Since the AUKUS announcement was made in September last year, a huge amount of ink has been spilled discussing the capabilities of nuclear-powered submarines, the merits of the potential designs, and the challenges of ensuring the vessels are delivered within the necessary timeframe. Far less attention has been paid to the potential impacts that the decision to adopt nuclear submarines will have on the Royal Australian Navy itself. A glance back at the experience of the Royal Navy during its formative period adopting nuclear submarines suggests that a massive technological acquisition project such as this will have a transformative impact on the RAN, and in ways that extend far beyond simply gaining a new capability.

In 1962, First Sea Lord Caspar John bemoaned in his diary that the British Polaris project threatened to be a millstone ‘hung round our necks’ and that they were ‘potential wreckers of the real navy’. While it may be questioned whether or not Admiral John’s fears proved well founded, it is indisputable that the decision of the British government to pursue nuclear submarines and a continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, or CASD, came at a considerable opportunity cost for the Royal Navy. The government’s assurances that the CASD would not impinge on wider Royal Navy funding naturally slipped, and where the money would come from soon became the topic of bitter interservice fighting. By the early 1980s senior naval leaders were describing the CASD as the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ because of the way the costly programs were funded at the expense of traditional surface-fleet capabilities.

Similar assurances to ‘do what it takes’ and provide full funding support were made by the Morrison government when announcing the nuclear submarines would be acquired under AUKUS. However, with the program not set to deliver the first boat for nearly 20 years, the likelihood of this ‘blank cheque’ remaining through successive changes of government seems slim. As in the Cold War Royal Navy, future RAN leaders may well have to make difficult decisions about which other capabilities to cut to continue to fund the nuclear submarine project. The current relatively benign financial situation has also served to limit opposition to this extraordinarily costly project from the other services. If we see tighter defence budgets this is almost certain to change, further driving pressure on the navy to make cuts elsewhere.

Money is perhaps the most tangible of the potential opportunity costs of the AUKUS project, but it is far from the only one. Massive technological acquisitions are extremely intensive in their use of human capital, something that Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead has recently highlighted. The Nuclear-Powered Submarine Taskforce he heads has already spawned at least seven divisions and nine high-level trilateral working groups and numbers more than 200 people. To support this, it has pulled in talent from across the navy, Defence and wider government. This concentration of personnel is essential to get a project as complex as this one off the ground, but in what are relatively small organisations, such efforts come at the cost of diverting people from other areas.

The demands of nuclear programs on human resources in the early Cold War demonstrate the potential impact. The US Navy Special Projects Office ‘stripped the Navy of its best technical talent’, and routinely ‘decimated’ teams working on other high-end projects. The Polaris program was delivered, but it arguably came at the cost of a number of other key conventional capabilities including surface-to-air missiles. Given the small talent pool in Australia, the risk of similar problems occurring with the submarine taskforce is extremely high.

The AUKUS submarine project comes with an additional layer of complexity in the form of the regulatory and legislative changes necessary to allow Australia to safely and legally acquire, build and run nuclear submarines. Although much of this might lie outside the direct purview of the navy, it is still going to be a huge endeavour that will take up a considerable chunk of Defence’s ‘bandwidth’, with resultant impacts elsewhere.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the decision to adopt nuclear submarines is likely to significantly and permanently alter the culture and identity of the RAN. The construction of the first nuclear submarines and the subsequent development of Polaris was a huge undertaking for both the USN and the RN, and these projects changed the nature of those organisations. Admiral Hyman Rickover’s influence on the US Navy is well known, but in Britain as well, many of the officers associated with these projects went on to significant leadership positions. The exciting nature of the technology served as a draw for talented young officers, and the prominence afforded to submarines by the Cold War ensured that the identities of both the USN and the RN were rapidly reshaped, with submarines at their heart and, increasingly, submariners at the helm.

Since HMAS Melbourne was decommissioned in 1982, the RAN has primarily been a surface navy, with the route to the top running through command of one of the service’s surface combatants. Between 1982 and 2008, seven of the eight officers who served as chief of the naval staff or chief of navy had commanded a guided missile destroyer, a pattern that has broadly continued with other surface combatants.

Although it is going to be a very long time before one of the commanders of an AUKUS submarine goes on to lead the RAN, the program seems certain to reshape the service long before then. The relative weight and significance of the project, and its role as a magnet for talented officers, will ensure that it will shape the careers of many of the service’s future leaders. The primacy of the surface navy seems likely to be challenged, and with it the very identity of the RAN.

