The cautionary note i'd add to this is that the other platforms mentioned - notably B-21 bombers - are also being produced in small numbers and, if the USAF requirement is ramped up to replace, in part or whole, the manned NGAD requirement, the US could also decline to provide any of those either.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...r-to-australia
Surface tension: could the promised Aukus nuclear submarines simply never be handed over to Australia?
The multi-billion dollar deal was heralded as ensuring the security of the Indo-Pacific. But with America an increasingly unreliable ally, doubts are rising above the waves.
Maybe Australia’s boats just never turn up.
To fanfare and flags, the
Aukus deal was presented as a sure bet, papering over an uncertainty that such an ambitious deal could ever be delivered. It was assured, three publics across two oceans were told – signed, sealed and to-be-delivered: Australia would buy from its great ally, the US, its own conventionally armed nuclear-powered attack submarines before it began building its own.
But there is an emerging disquiet on the promise of Aukus pillar one: it may be the promised US-built nuclear-powered submarines simply never arrive under Australian sovereign control. Instead, those nuclear submarines, stationed in Australia, could bear US flags, carry US weapons, commanded and crewed by American officers and sailors.
Australia, unswerving ally, reduced instead to a forward operating garrison – in the words of the chair of US Congress’s house foreign affairs committee, nothing more than “a central base of operations from which to project power”.
Officially at least, Aukus remains on course, centrepiece of a storied security alliance.
Pillar one of the Australia-UK-US agreement involves, first, Australia buying between three and five Virginia-Class nuclear-powered submarines from the US – the first of these in 2032. Then, by the “late 2030s”, according to Australia’s
submarine industry strategy, the UK will deliver the first specifically designed and built Aukus submarine. The first Australian-built version will be in the water “in the early 2040s”. Aukus is forecast to cost up to $368bn to the mid-2050s.
But in both Washington and Canberra, there is growing concern over the very first step: America’s capacity to build the boats it has promised Australia, and – even if it had the wherewithal to build the subs – whether it would relinquish them into Australian control.
The gnawing anxiety over Aukus sits within a broader context of a rewritten rulebook for relations between America and its allies. Amid the
Sturm und Drang of the first weeks of Trump’s second administration, there is growing concern that the reliable ally is no longer that. With the casual, even brutal, dismissal of Ukraine – an ally for whom the US has provided security guarantees for a generation – the old certainties exist no longer.
“I think America is a much less dependable ally under [president] Trump than it was,” the former prime minister
Malcolm Turnbull tells the Guardian this week. “And this is not a criticism of Trump, this is literally a feature, not a bug: he’s saying that he’s less dependable".
"It may be that – regrettably – we do end up with no submarines. And then we have to invest in other ways of defending ourselves. But the big message is that we are going to have to look at defending Australia by ourselves. That’s really the issue. We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up.”
Trump can hardly be accused of hiding his priorities. If the 47th president has a doctrine beyond self-interest, “America First” has been his shibboleth since before his first term. “Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” he said on the campaign trail. He
told his inauguration: “I will, very simply, put America first.”
On 8 February, Australia paid $US500m ($AUD790m) to the US, the first instalment in a total of $US3bn pledged in order to support America’s shipbuilding industry. Aukus was, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles said, “a powerful symbol of our two countries working together in the Indo-Pacific. It represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent … it represents an increase in Australian capability, through the acquisition of a nuclear‑powered submarine capability … it also represents an increase in Australian defence spending”.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth – joking that “the cheque did clear” – gave succour to Aukus supporters, saying his country’s mission in the Indo-Pacific was not one “that America can undertake by itself”. “Allies and partners, technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.”
But, just three days after Australia’s cheque cleared, the
Congressional Research Service quietly issued a paper* saying while the nuclear-powered attack submarines (known as SSNs) intended for Australia might be built, the US could decide to never hand them over.
It said the post-pandemic shipbuilding rate in the US was so anaemic that it could not service the needs of the US Navy alone, let alone build submarines for another country’s navy. Under a proposed alternative, “up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs would be built, and instead of three to five of them being sold to Australia, these additional boats would instead be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the five US and UK submarines that are already planned to be operated out of Australia”.
The paper argued that Australia, rather than spending money to buy, build and sail its own nuclear-powered submarines, would instead invest that money in other military capabilities – long-range missiles, drones, or bombers – “so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States”.....
*
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL32418.pdf