The Subs and the Next War

Written By: - Date published: 11:28 am, February 11th, 2024 - 9 comments
Categories: AUKUS, australian politics, China, defence, Diplomacy, Disarmament, Peace, uk politics, us politics, war - Tags:

By Samuel Hume, Cross-posted from ARENA Online

In March 2023, former Australian prime minister Paul Keating attracted significant media attention when he described AUKUS as a manifestation of the United States’s campaign to encircle China with hostile military allies and partners. Under this trilateral agreement with the United Kingdom and the United States, Australia will spend up to AU$368 billion on eight conventionally armed—at least for now—nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). This commitment, according to Keating, ‘screwed into place the last shackle in the long chain, which the Americans have laid out, to contain China’.

Less publicised was his criticism of the utility of SSNs in the intensely monitored shallow waters near China’s coast: in the ‘shallow water, the Chinese have it absolutely loaded with sensors and with equipment to detect large submarines … The Chinese can also shoot our submarines because we’re in the shallow water and we are detectable’. Supporting this view is a 2023 war-game report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which states that SSNs are ‘much more effective at searching the open ocean’. In fact, the report indicates that SSNs would play only a marginal role in a conveniently conventional war—necessary to avoid omnicidal nuclear escalation—between China and the United States following a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Titled The First Battle of the Next War, the report is ‘the most serious look at … how [a Taiwan scenario] could unfold’ according to Lyle Goldstein, a research professor at the US Naval War College for twenty years and the current director of Asia Engagement at the foreign policy thinktank Defense Priorities. Although the war-game is set in 2026 and Australia is not due to receive its first Virginia-class SSNs until the 2030s, the report sheds light on how the country’s submarines could be used.

The world is entering a new era in which great power blocs are emerging as the new foundation of geopolitics. At one level, this marks the end of the era inaugurated in 1991 with the US-declared ‘New World Order’, which mandated total US dominance globally. The process of global integration via high technology’s steady transformation of human social life continues, but the new blocs are now reorganising within this to contest US ‘Empire’. AUKUS is our response to this reorganisation, imposed on us as a fait accompli by the Albanese Labor government working in fluid movement with the right-wing Morrison government before it.

As the articles in this special section show, AUKUS will deliver a new regime of the everyday in Australia. What we can call, with some caution, an Australian way of life will be recomposed by the integration of our defence with the US military, with the demands of the scientific-industrial-military complex and the aggressive posture that military preparation brings. The shift to ‘forward defence’; nuclear technologies; the reshaping of northern Australia as a US garrison; military-led economic and industrial policy: this cannot but reshape who we are and the relations between us.

The growing resistance to AUKUS, represented by the recent public letter signed by Labor, Green and progressive figures, is welcome, but it does not fully grasp the degree of transformation AUKUS brings, or the degree to which it will be presented and accepted as natural and inevitable by a population already geared towards instrumental high-tech solutions to social and cultural dilemmas. This process has already begun. Legitimising discourses range from the ‘master and commander’ sub-imperial style of Richard Marles to the militarised human rights discourse of progressives, attached to ‘boutique’ nations abroad. At home, the question of settler and First Nations relations is being drawn in. We are rebranding ourselves as a reconciled settler nation as we join an Anglosphere alliance that revives notions of global right.

There is no need for this. As Clinton Fernandes makes clear, an independent defence is possible. While it has its own complexities, it is the only way to regain democratic control of our defence while rebuilding sovereignty based around a renegotiated existence on this continent. It may eventually find support among a population whose initial support for expansive notions of a grand alliance has turned sharply before, and can again.

Samuel Hume is a New Zealand teacher living in London.

9 comments on “The Subs and the Next War ”

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  1. Ad 1
    11 February 2024 at 3:04 pm

    I'm not sure who the "militarised human rights" people are, but anyone who thinks New Zealand can defend ourselves and our Realm states from climate catastrophes, civil wars, and hostile trade route takeovers, in a territory from the Antarctic to the Equator ie double the size of the EU, without Australian military and diplomatic partnership, has no idea what they are talking about.