The government delivered a barrage of missile announcements over the past couple of days. It’s not easy to distinguish what’s new from a semi-announcement of something that’s already been announced or is an existing part of the plan, let alone assess whether what’s been announced is actually a good idea. I’ll attempt to unpack three recent announcements, though I have to admit it’s a little hard to do, even for someone who follows this stuff full-time.

There’s no doubt that the timing of the announcements is related to the election—and there’s no doubt that the government has a further arsenal of already-made decisions to release during the campaign. But that’s a different matter to the content of this week’s announcements: what we’re largely seeing is the continuing development of programs that have been underway since the 2020 defence strategic update or indeed the 2016 defence white paper.

Let’s start with the announcement on the development of the sovereign guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise. (Note to Defence: It’s about time we got a handy acronym or code name for that mouthful to rival the REDSPICE cyber program.) Back in July 2020, the government stated in the strategic update that it was going to explore the feasibility of establishing guided weapons production here in Australia to address supply-chain risks. In March last year, it said it was going to establish the industrial capability and the next step was to identify a strategic partner to work with.

On Tuesday this week, the government identified two strategic partners, US defence primes Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. That’s not terribly surprising; by my rough guesstimate, those two companies make 90% of the guided weapons either currently in or planned for the Australian Defence Force’s inventory. The announcement also named the Australian industry participants in the enterprise, including two entities specifically formed by existing companies to compete for missile work, the Australian Missile Corporation and the Sovereign Missile Alliance.

What the announcement did not provide was any further information on what weapons the enterprise will build here, what role Australian industry will play, where production facilities will be established, and when we can expect to see weapons coming off the production line. So, there are still some key information gaps.

At the same time, in a separate release, the government announced the ‘accelerated’ acquisition of the JASSM-ER (joint air-to-surface standoff missile—extended range), the NSM (naval strike missile) and maritime mines for $3.5 billion. These capabilities are already in Defence’s acquisition plan. There’s a $3.4–5.2 billion line in the 2020 force structure plan for air-launched strike weapons and a $16.1–24.2 billion line for maritime guided weapons including long-range anti-ship missiles. We can’t confirm whether or how much they are being accelerated since neither the government nor Defence had released the original schedule, but we’ll take their word for it.

This announcement did provide some useful detail. JASSM-ER, a 900-kilometre-range weapon, will be integrated onto the F/A-18F Super Hornet by 2024 and after that onto the F-35A. According to a report in The Australian, that’s three years faster than originally planned. That only partially fills a gap created by the retirement last year of the F/A-18A/B Classic Hornet. It was the only aircraft in service that could launch the ADF’s only long-range strike weapon, the ‘classic’ version of the JASSM, which had a shorter, but still useful, range of 370 kilometres.

Acquisition of the NSM raises some interesting issues. Integrating the NSM’s sister missile, the JSM (joint strike missile), onto the F-35A has always been part of the capability program since it’s the only long-range anti-ship missile that will fit inside the F-35A’s payload bay. Arguably, it was delays to the integration of the F-35 and JSM (clearly the international Joint Strike Fighter consortium that sets the work program doesn’t regard a maritime strike weapon to be as high a priority as we do) that led to the government’s July 2020 announcement of a Plan B for maritime strike, which is to integrate the long-range anti-ship missile (LRASM) onto the Super Hornet.

But this announcement refers to NSM being acquired for the navy’s major surface combatants, not JSM for the F-35A. Certainly NSMs are a major improvement over the Harpoon missiles currently in navy service, particularly in terms of range and stealth. But the NSM doesn’t have the range of the significantly larger LRASM, so it would be interesting to hear why Defence opted for NSMs for its ships over LRASMs, although it’s always possible that LRASMs could still be acquired.

Of course, I can’t let this go without once again asking why Defence isn’t installing NSMs on its fleet of offshore patrol vessels, which would essentially double the navy’s number of lethally armed ships well before the arrival of the first Hunter-class frigate in the mid-2030s.

Sea mines are mentioned the 2020 force structure plan, but it provides little information about scope, schedule or budget. This announcement adds little to that. They are potentially a valuable asymmetric capability, complicating an adversary’s planning for only moderate cost. Effective mine-hunting capabilities are in short supply in most navies.

The third announcement was yesterday’s statement by the leaders of the three AUKUS countries that four more areas would fall under AUKUS’s umbrella, including hypersonic technologies. Contrary to breathless media commentary that this means Australia will now be pursuing a hypersonic capability, there’s little news here.

