Undersea Power, Not Submarine Politics: What John Blaxland Gets Right About Australia’s Deepest Strategic Problem

Five years into AUKUS, the Australian debate remains stubbornly fixated on a single question: will the submarines arrive, and when?

John Blaxland’s submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry, Undersea Power: A Framework for Evaluating AUKUS, argues that this question, while legitimate, has trapped the debate in the wrong frame.

Submarines are not the strategic object. They are one instrument within a much larger national capability that Blaxland calls Undersea Power — and until Australians understand that distinction, they will keep judging AUKUS by the wrong yardstick.

This matters beyond Canberra’s inquiry rooms. Blaxland has, in effect, restated the sequencing problem that recurs across every serious effort to reimagine military power for a contested century: the platform gets debated before the mission is defined, and the mission gets defined before the strategic function it serves is understood.

Get the sequence backwards, and you end up managing a procurement program instead of building a capability.

How Blaxland Characterizes Undersea Warfare

Blaxland’s argument runs through the classical maritime strategists — Mahan, Corbett, Booth, Till — not to rehearse naval history but to make a specific point: each generation’s theorists progressively broadened what “sea power” meant, from fleet battle, to political instrument, to multi-functional force, to a whole-of-nation system embracing economics, law, technology and information.

His claim is that the undersea domain is now due the same broadening. The submarine, in this reading, is not the unit of analysis any more than the battleship was for Mahan. The unit of analysis is Undersea Power: the integrated capacity to understand, protect, and if necessary contest the environment beneath the surface, encompassing submarines, autonomous systems, seabed sensing, critical infrastructure, science and industry together.

Two developments justify treating this as a genuinely new strategic domain rather than an old one with new toys.

The first is the militarization of the seabed itself.

Submarine fibre-optic cables now carry the world’s financial transactions, government communications and military command-and-control traffic. Offshore energy infrastructure, and the renewables and hydrogen production layered onto it, is becoming as economically load-bearing as the cables.

Recent damage to subsea cables and pipelines in European waters, the Pacific, and off Taiwan has demonstrated that this infrastructure is neither remote nor immune. It is exposed, concentrated at a small number of chokepoints, and attributable only with difficulty.

Blaxland’s point is that this is now a national security matter, not a commercial one, and Australia’s digital economy, dependent on a handful of international cable connections, sits squarely inside that exposure.

The second is the erosion, and simultaneous reassertion, of submarine stealth.

Blaxland lays out a five-part sensing threat that any serious undersea strategy now has to reckon with: fixed acoustic arrays fencing chokepoints such as the Sunda, Lombok and Malacca Straits; autonomous gliders that loiter for months collecting the oceanographic data needed to strip away the thermal-layer protection submarines have always relied on; emerging quantum magnetic-anomaly sensors; non-acoustic detection of wake and thermal disturbance via satellite radar and multispectral optics; and the simple proliferation of active sonar from helicopters and surface combatants.

In the shallow, crowded, acoustically complex waters of the Indo-Pacific archipelago, this is a materially different problem than open-ocean deterrent patrolling.

What Blaxland does with this threat picture is instructive, and it is where his argument converges most closely with the kill web logic that has reshaped thinking about air and maritime combat more broadly.

He does not conclude that submarines are becoming obsolete. He argues that survivability now depends on a five-fold mitigation architecture: oceanographic data dominance, unmanned teaming (using the submarine’s own UUVs and UAVs as decoys and sensors), AI-driven signal processing to classify an adversary’s sensor signature before entering its detection envelope, bathymetric operational flexibility, and critically “system-level counter-sensing” that draws on the wider joint and allied force to detect, deceive, disrupt or degrade an adversary’s sensing network.

In his own words, AUKUS’s value lies in the integrated capability system, not the submarine alone. That is a kill web argument stated in undersea terms, even though Blaxland never uses the phrase: the submarine survives not by being quieter in isolation but by being one networked node among many, drawing on off-board sensing, autonomous decoys and joint-force effects to manage its exposure. The autonomous vehicle is not a substitute for the crewed submarine here. It is a force multiplier that extends persistence and expands the sensor picture the submarine itself depends on.

Why This Has Become Central to Australia’s Fate

Blaxland’s case for urgency does not rest on AUKUS at all. It rests on geography and economics that predate it and will outlast it.

Australia is an island continent, one of the world’s most trade-dependent advanced economies, whose maritime approaches were, for three decades of defence planning, assumed to be relatively uncontested with extended warning time before any threat materialized. Blaxland’s “poly-crisis” framing — coercive great-power competition layered onto technological disruption, environmental stress and governance strain — is his argument that those assumptions no longer hold, and that retaining capability settings designed for a calmer strategic period is itself a form of risk-taking, not caution.

Layer the undersea-specific picture onto that geography and the stakes sharpen further.

Australia sits at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, adjacent to the region’s critical chokepoints, dependent on a thin skein of undersea cables for its digital and financial life, and increasingly dependent on offshore energy infrastructure it has not historically had to defend.

Blaxland’s asymmetry is worth holding onto: activity on or above the ocean surface is now observable and targetable as a matter of course; what happens beneath it remains comparatively opaque, but that opacity is under sustained technological pressure from exactly the sensing architecture described above.

A nation whose economic and military lifelines increasingly run through a domain that is simultaneously become more contestable and more essential does not have the option of treating undersea capability as a niche naval specialization. It is approaching the same status road and rail networks, the electricity grid and the financial system already occupy: infrastructure whose compromise is a national event, not a service outage.

