Skidding Pacts

An AUKUS Delusion Update

The United States Navy's Virginia-class Block IV fast-attack submarine USS New Jersey (SSN 796) underway during sea trials. Photo credit: Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII)

In the unpardonable ecosystem of graft, favours and corruption that is defence contracting, defence conferencing and all matters tanking over the thinking—in short, the world of defence—the convenient delusion will always have truck over the inconvenient empirical. Phantoms are elevated and celebrated; bogeymen are treasured by the entire security apparatus that links obeisant academics, overpaid consultants and waxwork politicians. Budgets of criminally unaccountable proportions are approved, not least because the fictional threat is so impressive as to scare the living daylights out of an imbecilic political class.

Even as the Australian public inquiry into the tripartite security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom known as AUKUS rumbles along, the devotees of delusion continue to be busy in Canberra and beyond. For them, defence is not a reality so much as a style: the need to be seen on the circuit, the necessity of keeping the wheels of alliances greased. The Australian establishment hankers to be clubbable, and that club is known as the Anglosphere. On 2 September, Michael Pezzullo, a figure disgraced by his conduct when Secretary of the Home Affairs Department, took the stage as sage and pontificator before that very same inquiry. In addressing its members, he was convinced about the Chinese threat. “It’s an aggressive and assertive combination of Marxist-Leninist politics, Chinese nationalism, and aggressive positioning in Asia that is as terrifying to Japan and the Philippines and other countries in Asia as it should be to us.”

The following comments, published in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s outlet The Strategist, are even less guarded and worthy of mention. While the publication claims them to be an edited version of Pezzullo’s address, those edits were made with some muscle. In essence, “Australia would favour fighting an offensive campaign without having to call on the combat forces of the United States or anyone else.” Expressed like a true hardboiled warmonger. Given its limitations, Pezzullo suggests that Australia would find itself going on the defensive “until allied help arrived, until the United States prevailed to the point where it could dictate terms, or until conflict was contained in an uneasy truce that arrested a slide into the nuclear abyss of planetary destruction.”

After this febrile nonsense, the sort that makes Tom Clancy’s unspeakable prose passable, Pezzullo hits his stride. Previous submarine plans were not pursued. He has pleasant words for the Rudd government’s 2009 submarine plan that never eventuated, largely because this mirror-gazing bureaucrat was, at the time, deputy secretary of defence. But never mind. “The AUKUS programme puts us back on track.” As with so much writing on defence strategy, the language resembles that of a narcotics addict awaiting that cathartic hit: the gift is just around the corner, even if that corner is excruciating in distance. “Acquiring submarines of the US Virginia class and then the Anglo-Australian SSN-AUKUS class—or if the latter fails, joining the USN SSN-X programme—will give us a pathway to undersea warfare dominance.” This is playground posturing at its worst.

The logistics of acquiring these needless hulks are not explained, because their relevance is assumed. Pezzullo is a self-styled Ur-warrior, drinking from ancient wells of numbing power. “More crucially, by integrating our submarine industrial and technology base with those of the United States and Britain, we will forge an exclusive club of undersea dominance.” It would be far more accurate to recast dominance as subservience, with the Australian taxpayer providing enormous sums to the submarine industrial bases of both the US and the UK without any enforceable undertaking of returns.

It is worth noting that Pezzullo’s appearances in the media as a specialist—a term so stretched as to have lost meaning—are never qualified by the spoiling conduct that demonstrated his inadequacy as a fair-minded public servant giving advice on the issues of the day. It would be good for audiences to know that one of Australia’s formerly most powerful bureaucrats was a meddlesome, crazed, and shaky man with a shaky grasp of history, not least the US-Australian relationship. He was sacked in November 2023 after revelations that he had used WhatsApp to communicate at length with former New South Wales Liberal Party deputy director Scott Briggs, offering gobbets of advice on party room politics. Frank views about various cabinet ministers were also offered, hardly in keeping with the best traditions of a supposedly uncorrupted public service. An inquiry into Pezzullo’s conduct, a redacted version of which was obtained under Freedom of Information in April, identified 14 breaches of the government code of conduct. Instead, we find his biography on the United States Studies Centre website making no mention of his reputational soiling. “He is now retired, after almost 37 years of service, principally in the areas of defence, national security, immigration, and border protection.”

While Pezzullo was making his interventions in the AUKUS debate, the toadying Defence Minister Richard Marles, whose significance in the AUKUS relationship never rises above that of implausible water carrier, made a journey to the United Kingdom to catch up with the unnervingly chilly Wes Streeting. While Australia’s politicians delude themselves about American submarines they will never receive in the form of their choosing, if at all, the UK side of the bargain, which envisages the construction of the SSN-AUKUS, is even more dubious. In terms of boat production, the British submarine base has proven even tardier than their US counterparts. Sharp reservations have also been expressed about the nuclear reactor core project of the SSN-AUKUS, notably by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), incarnated as the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA). IPA’s report released at the start of 2025 is grave on the subject: “Successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.” It identified “major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability assessed.”

The British proved keen to assure the press—and a credulous Marles—that AUKUS had continued standing and vitality. “AUKUS,” according to Streeting, “says to our adversaries that if you attack one of us, you are challenging a coalition that is willing to stand together to defend the values we cherish and to fight alongside one another.” With little by way of justification, Streeting went so far as to suggest that AUKUS was “global” in nature, able to deliver submarines “which can be deployed everywhere from the Euro-Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific.” (Australian personnel, take note.) The US ambassador to the UK, Warren Stephens, was also keen to chant the mantra. “We should be under no illusion,” he stated, “that there are many who do not want this partnership to succeed. It’s not a secret.”

What is also not a secret is that the pact is skidding. The defence establishment operates a permanent, around-the-clock rinsing facility for the sketchy and mediocre, fostering a tribalism by seeking enemies that, at best, resemble fantasy woodland creatures. On this occasion, the fictional enemy is set to be confronted by fictional nuclear-powered submarines—at enormous cost. Australia, in its remarkable fortune of location and creation, has every reason to be the congenial middleman of international relations, the sage of diplomatic partiality and cool arbitration. Instead, it has opted for the role of Freudian paralytic and emotional cripple, drunk on the terror of abandonment and keen, therefore, to be client, vassal and a sort of wretched facsimile of Jeeves. If only its representatives were as capable.