From 2027, Australia will host under the AUKUS agreement a US submarine force at HMAS Stirling, near Perth. It will be known as Submarine Rotational Force–West (SRF–W) and will consist of up to four US attack submarines.
For Australia, SRF–W will assist in the development of our capability to operate conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs). For the US, assisting Australia under AUKUS is an important but secondary objective.
The US simply does not have enough attack subs in its fleet to spare for exclusively Australian requirements. One day, when the official history of the AUKUS agreement is written, it will become apparent that the US agreed to the establishment of SRF–W at HMAS Stirling, and possibly to AUKUS more generally, primarily because it made sense in terms of giving the US a potentially decisive geostrategic advantage in the unlikely, but not inconceivable, event of a war with China.
In sea power terms, Australia has long been a coveted operating location for the US, as was demonstrated during World War II. It has a long coastline, defensible harbours, a suitable industrial base and a favourable geopolitical attitude. These are the key elements of sea power as propounded by US naval strategist Alfred T Mahan (1840–1914). The US is a Mahanian power, which needs access to secure and distributed naval bases around the world from which its battlefleets can project power.
HMAS Stirling is a classical Mahanian operating location. Australia, more generally, is vital Mahanian space. Its geography allows the US to securely swing its fleets between the Pacific and Indian oceans without having to fight through the close, archipelagic waters found to Australia’s north.
That HMAS Stirling is a vital operating location for the US Navy can be seen in the organisational character of the submarine rotational force in Western Australia that is only now quietly emerging.
Last month, in addition to establishing what is termed a ‘naval support activity’ at HMAS Stirling – that is, the shore-based administrative entity that will support US personnel and their families – the US Navy announced that it had reactivated Submarine Squadron 3 (which had been decommissioned in 2012) as the command headquarters for the submarine rotational force and that the squadron would be based from 2027 at HMAS Stirling.
This was a crucial, although little noticed, organisational move. It means the Perth-based submarine rotational force in reality will be a combat force that is an integral part of the US Pacific Fleet. Submarine Squadron 3 will be able to be tasked to undertake wartime combat missions through the US military command chain, which flows from the president, through commander, Pacific Command, and then to the various naval taskforces to which the squadron’s submarines would be assigned during wartime. These tasks would include anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare; land strike; intelligence and surveillance; and support to special forces.
From HMAS Stirling, US submarines will be able to access the open seas of the Indian Ocean from a relatively secure and defensible wartime operating location, from which they will be able to conduct operations across the seas and the maritime choke points that are to be found from the Arabian Sea, across the Indian Ocean and in the littoral waters of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.
So, while we may see the submarine rotational force at HMAS Stirling through an AUKUS lens, the US sees a forward-deployed submarine combat squadron.
Being able to so operate from a relatively secure location would be crucial in any future naval war with China. Such a war is unlikely but possible enough to be treated as a serious risk. War might break out as early as 2028 if, as Kevin Rudd recently warned, Xi Jinping were to miscalculate US resolve over Taiwan in any crisis that might arise after the Taiwanese presidential election held in January that year.
In any such conflict, the US would seek to disrupt Chinese seaborne trade in the Indian Ocean and in the maritime choke points through which that commerce has to pass. In the Indian Ocean, it also would seek to engage PLA naval forces and from there conduct long-range strike missions against Chinese installations and forces in the Western Pacific and possibly in southern China.
The US has probably been exploring ways to operate its attack submarines from western and northern Australia since about 2010, which is when it began to seriously contemplate how such a war might unfold at sea. With the introduction of what was termed ‘Air-Sea Battle’, the US began to crystallise its joint operational concepts and plans for fighting a major war across the Pacific and Indian oceans. In the history of AUKUS that will be written one day, we will learn that Australia always featured prominently in Air-Sea Battle and its successor strategies.
The AUKUS security pact of September 2021, which agreed on the establishment of the submarine rotational force at HMAS Stirling, was the vehicle by which the US began to realise this ambition.
While the term ‘rotational presence’ is being used officially to describe the force, out of deference to Australian sensitivities about the hosting of foreign military bases in Australia, there should be no dissembling to the Australian public. Hosting a US submarine squadron at HMAS Stirling, which will be integrated into the US order of battle, will see Australia hosting a US naval combat force, as we did in World War II.
Purpose-built infrastructure for this squadron is being provided at HMAS Stirling, along with repair, sustainment and resupply facilities, shore-based support amenities and housing, including for accompanying families. Assisting the US with the sustainment and maintenance of its attack submarine force (which will be able to be done once the shipyard facilities are completed at nearby Henderson) is in our interests. By assisting the USN to increase the number of available submarines it can put to sea at any one time, we will lessen the risk that a future US administration will decide not to sell to Australia the three to five Virginia-class boats, from 2032 onwards, that we will require, pending the introduction into RAN service of the new SSN-AUKUS class fleet.
Even if individual US submarines are to be continuously ‘rotated’ through HMAS Stirling, for both governments to be able to say that no individual US submarine is ‘home ported’ there, the effect in functional terms will nonetheless be the same. US Rear Admiral Lincoln M Reifsteck, Commander, US Submarine Group Seven, said it bluntly when he visited HMAS Stirling recently. Speaking about the strategic utility that HMAS Stirling offered, he said that in a conflict, where ships were being attacked and damaged, ‘you are going to want to return to the fight quickly’. The admiral was so quoted in a report by Mike Cherney in The Wall Street Journal on February 7, ‘The US Navy’s new insurance policy for war with China is an Australian base’.
