By Robbin Laird

In March 2020, I was visiting Western Australia including HMAS Sterling. I was there to visit the HMAS Rankin, one of the Collins class submarines homeported at HMAS Sterling on Garden Island. When I informed a senior U.S. Navy Admiral that I was going to visit the Royal Australian Navy at Garden Island, he wrote: “Awesome, say hello to the fellas down south, incredible team!   And absolutely critical in/out of a fight.”

Little did I know at the time of my visit which was 12 March 2020, that in fact I was visiting a future SSN base. I also did not know that I was about to have to escape Australia to get back to the United States with the onset of the pandemic.

In my visits to Australia during the period when Australia was working with France on the build of a new generation diesel-powered submarine, my work with the U.S. Navy, my time in France at my Paris apartment and discussions with the French, and my discussions in Australia gave me a good view of progress on this program.

Then in September 2021, while in my apartment in Paris, the Australian, British and American governments announced that Australia was to cancel the French program in favor of an SSN program which would involve the three countries or the Anglo-Saxons as the French refer to the three, although it is difficult to view the United States or the UK in this light as the two countries change significantly.

Being in France, I certainly had a chance to talk with the French and with colleagues in the United States I could do so by phone and video, and of course reached out to Australian colleagues to sort out an initial read on all of this as well.

I wrote several pieces on this development at the time, but not surprisingly, the most perceptive of the pieces was built around an interview with Vice-Admiral Tim Barrett (Retired).

This is what I wrote in a piece published 19 October 2021:

“During my visit to Europe earlier this Fall, the surprise announcement of the Morrison Administration’s decision to shift from their French alliance to deliver a long-range diesel submarine to acquiring nuclear submarine capability through an alliance with the United States and Britain was made. I talked with both French and Australian analysts and provided my initial assessment in a series of articles which highlighted the decision and the dynamics of change associated with that decision.

“But what was clear that the strategic environment has changed dramatically from when the Australian government made its decision to stay with a conventional submarine capability. The nature of the Chinese threat as well as the actions of the Xi Administration has clearly driven a shift in Australian thinking and perceived needs for longer range operational capability in the Indo-Pacific region.

“At the same time, its closest allies in the region the United States and Japan clearly recognize the need to expand their capabilities to operate throughout the region to complicate Chinese operational considerations, and to deter via more capability to operate throughout the wider Pacific as well.

“The announced decision highlighted an 18-month period with Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead in charge on the Australian side of negotiating within the new nuclear submarine alliance to deliver Australian solutions. I interviewed Mead when he was head of Navy Capability in 2016. He then went on to be Commander Australian Fleet and then Chief of Joint Capabilities and Command of Joint Capabilities Group. He has a strong ASW background as well as working closely with the other member of the Quad, namely India. He is now the Chief of the Nuclear -Powered Submarine Task Force….

“I had a chance to discuss these issues on October 14, 2021, in a phone interview with Vice-Admiral (Retired) Tim Barrett, with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss maritime issues since 2015.   As the exact nature of what will happen in the program is a work in progress and not really open to public disclosure until that 18-month period is completed, we focused on the context and how one might assess that context.

“Vice-Admiral (Retired) Barrett made three key points. First, the nuclear submarine effort was a strategic one, which was about Australian defense and not primarily focused on a priority on ship building on Australian soil. It is crucial to understand that this is about adding core defense capabilities earlier rather than later and would almost certainly encompass interaction between shaping the eco system for the operation of Australian nuclear submarines and the presence of allied nuclear submarines working with the Australian eco system.

“The second key point was that the priority needed to be focused on adding nuclear submarine capability to the evolving USW or ASW capability which Australia was already building out. The Australian government recently decided to add another squadron of Romeo helicopters to the fleet, and has procured P-8s and Tritons as part of an expanded ASW or USW warfighting capability. The submarine is not a silver bullet for ASW or USW mission sets but part of the evolution of the kill web approach to ASW and USW missions going forward….

“According to Barrett: “The submarine decision is part of a broader set of decisions with regard to how the ADF should respond to the challenges in the Indo-Pacific. This was a deliberate and considered position from the Navy’s perspective, but the political and geopolitical circumstances have changed. This is not the first time that Australia has sought or considered the acquisition of a nuclear submarine.”

“The third key point was that flexibility and innovations will be part of working out a way ahead and he noted that Mead had worked with him previously. When Commander of the Australian Fleet, then Commodore Mead was instrumental in working an innovative plan to manage a temporary capability deficiency for fleet fuel tanking.  To shore up a gap, the RAN ‘leased’ a Spanish Navy oiler for 8 months, and the RAN crews trained on the ship and operated the ship in support of the Australian Fleet.

“Eventually, the RAN acquired two new Spanish oilers, but the kind of innovation demonstrated in this example, will almost certainly be part of the way ahead in meeting the challenges of accelerating the operational acquisition of nuclear submarine capacity in support of Australian defense.

