Australia has embarked on the largest and most ambitious defence procurement project in its history. Supporters present the arrangement as a necessary response to a deteriorating strategic environment dominated by the rise of China. Whether that’s a reasonable assessment is not the purpose of this essay, nor are moral and ethical considerations – they include whether Australia should embed itself in the nuclear fuel cycle, and whether Trump’s America represents the values of Western liberal democracy that the US alliance is supposed to defend.
Instead, the focus here is on the history of geopolitics.
Notably, AUKUS is much more than a submarine acquisition program. It commits Australia to a technological, industrial and strategic system centred on the United States, on the assumption that deeper integration with a great-power ally will make Australia more secure.
This is why an episode from Australia’s defence history deserves another look.
An Australian-made Bristol Beaufort: too little, too late
Australia faced a comparable choice in the late 1930s. Imperial Japan was expanding in Asia, Europe was heading towards war, and Australian governments had to decide how a small and geographically isolated country should provide for its security. The answer favoured by some of the most influential conservative politicians of the period was to bind Australia more closely to Britain.
Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a Prime Minister in the 1920s and Australia’s High Commissioner in London from 1932, was central to that project. Richard Casey, first as Treasurer and then Minister for Supply and Development, shared his enthusiasm for closer imperial economic, industrial and defence cooperation. So did Robert Menzies, who became Prime Minister in 1939. They were not simply responding pragmatically to Australia’s limited resources. They belonged to a political generation for whom the British Empire remained the natural framework within which Australian security should be organised. The Empire was simultaneously a strategic alliance, an economic system and a cultural identity.
This episode, and the political and industrial choices behind Australia’s Beaufort project, is examined in detail in my book Wounded Eagle.
left to right: Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Richard Casey and Robert Menzies with Winston Churchill
But there were alternatives.
At Fisherman’s Bend in Melbourne, in 1936 aviation engineer Lawrence Wackett began constructing an Australian aircraft industry around the privately owned Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. With the support of Australian industrialists, Wackett chose American engines, manufacturing techniques and production philosophy on which to base the local industry. The aim was not self-sufficiency but the creation of an Australian industrial capability able to absorb foreign technology, modify it for Australian requirements and progressively develop its own engineering expertise.
Within the armed forces, Air Vice-Marshal Richard Williams was making a parallel argument about strategy. Along with the Army Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir John Lavarack, Williams questioned the assumptions underpinning the Singapore Strategy—the proposition that in a Pacific crisis Britain would send a powerful fleet to its great naval base at Singapore and thereby secure Australia.
If Britain were simultaneously fighting for its survival in Europe, Williams and Lavarack doubted whether sufficient British military power would necessarily be available in Asia. Australia therefore needed stronger local air and land forces capable of defending the country.
Wackett, Williams and Lavarack were approaching different problems, but their thinking shared an important principle: an alliance should augment Australian capability rather than substitute for it.
Bruce, Casey and Menzies chose the other path.
Once the Singapore Strategy was accepted, a series of other decisions followed logically from it. If British naval power ultimately guaranteed Australian security, there was less reason to build an independent Australian strategic capability. If Australia would fight as part of an imperial military system, standardisation with Britain became more important. And if Australian industry existed partly to support that system, technological choices should be made according to imperial requirements.
The Singapore Strategy was therefore much more than a plan for sending battleships to Asia. It was an organising assumption about Australia’s place in the world. It connected foreign policy, defence strategy, military organisation and industrial development.
But there was another dimension to this relationship that is easily missed. It concerned political economy.
By the late 1930s Britain’s relative position was declining, particularly in the face of American industrial expansion. Australia represented both an important imperial market and an increasingly significant manufacturing economy in its own right. The question was therefore not simply whether Australia would industrialise, but within whose industrial and technological orbit that development would occur.
The Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation crystallised British anxieties. The US giant General Motors was among its investors, and British officials feared that the emerging Australian aircraft industry might provide a bridgehead for American capital and manufacturing methods. Their concern extended beyond aviation. London suspected that CAC could become a stalking horse for American domination of the growing Australian motor vehicle market.
The battle over Australian aircraft production therefore involved much more than aeroplanes.
In 1938, when Britain could not deliver modern aircraft because of its own pressing needs, the Royal Australian Air Force ordered American Lockheed Hudson bombers. The decision fitted neatly with Wackett’s emerging industrial model, since the Hudson could use the Pratt and Whitney engines he was building.
Alarmed by this further turn to American technology, Bruce initiated plans for Australia to manufacture the British-designed Bristol Beaufort torpedo bomber, and Menzies and Casey fell in behind them,
The Beaufort was not simply an alternative aeroplane. It offered Britain a means of drawing Australian manufacturing back into the British industrial orbit. Aircraft manufacture created networks of engines, components, machine tools, technical expertise and production relationships. Choosing a British aircraft could help preserve British technological and commercial influence in Australia at precisely the moment when American industry threatened to displace it.
There was therefore a paradox at the heart of the imperial relationship. Australia looked to Britain for protection because it lacked the military power to defend itself. But Britain increasingly needed Australian markets, resources and industrial capacity to sustain the economic and technological foundations of its own power. The weaker partner was expected to help compensate for the growing limitations of the stronger one.
The same political assumptions shaped the RAAF itself.
Williams wanted an Australian Air Expeditionary Force which could serve overseas while remaining under Australian command. Instead, at Bruce’s bidding, Australia joined the Empire Air Training Scheme. It was an enormous undertaking and Australians made an important contribution through it, but thousands of Australian aircrew were dispersed throughout the Royal Air Force rather than concentrated within Australian operational formations.