The Defence Science and Technology Group and its academic partners have been experimenting with hypersonic technologies for more than a decade, including launching a hypersonic test missile in 2012. The force structure plan put some serious money behind this endeavour with a $6.2–9.3 billion line for ‘high-speed long-range strike, including hypersonic research’. And in December 2020 the government announced the SCIFiRE program, a collaborative agreement with the US to ‘develop and test hypersonic cruise missile prototypes’.

Hopefully, including hypersonics in AUKUS will accelerate developments. But with China testing hypersonic weapons and Russia actually using them in Ukraine, rather than admiring yet another announcement about hypersonics, we should be asking when all of this research is going to deliver actual military capability.

The ADF’s strike cupboard is currently bare, so the sooner we can get strike weapons, the better. The range of our fighter jets is around 1,000 kilometres, so a 900-kilometre boost on top of that provided by JASSM-ER makes a big difference, particularly if the task is to destroy an adversary’s forward operating base in the archipelago or South Pacific.

But of course, all of those long-range missiles are of little use without a sophisticated targeting system including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets—like the SkyGuardian uncrewed aerial system that was abruptly cancelled last week.

Note: This article was updated to clarify the difference between the NSM and JSM (8 April 2022, 1530 AEST).

Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought into stark relief the dangerous face of revisionist power. It could serve as a catalyst to urgent action in countering both Russian and Chinese revisionism. One avenue for such action is the AUKUS technology-sharing agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

AUKUS presents new opportunities, the first and foremost of which is providing Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. The US has only ever shared nuclear-propulsion technology once before, with the UK. Beyond submarines, AUKUS aims to promote greater sovereign defence capability for Australia and Britain by providing access to US technology. It is designed to push back against any potential weakening of the alliance bonds by selectively combining defence capability between Australia, the UK and the US in the face of strategic competition with China and Russia.

AUKUS is a grand experiment, a focused security partnership intended to deepen collaboration on advanced military capabilities and technologies including cyber, artificial intelligence and quantum concepts. If effectively implemented, AUKUS could become the springboard for revolutionising how the US works with a select group of its most capable allies through the extraordinary depth of technological development, access to highly classified materials and expanded sharing of intellectual property.

AUKUS could open up new avenues for cooperative development and production of armaments (the P-8, Triton and Jammer are examples to follow). It will be important to demonstrate the utility of AUKUS in facilitating a broader defence relationship by laying out a realistic, clear-eyed vision for the partnership; establishing a framework and plan to manage the work; identifying and then addressing barriers; and ensuring that metrics are in place to measure progress. Taking all these steps may help get AUKUS off the ground and bring major benefits to the partners and their regions.

Canberra, London and Washington have each responded to AUKUS differently. While all are committed at the diplomatic level, Australia’s engagement is deepest. Canberra is investing significant resources to ensure that both the nuclear-powered submarine and advanced capabilities workstreams succeed. As one anonymous Australian official noted, AUKUS has virtually restructured the entirety of Canberra’s defence and foreign policy thinking. UK national security adviser Stephen Lovegrove described AUKUS as ‘perhaps the most significant capability collaboration anywhere in the world in the past six decades’. AUKUS fits neatly into the UK’s integrated review, which promotes London’s return to the Indo-Pacific. However, the UK is, at least on the surface, the junior partner. The US sits somewhere in between, broadly keen to make it work, but distracted by countless other major world events, like the war in Ukraine and strategic competition with China.

The barriers to AUKUS’s success are numerous. At the national level, each country has its own political and economic challenges. Australians will go to the polls sometime between now and the end of May 2022. In the US, the November mid-term elections will soon distract Congress, so the legislative actions necessary to bring AUKUS into being may well have to wait until 2023. The UK will go to the polls no later than May 2024.

AUKUS’s effectiveness could depend on the development of a new legislative framework in the US, the commitment of organisational resources and access to the requisite expertise, the ability to identify and manage challenges, and the employment of measurable indicators of success. These are not easy tasks, and each carries some risk.

An unprecedented US legislative framework would include information-sharing agreements not just on nuclear propulsion, but also on much broader areas in key sectors. Such a framework could be designed to allow innovation to flourish, particularly as AUKUS looks for opportunities in artificial intelligence, quantum, and other key defence technologies. The role of the private sector, and the complications therein, is an underanalysed aspect of AUKUS. The involvement of defence industry also raises commercial data sensitivities and intellectual property issues—both of which may require additional legislative attention.

