A ceasefire deal has been announced in the Middle East, but it’s too early to know if it will be permanent. On the AUKUS front, the UK Defence Secretary John Healey resigned last week in the middle of a visit by his Australian counterpart, Richard Marles. Whoops! While his resignation was not directly over AUKUS, it is connected to it because Mr Healey does not believe the UK is spending nearly enough on defence capabilities – and those include nuclear powered submarines.
The UK industrial base is in such poor shape that – once again – no Astute class SSNs can go to sea because they are awaiting maintenance. One of those is HMS Anson, which made a visit to Australia in February that was nothing more than a publicity stunt. Anson started experiencing problems – possibly with reactor piping issues – and is now out of service for an unknown period of time. You won’t hear about that from the Australian government. The Royal Navy surface fleet is not in much better shape.
UK submarine construction happens at Barrow in Cumbria. Many Australian journalists have expressed an interest in visiting the yard, but all have been rejected for completely bogus security reasons. The real reason is because the town of Barrow is without any redeeming features, meaning the recruitment of an additional 10,000 workers to build SSN AUKUS looks like a pipe dream – and the main construction hall at the yard was probably badly damaged by a fire in 2024.
Finally, Ukraine is scoring noticeable battlefield success against Russia. The Australian government needs to get off its backside and sign a security treaty with Kyiv – a process that has been stalled for at least a year due to the indifference of our politicians.
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My simplified understanding of Healey’s resignation is that the UK MOD was charged with three, broad, strategic responsibilities: 1. Sustainment of a balanced force that could contribute to integrate European defence; 2. Sustainment of a first strike nuclear strike capability that would form an umbrella for European defence; 3. A global force capability, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific, as a means of contributing to an anglo-centric rules based order. Unfortunately, UK Treasury would only come to an allocation that maybe funded a little short of two of these objectives. I think we know which objective is most disposable.
So, Healey resigned because he has some integrity and wouldn’t carry the can for an unfunded wish list.
The UK’s only real interest in the Asia-Pacific region was in accessing Australian taxpayer’s pockets to try and prop up their failing shipbuilding cabapilities.
Indeed. It looked like the original Astute replacement program – SSN(R) – was at risk of being deferred until Australia showed up promising huge amounts of cash.