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How Australian SSNs will fit into multi-domain deterrence
There’s a saying about submarine warfare: ‘there are two types of naval vessels – submarines and targets.’ Nuclear-powered submarines, SSNs, are the true apex predator of the oceans in war.
The chief of the Royal Australian Navy and soon-to-be chief of the defence force, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, brought the SSN into the picture in a discussion of multi-domain deterrence at the ASPI Defence Conference on 25 June.
For those that don’t know, nuclear-powered submarines have really only been involved in combat operations twice. First time, 1982 Falklands War, [when the Royal Navy’s] HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian Navy’s flagship, the cruiser the General Belgrano, with a spread of straight-running torpedoes. After that engagement, the Argentine surface navy did not come back to sea.
‘Animated by nostalgia’: Labor senator slams luminaries over AUKUS
Labor senator Raff Ciccone has launched a blistering attack on critics of the AUKUS submarine pact, dismissing a crowd-funded inquiry backed by former Labor ministers as backward-looking and unconstructive.
In a speech to the Senate on Tuesday night, the Victorian argued that opposition to Australia’s planned acquisition of US Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines was driven more by politics and nostalgia than genuine concerns about national security.
Ciccone, the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, took aim at a recently established inquiry into AUKUS, chaired by former Labor minister and anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Garrett and other party luminaries, which is calling for a fresh examination of the program’s strategic assumptions, costs and risks.
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The rime of the ancient submariner
The news that Australia will now only be getting used nuclear submarines should alert the government that AUKUS may prove more myth than reality
As a series of images flashing before your eyes, the AUKUS flip book is beyond bizarre. First up are two right-wing chancers – Scott Morrison, prime minister of Australia, and straw-haired Boris Johnson, UK prime minister – meeting US president Joe Biden on the G7 Summit sidelines in Cornwall, in June 2021. AUKUS was a secret twinkle in their eyes.
The next image is a virtual joint press conference three months later: Morrison flanked by a TV-screen Johnson on one side and a TV-screen Biden on the other – announcing the creation of AUKUS. Prefiguring his cognitive decline – or perhaps Morrison was just forgettable – Biden thanked “that fellow Down Under”. And what was an AUKUS anyway?
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