AUKUS planners would need adequate resources to take on these tasks, including a distributed governance framework with shared responsibilities and committed staff and resources, along with political and organisational support from the three governments.

Several AUKUS working groups have been established to flesh out the cooperative details. To be effective, these groups should be empowered by strong leadership, informed by evidence-based analysis, and encouraged to convene regularly. They could go beyond admiring the problems to identifying solutions. The success of the working groups will also greatly depend on the active and continuous support of senior leadership from all three nations.

Senior leaders could also ensure that the working groups have access to experts, practitioners and program implementers from Australia, the UK and the US who understand the breadth and depth of the existing barriers and the necessary workarounds. This could be challenging. While developing the cooperative framework, AUKUS may well shine a bright light on the barriers to collaboration—not only technical, but also bureaucratic, budgetary, cultural, regulatory, political and strategic.

Clear, measurable outcomes for each working group could be developed from the outset. For example, meeting deliverable dates is an obvious and essential metric, as is consistent maintenance of meeting schedules and speed of decision-making. Progress in armaments cooperation is another metric, and includes changing processes that facilitate innovation and deepening of cooperation.

The ability to resolve bureaucratic barriers (such as routine overclassification of information) and regulatory challenges (such as technology-transfer limitations) is yet another hurdle to overcome. The three capitals might develop multi-year plans detailing proposed projects, anticipated costs and timelines for delivery. Success on each of these projects could be reported annually.

AUKUS clearly offers significant opportunities for Canberra, London and Washington. More than a repackaging of existing capabilities, AUKUS reimagines the way in which three capable allies work together. The success of AUKUS may rely on the effective management of this minilateral arrangement, and on each country’s willingness to adopt new policies and make legislative changes to allow for close collaboration. Making such changes will require strong management and, crucially, recognition by all parties that such changes are necessary to make progress in addressing common strategic goals.

What happens from here will determine whether Australia, the UK and the US can compete more effectively against China and Russia, or whether AUKUS becomes an interesting footnote in the story of what could have been.

For the moment, Defence Minister Peter Dutton has decided to stick with the troubled Hunter-class frigate program. With his usual candour, he told The Australian last week: ‘We looked very carefully at this project and we’ve decided that we will proceed with it. The relationship with the United Kingdom is incredibly important. BAE is a very important partner with us.’

Workable strategy is always about the art of the possible. The Hunter class will still be around after the election. The challenge for the Department of Defence will be to see how it can fix a connected set of problems reportedly making the ship’s design overweight, top-heavy, underpowered, slower than planned and too lightly armed relative to Chinese vessels.

Compare this with the mal­igned and cancelled Attack-class submarine project. Documents recently released under freedom of information legislation show that in August last year Defence submarine program head Greg Sammut judged the project was ‘affordable and acceptable, and compliant with contractual terms and conditions’.

The conclusion was that ‘substantial progress’ had been made with the manufacturer, Naval Group, ‘and there are no extreme program strategic risks’.

Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty responded, ‘I will ensure that the good progress to date is part of the advice we take to government, and you will have that message repeated in the 2+2 with France and in other engage­ments.’

Just over a fortnight later, the Attack submarine was cancelled when the AUKUS security pact was announced, offering Australia a pathway to submarine nuclear propulsion in partnership with the US and Britain. Australia’s relationship with France and Naval Group’s partnership were clearly not important enough to save the Attack-class subs. Has the Hunter-class frigate survived because BAE Systems is also the builder of Britain’s Astute-class nuclear-powered submarines?

The reality is that AUKUS puts to the torch every aspect of current defence planning. Nuclear propulsion is only part of the picture. A major step-up in cooperation is promised in four technology areas that could reshape the global balance of power: quantum com­puting, artificial intelligence, hypersonic vehicles and undersea technology.

If AUKUS delivers, Australia will become a leading provider of security in the Indo-Pacific. If AUKUS fails, we will have damaged our most important alliance relationship with the US, which has underpinned our security since the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942. Success is far from assured.

The US Navy and Department of Energy, which control nuclear propulsion, will rightly make the most stringent demands of Australia to ensure we are developing the capability to safely operate the technology.

US President Joe Biden has the authority to compel his officials ‘to seek an optimal pathway to deliver this capability’ for Australia, but he has no capacity to force an outcome. Delivering success through AUKUS will come down to our ability to persuade a sceptical part of the US national security system unused to dealing with Australia that we are, in fact, worth the risk to their control of the technology.