How Australia Should Address This Comprehensively

If the problem is this broad, Blaxland’s answer is that the response has to be equally broad — a “national undersea enterprise,” not a submarine acquisition program with some ancillary spending attached.

His nine-criterion scorecard is worth taking seriously as an organizing device for what comprehensive actually means in practice, because it refuses to let “success” collapse back into a delivery schedule:

• Operational capability — not platform counts, but the operational integration of submarines, autonomous systems, seabed sensors, maritime patrol aircraft, space-based surveillance and AI into a coherent architecture, judged by operational effect.
• Industrial sovereignty — sovereign submarine sustainment, genuine participation (not just purchasing) in allied supply chains, and advanced manufacturing that spreads beyond naval construction into the wider economy.
• Scientific and technological capability — quantum technologies, trusted AI, autonomous maritime systems, underwater robotics and cyber resilience, generating civilian as well as military dividends.
• Human capital — a nuclear-qualified engineering workforce, expanded apprenticeships and postgraduate pipelines, treated as a strategic asset in its own right rather than a jobs statistic.
• Alliance resilience — Australia’s contribution to allied capability, not merely its access to it.
• Regional confidence — maritime security cooperation, non-proliferation credibility, and disaster-relief capacity that reassures Southeast Asian and Pacific neighbours rather than alarming them.
• National resilience — cable protection, offshore energy security, sovereign cyber capability, fuel security and mobilization planning, treated as undersea-adjacent defence missions rather than someone else’s infrastructure problem.
• Strategic influence — the capacity, demonstrated rather than asserted, to shape allied and regional decision-making, the kind of influence Australia last visibly held in the 1999 INTERFET coalition.
• Delivery capability — the unglamorous trilateral governance, workforce mobility and supply-chain machinery that determines whether strategic intent actually becomes fielded capability at the pace required.

What this scorecard achieves, deliberately, is decoupling “is Undersea Power succeeding” from “did the Virginia-class transfer happen on schedule.”

Blaxland’s test is whether Australia in 2045 is more capable of shaping its own strategic environment than it would otherwise have been, a test that a delayed submarine, an accelerated cable-resilience program, and a suddenly more capable domestic workforce could all satisfy simultaneously, in ways a pure procurement scorecard cannot capture.

Where AUKUS Fits and Why the Order Matters

This is the point at which Blaxland’s framing does its most useful work, and where the sequencing argument becomes explicit rather than implicit.

AUKUS is not the strategy. It is a vehicle for a strategy that exists independently of it namely, Undersea Power, driven by geography, trade dependency and the sensing/mitigation dynamics described above and it should be judged by how well it serves that pre-existing national requirement, not the other way around.

Run the logic in the sequence Blaxland actually uses. Australia needs long-range, persistent, survivable undersea capability because of where it sits and what depends on secure maritime access and that need would exist with or without a trilateral pact. Nuclear propulsion is one credible way to meet the range and endurance requirement that conventional submarines cannot match across Australia’s distances, even close to its own shores.

AUKUS is the industrial and alliance mechanism through which that specific capability, plus a wider basket of Pillar II technology — autonomous systems, AI, quantum, advanced manufacturing becomes available to Australia faster and more completely than it could build alone. Pillar I answers the platform question; Pillar II is where the broader Undersea Power enterprise, the autonomous mesh, the sensing and mitigation architecture, the sovereign industrial base, actually gets built. Both serve the strategy. Neither is the strategy.

This reordering does real work against two of AUKUS’s most common criticisms.

• The “will we ever get the submarines” objection, treated as dispositive by critics, becomes a serious but secondary industrial-risk question once Undersea Power rather than submarine delivery is the object being evaluated which is exactly why Blaxland spends real effort on contingency measures (Collins life-extension, Submarine Rotational Force–West, disciplined trilateral planning) rather than treating delay as a fatal flaw.
• And the abandonment/entrapment dilemma he works through in Part 9 resolves more clearly once AUKUS is understood as one instrument for building sovereign strategic agency rather than as a blank alliance commitment: the entanglement being accepted is in service of a capability Australia would need regardless of whom it aligned with, which is a different and more defensible trade than entanglement accepted merely to please an ally.

The corollary is uncomfortable but follows directly: if AUKUS were to collapse tomorrow, the undersea requirement would not disappear.

Australia would still be trade-dependent, still geographically exposed at the intersection of two oceans, still reliant on a thin set of vulnerable cables, and still facing a sensing environment that makes stealth-only strategies increasingly fragile.

It would simply be trying to meet that requirement with fewer tools. That is Blaxland’s real argument for staying the course and not that AUKUS is beyond criticism, but that the underlying strategic need it is one instrument for meeting long predates it and will long outlast any single delivery schedule.

The Frame That Should Travel

Blaxland’s contribution is ultimately a discipline of sequencing: define the domain, establish why it now sits at the center of national fate, specify what a comprehensive response looks like, and only then ask which instruments — alliance, industrial, technological — best serve that response.

AUKUS earns its place in that fourth step. It does not get to substitute for the first three.

Any comprehensive treatment of Australian maritime domain awareness, or of the wider autonomous-systems architecture reshaping naval power, should borrow this discipline directly: start with what the domain requires, and only then ask what any given platform, program or partnership contributes toward meeting it.

Note: Undersea Power: A Framework for Evaluating AUKUS

by John Blaxland

Submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry

28 August 2026

https://www.johnblaxland.au/_files/ugd/dd6658_41d4f8509df04d78af97fc83f93590fb.pdf