  2. Ad 2
    11 February 2024 at 3:10 pm

    Which aid organisation from the US came to our aid after the Christchurch earthquakes?

    Which country immediately sent a big naval vessel to help after the Kaikoura Earthquakes?

    After foolishly initially setting aside offers of help from the United States and other countries, did Prime Minister Hipkins say: “We are accepting offers of international assistance.” ?

    It sure the fuck wasn't the Chinese.

    Grow up people. We are way took small and way too vulnerable not to partner up.

    • adam 2.1
      11 February 2024 at 6:43 pm

      Grow up people. We are way took small and way too vulnerable not to partner up.

      Vulnerable hell yes, to 40 years of dumb economics gifted to us by the people you want us to serve like lap dogs.

      Keating is right.

      Why are we making China a target, could it be they have state control of all the tech, that our current mob of feudal lords use to gather their tithe from us all in the west?

      Those bloody Chinese are not doing the corporations bidding

      That said, we can be friends with the yanks, and not be their lap dogs. I'd be happy with that, but hitching our wagon to a country who is actively retreating from world affairs, is silly, and in the long term – probably dangerous for us.

      • Ad 2.1.1
        11 February 2024 at 8:41 pm

        Whitlam could have taken us towards a fully Non-Aligned partnership.

        If Whitlam and Kirk had had another term, that’s a future we just might have had.

        But now…

        Uncomfortable as it is to be the lapdog of a lapdog, that is our level in this world.

  3. Sanctuary 3
    11 February 2024 at 3:30 pm

    During the cold war US nuclear submarines spent a lot of time in the shallow territorial waters of the USSR and were basically never detected. The idea that nuclear attack submarines are easy to detect is nonsense.

    • Obtrectator 3.1
      11 February 2024 at 4:38 pm

      The Cold War was more than thirty years ago. I imagine there've been some technological advances since then, including in submarine detection.

    • Macro 3.2
      11 February 2024 at 9:30 pm

      But the soviet subs were – I know this first hand, and here is how:

      Developed during the Cold War the P-3's primary mission was to locate Soviet Navy ballistic missile and fast attack submarines detected by undersea surveillance systems (ie MAD) and eliminate them in the event of full-scale war. At its height, the U.S. Navy's P-3 community consisted of twenty-four active duty "Fleet" patrol squadrons home based at air stations in the states of Florida and Hawaii as well as bases which formerly had P-3 operations in Maryland, Maine, and California.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-3_Orion

  4. weston 4
    11 February 2024 at 9:35 pm

    Spending 368 billion on 8 boats is insane why would we want to join an alliance of insane people ???and for that matter , a fear mongering , war mongering , disinformation peddling pack of cunts like the neo cons in the state dept of the US and whateva you want to call their Aussie counterparts !!

    Fuck them all and a pox on all their houses

  5. SPC 5
    11 February 2024 at 9:54 pm

    The concept of containment of China, which NATO + is part of and AUKUS 1 is part of and ANZUS is part of, was first applied in the Cold War to contain Russia.

    It was very successful, in that there was no war and the USSR and Warsaw Pact came to an end.

    It is not the worst model.

    The proponent of it, George Kennan, was not a fan of USA/NATO policy after the Cold War came to an end. His policy was not of a design to realise any supremacy and thus he was wary of eastward expansion of NATO. He wanted respectful co-existence.

    In hindsight, the EU should have left NATO and formed trade, diplomatic and defence co-operation agreements with both the USA and Russia as it included east European nations in the EU.

    I have no problem with New Zealand in AUKUS 2 – tech development co-operation (cyber IT and AI security etc). We should approve in principle, but delay till we see the direction of the USA post the 2024 election .

    We support the UN (multi-lateral action) and WTO etc. We would have concerns about the South China Sea situation, and a defence alliance with Oz, but want a focus on global action on climate change rather than a military weapons build-up.

    Our best defence policy move would be to facilitate peace in Korea (withdrawal of US forces and a Chinese guarantee of South Korean independence) and a resolution over the future of Taiwan (autonomous within China).