A failure will be a significant failure also for Biden, further diminishing his struggling administration, reinforcing a national mindset about the unreliability of allies and the need to place ‘America first’.

Whichever party wins government in the coming federal election, setting the foundations for AUKUS success will be the most significant development in Australia’s security since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951.

In effect, this means we need a complete rethink of defence policy. Spending about 2% of GDP on defence delivers a small force with modest military capabilities. It emphatically does not produce navy infrastructure geared around nuclear propulsion or plans for domestic missile manufacturing, hypersonic weapons and the rest.

During the next half-decade or so we will need to double defence spending to deliver on what is apparently bipartisan support for AUKUS. This will produce a defence force dramatically different from the one we have now and the ‘future force’ designed in the most recent defence white paper in 2016. The government should approach this challenge initially by resisting the temptation to produce another defence white paper. The last one was written mostly in 2015. A strategic update in 2020 made the right judgement call about the rapid deterioration of regional security.

The gap in thinking is about Defence’s equipment plans. Blueprints for large but undergunned surface ships, heavy armoured vehicles and exquisite but expensive manned combat aircraft all start to look dangerously outmoded.

The risk in asking Defence to produce a new white paper is that the organisation will diligently make the case for keeping current plans on track. I have been associated with a few white papers: seldom are opportunities taken to propose genuinely new and different military capabilities. Typically, white papers validate the status quo, replacing like with like.

In fact, the last time the Australian Defence Force’s force structure was given a thorough independent assessment was in Paul Dibb’s 1986 Review of Australia’s defence capabilities, 36 years ago. The six white papers that followed offered cautious expressions of incrementalism. Arguably the biggest jump in military capability was Kevin Rudd’s plan in 2009 to expand the submarine fleet from six to 12 boats. Now we are unlikely to have more than six subs well into the 2040s.

An independent assessment of the ADF’s structure would hold open the possibility of grafting AUKUS’s technology agenda onto Defence thinking, and hopefully lift priority for uncrewed autonomous vehicles, ships and aircraft that will come to dominate modern military forces.

A second critical task should be to bury the Dickensian idea of ‘sovereign capabilities’ being built in slow-motion in South Australia. There is a reason the air force is the most technologically advanced service—no one thinks we should build combat aircraft in Australia.

AUKUS holds out a much more promising industry pathway, which is to focus on high-tech component production, systems integration and maintenance as we do for the F-35. The more we can shape a shared defence technology future with the AUKUS countries and Japan, the stronger Australia will be.

Finally, Defence has a need, and the need is for speed. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are not waiting to see if we can resolve the Hunter-class frigate’s weight problems. The ADF needs to be strengthened quickly, but Defence has shown it can’t deliver that outcome. Something must be done to light a fire of urgency under our strategic thinking.

The immediate significance of Friday’s AUKMIN gathering in Sydney was that it took place while a Russian military assault on Ukraine is imminent. Given the threat from Moscow, no one would have been surprised had the UK foreign and defence secretaries delayed their visit.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne told the post-dialogue media conference she had observed an exponential and continued upward commitment of UK engagement in the Indo-Pacific. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said ‘we are facing global challenges from multiple aggressors’.

That’s the reality of our strategic times. The democracies are working more closely together because they must. Either we find ways to add strength through closer co-operation or else we lose ground to aggressive international behaviour from Russia and China.

The strategic outlook could hardly be more different today compared to the relatively more benign world of 2006, when AUKMIN was established. At that time UK and Australian officials were seized of a common view: they thought the bilateral agreement was a pointless waste of effort. Britain’s future, you see, was in Europe, and Australia was ‘Asian century’-bound.

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans summed up the mood. Writing in 2016 about former prime minister Tony Abbott’s affection for the Anglosphere, Evans claimed ‘the truth of the matter is that the UK has brought nothing of significance to the region’s defence since the fall of Singapore in 1942’. Closer Australia–UK co-operation was simply a ‘nostalgic’ hankering for the past, a ‘fantasy’ of ‘Anglosphere dreamers’, that no one would be interested in, least of all the US, which would focus on the ‘biggest game of all for the foreseeable future’, its competition for ‘global supremacy’ with China.

Evans was far from alone. In January 2011, I attended the third AUKMIN held at HMAS Watson naval base in Sydney. Kevin Rudd as foreign minister and Stephen Smith as defence minister, hardly Anglo-tragics, met their Conservative counterparts, William Hague and Liam Fox.