“According to Vice Admiral (Retired) Barrett: “The strategic environment has changed.  We need to reconsider the balance between sovereign capability for a thirty-year build and the need for creation of capability in the near term. The earlier 30-year period build approach should not be the dominant approach; the capability and its presence to shape deterrent capabilities is crucial and work out over time how the build side of this effort is clarified and put in place. The program needs to be driven by the need for creative capability options first.”

Now after the 18-month period, the three countries announced their joint decision on how to proceed on the Australian approach to acquiring nuclear attack submarine technology and capability. To do so, will require Australia to build a comprehensive enterprise to operate, maintain, to sustain, and build an Australian nuclear attack submarine.

The comprehensive approach to do so was announced in mid-March 2023 in San Diego by the three heads of state. The Williams Seminar was held on 30 March 2023 and is sandwiched between this event and the public release of the strategic defence review sometime in April.

The Australian government released a report laying out how it saw the “partnership for the future” or “the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine pathway.”

In that report, the government describe the advantage of nuclear-powered submarines and why Australia was transitioning to an SSN capability. “In the future security environment of the Indo-Pacific, conventionally-powered submarines will be increasingly less able to meet Australia’s needs. The United Kingdom Royal Navy and United States Navy retired their last conventionally-powered submarines in the early 1990s because SSNs have superior stealth, speed, manoeuvrability, survivability and endurance when compared to diesel-electric powered submarines.”

At the Williams Seminar, Vice-Admiral Mead provided an overview to the approach being taken to establish a nuclear submarine enterprise in Australia.

In essence, the approach is three-fold.

In the first phase, UK and US nuclear submarines will visit HMAS Stirling, and the Royal Australian Navy will learn how to support these ships during their visits. As part of this standup phase, Australia will work with the United States in operating Virginia class submarines.

In the second phase, Australia will obtain Virginia class submarines and operate anywhere from three to five of these boats going forward.

And in a third phase, Australia will particulate with its partners in shaping a new class of SSNs, which will be British designed but enabled by U.S. technologies. In this third phase, Australia will have built its own submarine yard at Osborne where in effect this would be the fourth nuclear submarine yard in the trilateral alliance. In other words, the notion of building an arsenal of democracy through allied cooperation would be realized.

Vice-Admiral Mead started his presentation by indicating that “in 2027, the U.S. will forward rotate Virginia class submarines to Australia and the UK would rotate one nuclear submarine to HMAS Sterling. The aim of this effort will be to allow Australia to deeply immerse itself in a nuclear-powered program. We will be doing maintenance on Virginia class submarines and will be doing crewing of these submarines out of Western Australia.

“After a period of about four or five years, we will reach the point where our partners and we will be able to ensure that Australia is a safe and secure steward of nuclear technology, of nuclear materials and a nuclear reactors. From that point in time, the United States would offer us for sale or transfer up to five Virginia class submarines.”

This would constitute the standup and launch phase for Australia shaping a nuclear submarine exercise, and really the key one to ensure a capability being able to operate to replace the Collins class submarines. This is really the key effort which enables the threshold to be crossed into a period of operating nuclear submarines.

In my view, this also allows Australia to build its con-ops for integrated USW and ASW with the P-8s, Tritons, and various air and maritime assets, including the coming of maritime autonomous systems to build an integrated offensive-defensive capability to protect Australian sea lanes.

What then follows is working through what a follow-on submarine program would look like. And this effort will entail in depth cooperation with both the UK and the United States. According to Mead: “It will be a follow-on to the British nuclear-powered submarine but will incorporate U.S. technology, including weapons, sensors, VLS combat systems and torpedos.”

Vice-Admiral Mead then looked beyond the pathway discussion to the broader question of  what Australia needs to do for this effort to be successful.

The first element is addressing the strategy and being able to gain support for the effort within the Australian public. “We are going to have to be very clear on our strategy.”

Second, Australia must successfully manage the trilateral working relationship. “How can we make the best of Australia working with the U.S. and the UK to delver this capability?”

Third, creating, training and sustaining the appropriate workforce for the enterprise is a major challenge within Australia. “We will be the first country in the world to operate a nuclear submarine without having a civilian nuclear industry. This presents some unique challenges.”

Fourth, Australia needs to build the appropriate infrastructure both in terms of basing and in terms of the shipyard itself. There will be some unique aspects to the yard including shaping high security protection for the yard as well. “We need to design the yard, build the yard and start building the nuclear-powered submarine by the end of the decade.”

Fifth, Australia needs to build an industrial base for this effort which can support and sustain the effort into the indefinite future. Osborne will become the fourth nuclear submarine yard to go with the two in the U.S. and the one in the UK. “Osborne will become one of the most advanced and complex technological hubs in the world.”