The Beaufort decision and the Empire Air Training Scheme therefore belonged to the same political project. In industry as in strategy, integration into the imperial system took precedence over the development of autonomous Australian capability.
The restructuring of Australian industry required massive investments to turn the railway workshops of Victoria and New South Wales into aircraft plants. The irony is obvious. A conservative government committed rhetorically to private enterprise presided over an extraordinary expansion of state-owned industrial production.
Much delayed by Britain’s inability to deliver the support needed to build the Beaufort in Australia, the project failed to meet the RAAF’s needs at the critical moment.
Japan entered the war in December 1941, and only a handful of Beauforts – without armament – were available. Singapore fell in February 1942. Within days, Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin. Australian airmen fought with distinction in Malaya and elsewhere, but they did so within an imperial defence system that could not provide the protection on which Australian policy had been predicated.
There was a cruel historical symmetry in all this. Williams happened to be in Darwin when the Japanese attacked on 19 February 1942. The man who had spent much of the 1930s arguing for stronger local air defence watched enemy aircraft bomb an Australian town knowing that the locally produced fighter force he had advocated had never materialised.
What does this history tell us about today’s strategic environment?
Whether or not China today is the same threat as Imperial Japan in the later 1930s is not the point.
The parallel lies somewhere more important.
Australian leaders in the late 1930s confronted genuine strategic danger and concluded that the safest response was deeper integration with a powerful protector. In doing so, they allowed the alliance relationship to shape decisions that went well beyond the alliance itself. It influenced which technologies Australia acquired, what kind of industrial capacity it developed, how its armed forces were organised and, ultimately, how Australian leaders imagined the country could defend itself.
That is what should trouble us about AUKUS.
The submarine program is already locking Australia into American and British nuclear technology, weapons systems, supply chains, training arrangements and strategic planning for decades. Whatever industrial capability eventually emerges in Australia will not be technologically autonomous in any meaningful sense: it will exist inside an American-led military and technological ecosystem. The issue is not merely whether Australia eventually receives nuclear-powered submarines. It is what else Australia chooses not to develop because so much money, expertise and institutional attention have been committed to making AUKUS work.
But here, too, the strategic relationship has a political economy.
Australia is not simply purchasing submarines from two great industrial powers. Australian money is being committed to strengthening the submarine industrial bases of both the United States and Britain. American shipyards are struggling to build nuclear-powered submarines at the rate required to meet the US Navy’s own needs. Britain likewise faces the enormous industrial demands of maintaining its nuclear submarine enterprise while developing the next generation of boats. Australia is contributing money and industrial resources to both.
Seeing is apparently believing: the SSN submarine design intended for Australia.
British experts are already saying the UK lacks the capability to deliver these boats.
The circularity should be obvious. Australia is turning to the United States for a military capability it cannot provide for itself, while helping subsidise the American industrial base because that industrial base cannot currently produce enough submarines to satisfy American requirements as well as Australia’s. Australian expenditure will also help sustain the British nuclear submarine industry on which the future AUKUS boat will depend.
That does not make AUKUS identical to the Beaufort decision. But the political-economic relationship is strikingly familiar.
In the late 1930s Britain wanted Australia drawn more tightly into the British industrial system partly because British manufacturers were losing ground to their American competitors. Australia helped sustain the industrial capacity of the power upon which it depended for protection. Today Australia is again committing its own resources to strengthen the industrial capacity of the great powers upon which its chosen defence strategy depends.
In other words, Australia is expected to help finance the industrial capacity its great-power protector can no longer provide on its own.
There is also a political irony. The turn towards Britain in the late 1930s was driven by Australian conservatives whose attachment to Empire was explicit. AUKUS, by contrast, was conceived under Scott Morrison’s Coalition government and then embraced by a Labor government. On perhaps the largest strategic and technological commitment Australia has made in generations, the change of government produced remarkably little change of direction.
And here the comparison with the 1930s becomes more disturbing.
Williams and Lavarack challenged the prevailing strategic orthodoxy from the highest levels of Australia’s armed forces. They did not advocate abandoning the British connection. They questioned the wisdom of organising Australian defence around assumptions about what Britain would do in a future crisis. Their advice was rejected, but at least there were leaders prepared to articulate an alternative..
Today, the only serious challenge to the strategic assumptions behind AUKUS come overwhelmingly from outside the defence establishment—from scholars, former officials, think tanks and other members of the policy community. Within government and Defence, the argument appears largely settled. The debate is about implementing AUKUS rather than whether organising Australian defence around it is wise.
This is where I think the historical comparison leads. AUKUS is the wrong course for Australia because it commits too much of Australia’s future defence policy, industrial development and technological capability to a single strategic conception: that ever deeper integration with the military system of a great-power ally will provide the security Australia cannot provide for itself.
And the political economy makes that dependence still more troubling. Australia is not merely buying protection. It is investing Australian resources in the industrial systems of the powers expected to provide that protection, in part because those powers cannot presently generate all the capability their own strategic commitments require.
We made a comparable choice once before.
Bruce, Casey and Menzies believed that integrating Australia more deeply into the British imperial system represented hard-headed realism in a dangerous world. Williams, Lavarack and Wackett offered alternatives that retained the alliance while placing greater emphasis on Australian strategic and technological capability. The imperial vision prevailed.
Within a few years, the strategic assumption at its centre had collapsed. The industrial and institutional consequences lasted much longer.
History does not tell us that AUKUS will end the same way. But it does tell us something useful: decisions made in the name of alliances can determine technological, industrial and strategic choices long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared. And great powers experiencing industrial constraints do not necessarily ask their smaller allies for less. They may ask them for more.
That is the gamble Australia is making with AUKUS.
History suggests it’s not a good bet.