After a morning of productive talks, officials were told to write up a list of quite ambitious agreed outcomes for ministers to approve after lunch. A strange wrestle ensued with unhappy and jet-lagged Whitehall officials. Their mission was to ensure that nothing too substantial by way of future action was recorded.

We had all heard what the ministers wanted. But the British agenda was ‘curb your enthusiasm, let’s not get carried away here’. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was largely on board the Whitehall bus too. Evans’s Kool-Aid had been drunk deeply, we should stick to our Indo-Pacific knitting.

More than a decade later and it seems little has changed. Ticky Fullerton reported in The Australian on Thursday that Truss had to drive ‘the free-trade agreement with Australia, pushing back against entrenched Euro-centric views of Whitehall public servants’, when she was trade secretary last year.

Significant credit should go to British and Australian politicians of all political stripes for sticking with AUKMIN in the face of indifference from many officials.

Four important lessons come from the AUKMIN story. First, the historic, linguistic and cultural connections that tie the UK and Australia do matter. Contrary to Payne’s article in The Australian on Thursday, this is not about basking in being ‘two of the most diverse nations on Earth’, it’s our commonalities that bring us together.

For all that is condescendingly decried (in Evans’s words) as a ‘passion for English country walks and pubs’, the truth is that historical closeness translates into effective defence and intelligence co-operation.

Second, Britain and Australia have interests that go beyond our immediate neighbourhoods. We are not small regional players but rather large states with global interests. We cannot be as small as the conventional thinking of some of our officials.

Third, rising aggressive totalitarianism in the form of China and Russia—and let’s add in North Korea and Iran—is the biggest strategic challenge of our age. It is pushing the consequential democracies together.

It is massively to Australia’s benefit that the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands and others now define Indo-Pacific security as relevant to them. Hugh White dismisses these connections, saying they offer no guarantees of support in conflict: ‘We need to plan to fight alone,’ he maintains.

But we are not on the start line of the conflict today. The issue is what like-minded countries can do to avoid war. Thinking and acting alone is what China wants us to do because it encourages capitulation. Working together in ANZUS, AUKUS, AUKMIN, the Quad and other groupings is what Beijing dislikes because together the democracies are stronger.

A fourth AUKMIN lesson, nicely expressed by British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace on Friday, is that deep alliances can’t just be transactional, trading reciprocal favours. They are based on long-term trusted relationships working towards shared goals. These links take a long time to build.

To really work, alliances need practical outcomes, military engagement, things that really happen. On this test the AUKMIN communique delivers a set of interesting outcomes, although perhaps none as startling as the AUKUS nuclear propulsion announcement of last September. (To be fair, those sorts of ‘deliverables’ are rare.)

Off the table is the idea of basing a Royal Navy Astute-class submarine at an Australian base, but the promise is for ‘greater rotations’ of British vessels into the region. The RN will deploy two offshore patrol vessels, HMS Spey and HMS Tamar, ‘re-establishing a persistent Indo-Pacific presence’ this year.

That’s a significant commitment. Australia should encourage the RN to make one of our naval bases its long-term centre for operations, treating this as a joint endeavour.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton stressed the ‘seamless’ progress in negotiations on nuclear propulsion and the wider technological agenda for joint work on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic vehicles and underwater systems.

One can only hope AUKUS delivers. On submarines, going into Friday’s meeting, Truss pointed to the possibility of ‘collaborative development by the three AUKUS parties rather than a choice of Britain’s Astute class or America’s Virginia class’.

There is promise in that approach, which could produce a design common to all three navies. Ministers will be keenly aware of the risks and challenges posed by the nuclear propulsion plan for Australia. This is one heck of a project to land.

The AUKMIN partners signed agreements for a ‘cyber and critical technology partnership’ and for ‘clean, reliable and transparent infrastructure investment in the Indo-Pacific’. This points to a broadening of co-operation beyond traditional defence and intelligence roots.

In many ways, the competition for influence between the democracies and the dictatorships in the Indo-Pacific comes down to those countries looking for ‘clean, reliable and transparent’ co-operation and those who will settle for Beijing’s money, which is anything but clean.

How curious that, for decades, Canberra’s response to globalisation was to obsessively narrow our interests to a thin slice of Asia. Australia and Britain are stronger because of AUKMIN. Britain is again, and Australia is at last, thinking about our interests on a global scale. We have much to live up to.