Sixth, the security of the enterprise is a major element for success. In addition to the physical security mentioned earlier, the IAEA involvement will be significant in verifying the quality of Australian nuclear power stewardship. “If we don’t have the international community along with us, the enterprise will fail.”

But the point of all this effort was highlighted by VADM Mead at the beginning of his presentation: “there is no more powerful instrument of conventional deterrence than a nuclear-powered submarine capability.”

By Robbin Laird

At the recent Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar held on 30 March 2023, Air Marshal Harvey Smyth, the Deputy Commander Operations, presented a UK perspective of the challenges facing the UK and her allies in the contentious 2020’s.

I first met Smyth when he was the head of the UK F-35 program. In an interview I did with him 2016, Air Commodore Smyth highlighted the coming of the F-35 the UK joint force. In that discussion, he highlighted the importance of the F-35 in enabling coalition operations, which is now considered a key element for integrated deterrence.

This what we emphasized in that interview: “It can be easily forgotten that the USAF and the RAF have not flown the same aircraft for a very long time indeed. The RAF and the Marines have flown Harriers and along with the Spanish and Italians formed a three-decade Harrier community. And Smyth as a Harrier pilot underscored the importance of this shared legacy moving forward.

“As an RAF pilot with significant maritime and carrier operational experience, we are shaping a collegiate and joint way ahead with the Royal Navy which brings the RAF domain knowledge of ways to operate in the extended battlespace with the coming of the F-35B to the new Queen Elizabeth class carrier.

“Being radical, I think it would make sense to put a picture of the Queen Elizabeth class carrier on our RAF recruiting poster: the RAF and the RN are jointly delivering the UK’s future Carrier Strike capability, and all RAF Lightning pilots will spend some of their time at sea, as I did throughout my 16-year career in Joint Force Harrier – we are forging an integrated approach together, which is incredibly exciting.”

The point simply put is that Smyth has been working integrated deterrence via the F-35 program for several years. But this was before Brexit, before several years of turbulence in UK and European politics and the return of war to the European context.

But it was also prior to the recognition of the broader challenges posed by the global reach of the 21^st century authoritarian powers. When my co-author and I decided to write a book on the return of direct defense in Europe, which we started to write in 2014 and published in late 2020, our original publisher wanted this book to focus on Russia.

We significantly disagreed. We argued that the challenge for Europe’s direct defense was posed equally by China as a force within Europe and operating globally. Our view was an anomaly at the time, but it is no longer.

In fact, Air Marshal Smyth underscored that we now face a Euro-Atlantic-Pacific global threat envelope and that the UK is focused on shaping its contribution accordingly within the scope of its means. He argued that the UK recognized that global deterrence was the critical focus of their defense effort, but such a focus clearly needed to encompass close working relationships will allies going forward. He made the point that even for the United States it was beyond its capability to fight a two-front war.

This meant that shaping more effective allied cooperation through a process of integration was critical and that is what is meant by integrated deterrence. But such an aspiration cannot be realized within the legacy limits on information and technology sharing.

As he underscored: “The key to success will center on our ability to share more of our intelligence, share more of our information, sharing more data, and share more technology. We need to work together to identify the gaps and the vulnerabilities in our deterrence posture that an adversary might exploit. And we need to work out how best to work as a collective, rather than as individual nations. This is really, really hard to do.”

Air Marshal Smyth emphasized that in spite of its successes, NATO scoped to European defence was not enough for today’s UK deterrent structure. “It is clear that given the changing threat picture, effective defense deterrence will mean working through other groupings further beyond NATO, and beyond the Euro Atlantic theater, with a renewed emphasis on the concept of strategics, developing and establishing new frameworks, and building a new international security architecture to manage systemic competition and escalation.

“And in today’s  multipolar environments, the UK will continue to develop a broader deterrence toolkit to include information operations and offensive cyber tools and make greater use of open source information alongside our historically more classified intelligence capabilities.”

“We will launch a new economic deterrence initiative to strengthen our diplomatic and economic tools to respond to and deter hostile acts by current and future aggressors. On nuclear, of course, the foundational component of UK is an integrated approach to deterrence with our minimal but credible, independent, UK nuclear deterrent. It is assigned to the defense of NATO to ensure that potential adversaries can never use their capabilities to threaten the UK, or indeed our NATO allies…

“We would consider using our nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances of self-defense, including the defense of NATO allies, and of course, only the Prime Minister can authorize their use.

“But in addition to our nuclear deterrent, the UK’s conventional, cyber, and space forces are now becoming sufficiently capable, resilient, deployable and adaptive, to deter potential adversaries from engaging in conflict and to win if indeed, deterrence fails.

