare, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic weapons, undersea robotics, and electronic warfare.
On paper, AUKUS represents one of the most ambitious defence collaborations in decades. In practice, its flagship submarine component is increasingly seen as unworkable within the promised timelines.
The most immediate problem lies in the United States’ ability to spare any Virginia-class submarines at all. Despite repeated assurances from Washington, the U.S. Navy is struggling to meet its own force requirements. The Pentagon currently faces a backlog of 12 Virginia-class attack submarines and three Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the latter being essential to America’s nuclear deterrent.
U.S. shipyards are producing roughly 1.2 Virginia-class submarines per year, well below the estimated 2.33 per year needed to meet both American operational demands and AUKUS commitments. Compounding the issue is the limited industrial base: only three U.S. shipyards — in Groton, Connecticut; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and Newport News, Virginia — are capable of building nuclear-powered attack submarines. Of these, only two are currently fully functional, and both are already operating at maximum capacity.
There is also a legal hurdle. Under U.S. law, any transfer of a nuclear-powered submarine to another country requires presidential certification that the sale will not “degrade U.S. undersea capabilities.” Given the current shortage of operational submarines in the U.S. fleet, many analysts believe this threshold will be extremely difficult to meet, regardless of political intent.
The U.S. government has pledged to invest more than USD 17 billion to expand its submarine industrial base, an effort Australia is helping finance. However, such investments take years to translate into additional submarines, especially in a sector constrained by skilled labour shortages and long supply chains.
Although President Donald Trump told Prime Minister Albanese during a visit to the U.S. last October that AUKUS was moving “full steam ahead,” the Pentagon has yet to release the full findings of its internal review into whether Virginia-class submarines can realistically be provided to Australia.
If doubts about American capacity are troubling, concerns over Britain’s ability to deliver its share of AUKUS are arguably even starker.
The UK’s submarine force has shrunk significantly since the Cold War, and maintenance backlogs have left much of the fleet unavailable. The Royal Navy nominally operates 10 nuclear-powered submarines — five Astute-class attack submarines and four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines — but reports suggest that at times only two are actually ready for deployment.
Retired Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, a former nuclear submarine commanding officer, has described Britain’s submarine capability as “shambolic” and “parlous.” Mathias led a major 2010 review of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system, lending weight to his criticism.
“There is a high probability that the UK element of AUKUS will fail,” Mathias told The Sydney Morning Herald, warning that such a failure would make the diplomatic fallout over Australia’s 2021 cancellation of its French-designed submarine contract “look like a non-event.”
According to Mathias, the fundamental problem is people, not policy. “Policy and money don’t build nuclear submarines. People do that, and there are not enough of them with the right level of skills and experience,” he said. He argues that Australia showed “a great deal of naivety” in signing up to AUKUS without conducting sufficient due diligence on the state of the UK’s submarine program, even as it began transferring billions of dollars.
Rear Admiral Peter Briggs, a submarine expert and former president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, shares many of these concerns. Briggs notes persistent problems with the Royal Navy’s Astute-class fleet and warns that manpower shortages are forcing Britain to staff key roles with personnel lacking deep nuclear submarine expertise.
“The schedules are already fuzzy, and even those fuzzy schedules are slipping,” Briggs said, pointing out that the design review for the SSN-AUKUS concept has reportedly been pushed back to September next year. Detailed design would follow, leaving little chance of construction beginning in the late 2020s.
“There’s no way they’ll be starting to build it in the late ’20s,” he said. “It will be late, it will be over budget, and it will have first-of-class issues.”
The British government, for its part, insists it remains firmly committed to AUKUS. Its Strategic Defence Review published last June pledged to “double down on both pillars” of the agreement, and London views the pact as central to its long-term security posture, industrial strategy, and “Global Britain” ambitions.
The UK says it has invested £6 billion over the past 18 months in submarine infrastructure and skills, expanded facilities at Barrow and Derby, and aims to build a new submarine every 18 months. In July 2025, Britain and Australia also signed a 50-year treaty to underpin their AUKUS partnership.
The goal is to have the first SSN-AUKUS submarines entering service in the late 2030s. But critics argue that these plans underestimate the scale of Britain’s industrial and workforce challenges and overestimate how quickly they can be resolved.
Against this backdrop, some defence analysts are questioning whether Australia should continue to prioritise nuclear-powered submarines at all — at least in the near term.
One proposal gaining attention is the idea of acquiring long-range strategic bombers instead. Steve Balestrieri, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier and defence commentator, has argued that transferring retiring B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to Australia could provide a valuable stopgap capability.
Australia has lacked a dedicated bomber force since retiring its F-111 fleet, and the B-2’s ability to penetrate heavily defended airspace, carry large payloads, and strike deep targets with aerial refuelling could significantly enhance deterrence. A small Australian B-2 fleet, Balestrieri argues, would complicate China’s military planning by forcing it to stretch air and missile defences across the Indo-Pacific.
He also contends that acquiring the next-generation B-21 Raider bomber would be cheaper and faster than waiting for AUKUS submarines, while offering greater flexibility in responding to rapidly evolving threats.
Whether Canberra, Washington, and London are willing to consider such an interim shift remains unclear.
For now, the three partners are emphasising progress on AUKUS’s second pillar to demonstrate continued momentum. Construction is underway on the first Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) site in Western Australia, which is expected to become operational by the end of this year. The facility will enhance space domain awareness and missile tracking.
The partners have also begun joint trials of quantum-based positioning, navigation, and timing systems designed to reduce reliance on GPS in contested environments. In addition, a trilateral funding pool of USD 252 million was established in late 2024 to support hypersonic flight testing and experimentation, with six test campaigns planned through 2028.
These initiatives underscore that AUKUS is more than just submarines. But for Australia, the submarines remain the pact’s centrepiece — and its greatest risk.
As doubts continue to mount over U.S. and UK capacity, the central question confronting Canberra is whether patience and faith will eventually be rewarded, or whether Australia has committed itself to a decades-long, multi-hundred-billion-dollar gamble whose payoff may never fully materialise.
