AUKUS and the Building of Australian Undersea Power: John Blaxland Makes the Case

10/23/2026
By Robbin Laird

In mid-October 2026, Professor John Blaxland of the Australian National University made the case for AUKUS twice in two days, to two very different audiences. On October 16, he and Washington-based defence and industry consultant Kate Rosengreen published “In a contested Indo-Pacific, undersea power is critical. AUKUS is our strategy” in ASPI’s The Strategist. The next day, Blaxland appeared on Devil’s Advocate, a podcast aimed mainly at Chinese-Australian and Chinese-American viewers, for a 69-minute interview titled “AUKUS: Strategic Imperative or Costly Mistake?” The host put the strongest critiques of the program to him one after another.

Read together, the two pieces do more than defend a submarine buy. They treat AUKUS as a national strategy for undersea power, and they show where that argument is strongest and where it still has to be proven.

From Platform to Strategy

The Strategist article opens with a reframing: “AUKUS is not just a submarine acquisition program; it is a long-term strategy for strengthening Australia’s agency in a contested Indo-Pacific.” Blaxland and Rosengreen define undersea power as “the national capacity to understand, monitor, protect and contest the undersea environment, including undersea cables, seabed resources, maritime energy infrastructure and more.”

That definition moves the debate. If AUKUS is judged only as a boat purchase, every delay becomes the whole story. If it is judged as building a national capability, the question becomes whether Australia is getting better at seeing and contesting the undersea domain, and building the people and industry to keep doing so. In the interview, Blaxland called Australia an “undersea power”: responsible for roughly 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, dependent on cables and seabed resources, and today with limited ability to monitor that space.

Geography Has Not Changed

Both pieces rest on geography. Australia is an island continent, far from its main allies, with widely separated ports and sea lines of communication running thousands of kilometres.

The history is telling. During the Pacific War, Fremantle, together with nearby Cockburn Sound, now home to HMAS Stirling, became the largest Allied submarine base in the Southern Hemisphere. By the end of 1944, more than 50 Allied submarines were based there, and the Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre records that Fremantle-based boats sank 377 ships, totalling more than 1.5 million tonnes. Blaxland and Rosengreen argue this made the Malacca Strait impassable and forced Japanese supply onto overland routes such as the Thai–Burma railway. “The geography hasn’t changed much.”

The authors present AUKUS as the latest phase of a five-phase evolution, running from the battlecruiser HMAS Australia in World War I through the Oberon and Collins classes. In each era, Australia has sought “the apex predator.”

Why Nuclear Propulsion

The most concrete technical argument in both pieces concerns detectability, and it helps to be precise about what Blaxland claims.

He does not argue that the oceans are becoming transparent. Below the surface, they “remain opaque,” as the disappearance of MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean shows. Submarine warfare remains “a game of cat and mouse,” and worries about transparency have not slowed the building of nuclear attack submarines, “notably by China.”

The vulnerability lies at the surface. A conventional submarine has to snort, raising its breathing pipe so its diesel engines can run and recharge the batteries. A transit from Perth to Darwin requires that “a dozen or more times.” Decades of submarine pattern analysis, AI-driven anomaly detection, proliferating drones and Chinese low-earth-orbit satellites that can detect the bow wave of the snort make that time at the surface “detectable to a degree that threatens survival in conflict.” In the interview, Blaxland put it bluntly: once a diesel boat loses its stealth, it loses its main value.

This is a geographic argument as much as a technological one. A conventional boat may suit a navy operating close to home. It is badly matched to one whose operating areas begin thousands of kilometres from its bases.

The Insurance Premium

The Strategist article puts the headline cost at A$368 billion over 30 years, or about A$12.3 billion a year. That is about one fifth of Defence’s estimated 2026–27 spending and roughly 1.6 percent of federal spending. “Effectively, AUKUS is an insurance premium.” The denominators can be debated: Budget Paper No. 1 puts federal payments somewhat above the A$770 billion the authors use. Either way, the share stays at around 1.5 percent of the budget.

The metaphor fits Blaxland’s view of deterrence. He presented AUKUS as insurance for deterrence, not preparation for war. Wars start when an aggressor thinks victory will be easy, so Australia’s aim is to make a potential adversary “think twice,” to be a “porcupine” or a “prickly pear.”

From Interoperability to Interdependence

The most important conceptual shift in The Strategist piece may be its description of AUKUS as “a transition from interoperability to interdependence in selected areas of advanced defence capability where Australia would struggle to go it alone.”