“Beyond these military instruments, we’ll also see UK working the much wider aspects of state power to increase the costs of aggression by hostile actors above and below the threshold of armed conflict. The UK will continue to develop such levers to adapt to the changing global threat environments.  In particular, we will strengthen our economic capabilities and information statecraft…”

Air Marshal Smyth brought to the attention of the audience, the recent update of the 2021 UK Strategic Defence Review. The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 or the IRR was released last month. And in that review, deter and deterrence was frequently cited throughout and provides a good overview of the current UK government’s view of the deterrence challenge facing Britain and her allies.

Based on this document, Air Marshal Smyth discussed the UK current concept of deterrence.

As Air Marshal Smyth underscored: “We are all very familiar with the three C’s of traditional deterrence: capability, credibility, and communication. But in the UK, we’re now finding it helpful to consider integrated deterrence through the lens of an additional three C’s: comprehensive, coordinated, and coherence.

“First, deterrence must be comprehensive, as discussed in the IRR. This means taking into account all state levers of power and tailoring our approach to maximize use of those levers of power that are best suited to change the perceptions of a specific adversary. The integrated approach attempts to avoid the age-old temptation of over focusing on the military instruments of power… To be truly comprehensive, integrated deterrence must be both multi domain and multi-agency.

“Second, deterrence must be impeccably coordinated with allies and partners so that the impact of our actions are greater than the sum of the parts, from force posturing, all the way to the imposition of economic sanctions. None of us can do this alone.

“And whilst we have all worked hand in glove for many decades in terms of deterrence and defense, in today’s information driven, intimately connected, rapidly dynamic but ever shrinking world, there is always more effort required, especially if we are to truly deliver a coordinated, integrated, and determined effect.

“Lastly, we need to take a more coherent approach to developing our deterrence strategies, understanding the complex interplay across the spectrum of conflict and considering the temporal nature of crises to ensure that our activities remain aligned with the overall objectives and desired end states.

“It is fair to say that capabilities available to state and non-state actors in today’s complex world have blurred the traditional thresholds of conflict…And also understanding the role and the impact of strategic or nuclear messaging well below the nuclear threshold, as well as how to manage escalation over time. And this is definitely something Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought into sharp focus.

“Thus, alongside the long standing capability, credibility and communication aspects of deterrence, we add three more C’s of deterrence:  comprehensive, coordinated and preparedness.

“And for me, there’s no question that the development of integrated deterrence remains incredibly complex both by necessity and by design across government, and working with allies is challenging enough in the best of times, but for sure, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.”

AIR MARSHAL HARVEY SMYTH

The Deputy Commander Operations is the senior Royal Air Force war fighter responsible for the conduct of air operations at home and overseas. Working together with other Services and international operational commanders, he oversees the generation and employment of air power in all environments. This wide remit includes the Air Defence of the United Kingdom, the delivery of intervention operations abroad and the conduct of humanitarian and disaster relief operations.

Air Marshal Harvey Smyth was born and educated in Northern Ireland and joined the RAF in 1991 via the Sixth Form and Flying Scholarship Schemes. After qualifying as a fast-jet pilot, he spent 15 years as a frontline Harrier pilot and weapons instructor. He has extensive combat experience having flown hundreds of operational missions from both land bases and aircraft carriers over: Bosnia; Kosovo; Serbia; Iraq; and Afghanistan.

In staff roles, Smyth has worked in the UK Air & Space Warfare Centre and spent 2 tours in the F-35 Lightning programme: the first as the Requirements Manager in MOD’s Directorate of Equipment Capability, and the second based in Washington DC as the UK’s F-35 National Director, where he was at the forefront of bringing the first UK Lightnings into service.

In 2013 Smyth retrained as a Tornado pilot and became the Station Commander of RAF Marham, supporting concurrent operations in Afghanistan, West Africa, Iraq and Syria. On promotion to Air Commodore (1*) in 2015 he became the Tornado Force Commander, and shortly thereafter, the UK’s first Lightning F-35 Force Commander. He followed this with a short appointment as the Head of Carrier Enabled Power Projection (CEPP) within the MOD, before then conducting an operational tour as Director of the Combined Air Operations Centre in Qatar, responsible for planning and authorising ~1000 daily air & space missions at the height of the counter-ISIS campaign.

Promoted to Air Vice-Marshal (2*) in 2018, Smyth retrained as a Typhoon pilot and became Air Officer Commanding Number 1 Group (AOC 1Gp), where he was responsible for the Air Combat Group of the RAF. In early 2020, Smyth then became UK MOD’s inaugural Director Space, building the Space Directorate and setting the foundation for the stand-up of UK Space Command.

As a member of the PM-chaired National Space Council, and co-chair of the National Space Board, he was responsible for the production of UK’s first National and Defence Space Strategies, and establishment of a more ambitious Defence Space Programme. Smyth was promoted to Air Marshal (3*) in 2022 and appointed as the RAF’s Deputy Commander (Operations).