Decades?
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/20...emains-strong/
Gilday: Australian sub deal ‘brilliant,’ partnership with French Navy remains strong
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations is committed to helping Australia with its newly announced nuclear-powered submarine program and equally committed to operating seamlessly alongside the French Navy, after the recent Australia-U.K.-U.S. submarine agreement caused a political fallout between the triad and France.
Adm. Mike Gilday called the so-called AUKUS agreement, in which the U.S. Navy and U.K. Royal Navy would help Australia design, build and support a nuclear-powered attack submarine program of its own, “strategically … very important and, I think, a brilliant stroke with respect to our posture in the
Pacific, particularly vis a vis China.”
He said the arrangement would require the U.S. Navy to work “very closely with the Australian Navy to help determine what the optimal path will be to safely deliver not solely the submarines, but the enterprise that has to support them. This is everything from a defense industrial base in Australia; to a community inside the Australian Navy that’s able to man, train, and equip those submarines; to sustain them; to have the oversight mechanism similar to what we have in the United States Navy to oversee those nuclear power vessels.”
“This is a very long-term effort that’ll be decades, I think, before a submarine goes in the water — it could be. I don’t see this as a short-term timeline. We have an 18-month exploratory period that’ll get after a lot of these questions and help Australia come to grips with exactly what they need to do to get in the path akin to the United States Navy,” Gilday continued during his remarks at Defense One’s State of the Navy event online.
The U.S. Navy not only has program offices that support submarine design, construction and maintenance, but a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, or Naval Reactors, program exists under the U.S. Department of Energy to handle the nuclear-powered propulsion system design, maintenance and safety……