Submarine Rotational Force–West at HMAS Stirling is the clearest example. The authors are candid that SRF-West exists partly to make up for “decades of Australian indecision, budget constraints and flip-flopping.” In the interview, Blaxland was blunter, calling it an imperfect stopgap for Australia’s “own stupidity.”

Interdependence cuts both ways, and here the interview strengthens the written argument. Perth gives the US Navy something it lacks: an Indian Ocean submarine base. Blaxland borrowed the late Des Ball’s phrase, a “suitable piece of real estate.” There is an irony here. Ball’s 1980 book of that title was a critique of American presumption; Blaxland turns the phrase into leverage. AUKUS meets an American operational need, which is the best guarantee of American commitment.

Recent events support him. On August 4, 2026, Chief of the Defence Force Admiral Mark Hammond confirmed that US submarines will keep “enduring access” to HMAS Stirling, Army Recognition reported. That settled the doubts raised by Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy’s earlier description of SRF-West as a five-year arrangement. Defence Minister Richard Marles argues that maintenance in Western Australia “creates sea days for the United States Navy,” according to the ABC. The goal, as the authors put it, is “resilient sovereignty within an interdependent alliance network, not autarky.”

Not Either/Or

Asked whether uncrewed systems offered a cheaper alternative, Blaxland rejected the premise: “not either/or… it’s everything all at once.” He described the shift from the kill chain to the kill web, in which crewed and uncrewed platforms across air, surface, subsurface, land, cyber and space are networked so that missions can be handed from one to another.

This is the right frame. A force built around one class of system gives an adversary one vulnerability to target. A nuclear-powered submarine’s value in a kill web lies in how it extends a distributed network of sensors and effectors. Uncrewed systems multiply what it can do; they do not replace it.

Deterrence and Its Critics

On the security dilemma, Blaxland turned the critics’ argument around: weakness invites aggression. His main analogy was Dean Acheson’s January 1950 National Press Club speech, which drew a US defensive perimeter from the Aleutians through Japan and the Ryukyus to the Philippines, leaving South Korea outside it. The analogy is contested. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, MacArthur had drawn the same line in 1949, and the House rejected a Korea aid bill days after Acheson spoke. The lesson about signalling holds, even if the green light came from more than one source.

He applied the same logic to Paul Keating’s view that Australia should stay out of any conflict over Taiwan. Declaring neutrality in advance, Blaxland argued, would encourage Beijing and could have a “negative demonstration effect” on Japan and the Philippines. He also rejected the “China, China, China” framing as “unhelpful and simplistic and reductionist,” while warning of gray-zone coercion: Taiwan squeezed first, then the Philippines or Japan, and over decades even Australia pressed “until they cave.”

What Remains Open

The interview also exposed real gaps.

First, delivery. Blaxland admitted the boats will “probably” arrive late, though he believes the US submarine industrial “valley of death” is being fixed. That is an assessment, not a demonstrated result. The plan has already changed: in May 2026, the partners agreed that all three of Australia’s Virginia-class boats would come from existing US inventory, Janes reported, with the first due in 2032.

Second, the deterrent signal. Blaxland called White House messaging on Taiwan “deeply alarming,” and offered two readings without choosing between them: a Nixon-style “madman theory” or a “sorcerer’s apprentice.” He did not explain how AUKUS makes up for a weaker political signal from its senior partner.

Third, people. Australia needs engineers faster than domestic training can supply them. On balancing the need for talent against the risks of security vetting, Blaxland called it “a million dollar question” and offered no clear answer.

Fourth, the alternative. Beyond the case for redundancy, he gave no detailed rebuttal to the argument for conventional submarines combined with long-range missiles and autonomous systems.

Finally, the cost of independence. Blaxland leans toward Shannon Tow’s Independent Ally over Coral Bell’s classic Dependent Ally, while noting that Australians want independence but will not pay for it. Real autonomy, he estimates, would cost 4 to 5 percent of GDP, against roughly 2 to 3 percent now. Interdependence of the AUKUS kind is partly the result of that choice.

The Mid-2030s Test

Blaxland and Rosengreen set the right benchmark. By the mid-2030s, the test will be whether Australia has “the national systems, people, infrastructure and industrial capacity required to make and implement its own decisions to exercise undersea power.”

That is a higher bar than delivering submarines, and the right one. In the authors’ words, if trilateral cooperation produces those outcomes, AUKUS “will have built not only submarines; it will have built Australian undersea power.”

Sources

AUKUS: Strategic Imperative or Costly Mistake?