However, US war planning cannot assume that Australian ‘concurrence’ in relation to its basing and infrastructure works would translate into Australian support for the wartime use by the US of such facilities and assets. Australia is right to reserve its sovereign decision autonomy in relation to going to war, as every nation does.
As I wrote in these pages last year, the conditions have now been set for a dramatic future rupture in the Australia-US alliance. Without a high degree of prior planning, co-ordination and operational integration between the two allies, too much will be left to arrangements being cobbled together ‘on the day’ should war be in prospect.
There is an urgent need to clarify the issue of how we would fight alongside one another, and specifically how US submarine combat missions that might be conducted from Australia would be commanded and controlled.
This could be done without Australia conceding its decision-making autonomy in relation to specific circumstances and events. The details should not be publicised, in the interests of protecting military secrecy, but the public should be informed, in general terms, that its government has authorised such war planning under our alliance with the US.
An even more dramatic challenge to the foundation of the alliance is likely to arise in the early 2030s when, on current plans at least, the US will reintroduce tactical and theatre nuclear weapons into its fleet for the first time since 1991.
By deploying these types of weapons, the US is seeking to give itself the option of being able to conduct limited nuclear strikes on military and strategic targets without having to escalate to the use of its larger strategic nuclear weapons, which carry the risk of planetary destruction were they to be used in a massive nuclear exchange with a peer nuclear power.
To that end, Congress has appropriated funding for the initial deployment in 2032 of a nuclear variant of its long-range strike cruise missile, to be fired from US ships and submarines, including Virginia-class attack submarines.
The introduction of the sea-launched cruise missile (nuclear), or SLCM-N, into the US fleet would give the US greater flexibility in deterring and responding to hostile military actions by peer nuclear powers.
In the interests of maximising this flexibility, the US is unlikely to agree to any request from the Australian government not to load nuclear cruise missiles into the submarines that will rotate through HMAS Stirling. To do so would be to diminish the deterrent effect of having the nuclear cruise missiles deployed throughout the fleet, without an adversary being able to deduce which submarines were so armed and which were not.
However, under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty (signed in 1985, and introduced into domestic law in 1986), it is prohibited for nuclear weapons to be stationed in Australia, although visits by warships that may be carrying nuclear weapons are allowed.
Were nuclear cruise missile-capable US submarines to begin to rotate through HMAS Stirling in the 2030s, a legal argument inevitably would be mounted that Australia was in breach of its South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty obligations. Rotations are functionally the same as stationing, given the permanent infrastructure and other facilities that are being built at HMAS Stirling to support US submarines, along with the establishment of Submarine Squadron 3 as the command element for those submarines. This all suggests permanent presence in Australia rather than visitation.
Moreover, the Australian government would not be able to hide behind the supposedly universal policy of the US that it neither confirms nor denies the presence of nuclear weapons on its platforms. There is no such universal policy. Under nuclear sharing arrangements with allies, especially in NATO, the US not only informs hosts of the presence of nuclear weapons in their territory but some of those allies also work with the US to actively protect those nuclear weapons, and some would even take part in their launch or delivery.
In fact, it is likely that the US would want to advise our government of the deployment of nuclear cruise missile-carrying submarines to HMAS Stirling, as it would wish to secure Australian support for their protection and operation, as occurs within NATO.
This would bolster collective deterrence, as it would mean another US ally taking up the burden of supporting US nuclear operations while sheltering under the umbrella of US nuclear weapons. Were this to come to pass, Australia would have to radically revisit its concept of nuclear deterrence.
As an argument for another day, it would be in our interests to assist the US to bolster its capacity to deter aggression by supporting its deployment of theatre-level nuclear capabilities.
For now, an acute alliance management dilemma is looming. In the 2030s, Australia may have to choose between radically modifying its nuclear-free zone posture (by developing legal workarounds to allow for the persistent presence of submarines carrying nuclear cruise missiles in Australia), or possibly even abrogating its treaty obligations, to continue to host the American submarine rotation force, or terminating the US deployment on the basis that nuclear cruise missile-equipped submarines cannot rotate through Australia under the provisions of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
The Australian Labor Party appears to have anticipated this dilemma, probably inadvertently. In the draft national platform (paragraph 37 on page 84) that is being debated today at the party’s 50th national conference in Adelaide, there is included a prohibition on the home porting of foreign warships in Australia and the stationing of nuclear weapons in Australia ‘in times of peace’. This is possibly an artful and useful qualification that has gone unnoticed. As this paragraph is constructed, it appears to be the case that under Labor policy the home porting of foreign warships and the stationing of nuclear weapons in Australia would not be prohibited in times of war. On that reading, planning and preparations could take place ahead of any war, seemingly without there being a breach of Labor policy.
However, as we get closer to the deployment of the nuclear cruise missile-capable US submarine fleet, seemingly clever resolutions and dead bat talking points will not suffice. We should extend compliments to former senator Rex Patrick and Alex Bristow of ASPI for continuing to draw attention to the issue of the introduction into service of submarine-launched nuclear cruise missiles.
There will come a time, however, when this ceases to be a matter of specialised interest. It will then be the time for an honest national conversation.
This article first appeared in The Australian.
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