Australia should have a big concern. Britain, a country that Australia is relying on for its future submarine force and much else under AUKUS, looks seriously unserious about naval defence. Quite apart from the challenge of building new ships and submarines, Britain isn’t even close to keeping the fleet that it already has fully operational.
‘Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy …,’ US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in March. Well, there isn’t.
The target size of the Royal Navy’s nuclear attack submarine force has been seven boats. Only six are in commission; the seventh, still under construction, wasn’t ready in time to replace an overage boat that had to be retired last year. Of the six, just one is known to be deployable, HMS Anson.
Six powerful Daring-class destroyers have been commissioned. One, HMS Daring, hasn’t been in service since 2017; it’s due to rejoin the fleet this year after spending more than half its life idle. That a £1 billion (A$1.9 billion) frontline air-defence destroyer can be absent from the fleet for nearly a decade, about three times longer than it took to build, points to systemic shortcomings in maintenance, workforce capacity and industrial resilience – and in political interest in naval defence.
Of the other Darings, only Dragon was available for deployment to protect British bases in Cyprus when the Iran war broke out. Actually, Dragon was only sort-of available: it needed repairs and didn’t head to Cyprus until seven days after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said it would go.
And after Dragon arrived in Cypriot waters, it had to go to a port to get a ‘technical issue’ fixed.
Rounding out the readiness story, the Royal Navy is supposed to have 13 frigates, which would hardly be a lot, yet only eight are in service, all overage. Sisterships, unfit for further service, had to be retired before commissioning of much-delayed replacements that are still under construction. There are two big and useful aircraft carriers that would be more useful if they had more aircraft. And four ballistic-missile submarines are serving long past their originally intended retirement dates to maintain the British nuclear deterrent.
‘If we were told to go to war, of course we would,’ the Royal Navy’s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in late March. ‘But are we as ready as we should be? I don’t think we are.’
Yes. Everyone can see that.
The British government can point to billions of pounds being spent on building or preparing to build new ships and submarines. But a rolling process of fleet renewal is only to be expected, and the spending will produce results in the future – generally not the near future. The here-and-now of the Royal Navy is weakness.
This matters for Australia because its future defence force relies heavily on Britain’s ability to help build a nuclear-powered submarine fleet under AUKUS Pillar One and work with it on other technologies under AUKUS Pillar Two. Australia needs to see a serious partner, especially since Canberra’s financial contribution to AUKUS far exceeds London’s.
The weak political commitment to naval defence seen in abysmal fleet readiness must lead Australia to wonder about Britain’s commitment to industrial readiness, too.
The latest sign isn’t good. There’s been a serious delay to the Defence Investment Plan, a decade-long spending outline, similar to Australia’s Integrated Investment Program, that should give guidance to industry. It was meant to accompany Britain’s Strategic Defence Review, released last year.
This delay risks British defence firms looking to overseas markets for certainty and growth. All of this is due to the Treasury refusing to plug a funding gap in the defence budget.
When the Defence Investment Plan is eventually published, it risks being outdated and reactive to a shifting threat environment rather than shaping it, and there’s no certainty it will provide the clear, long-term signal industry requires to invest and expand.
Amid these unsatisfactory circumstances, Australia should undertake a hard assessment of Britain’s defence industrial capacity. This should be conducted by a group with expertise in industrial benchmarking against alternative partners such as the United States and Japan.
After all, the success of AUKUS will depend not only on shared intent and symbolism, but on each partner’s willingness and ability to match that intent and deliver.