This is hardly top secret info but I’m surprised no one has mentioned or twigged the main reason behind this deal!
If the West, goes to war with China we need FOBs.
We the west have no nuclear support facilities in that part of the globe.
Australia does not have a mature nuclear industry, military or civil.
Part of the deal will be for a large infrastructure harbour and nuclear support port for heavy engineering on reactors etc.
Exactly what you need within theatre if operating nuclear powered boats.
Yes Japan, blah blah.
But let’s just assume Japan gets knocked over in first wave. We need somewhere in that hemisphere for our boats to dock, resupply and recieve heavy maintenance.
Australia getting a few Astutes in 10 years is a side part.
A good starting point is this article in Politico. It does explain why the French deal was fraught with difficulty although it doesn’t address the potential issues of the US/UK deal which could be equally hard to surmount.
The SSN makes sense for the RAN whose operating area is the vast expanse of the Pacific and the time is now right acquire them. They will not only access the technology to build the new vessels, but more importantly the support to operate them effectively. The French have never had the intelligence reach of the UK, let alone the US. For the major part if the Cold War they did not participate in the military structure of NATO and thus had much less access to operational information than for example the Dutch. The Kon. Marine made some major contributions.
On the subject of effectiveness, having operated both with and against UK, US and French SSNs there was a marked difference. TBH I didn’t really rate the French in those days.
Submarine operations and by implication anti-submarine operations are complex and not well understood without direct involvement. For those interested I recommend:
Roland White hmmm, an author rather than a historian. He writes a rattling good yarn and I’ll leave it at that.
I take your point about the “What are you reading?” Thread, but the books I mentioned are relevant to the subject under discussion. Unless you’ve had involvement with the maritime world it’s unlikely that you will properly comprehend its ramifications. Hennessy and Jinks is a pretty good primer on the recent history of submarine operations. Boyd is quite detailed in his account of how the UK intelligence organisations evolved and adds context to some of the material in The Silent Deep.
Parry’s book is different, personal and anecdotal, but does illustrate how a sub surface threat, however slight, can affect the conduct of operations. It provides the view from the other side.
Finally, to describe in a nutshell the advantage the SSN has over a conventional submarine:
There are no longer any Limiting Lines of Submerged Approach
I think History needs those who can get you interested which Roland White really does, if it promotes further digging all the better.
I don’t think anyone meant to say that your sharing further reading here was wrong, I think it was just a suggestion that we should be sharing books that are worth a read in that wider forum as well.
Having ploughed my way through ‘academic’ history texts earlier in life, I have to say that the modern authors - including James Holland, Leo McKinstry, Anthony Beevor, even Rowland White are a breath of fresh air. As far as the distinction between author and historian goes - if they get people to read up on past events who otherwise would not, I am all for it. University libraries are full of tomes no one reads.
This blog post on the French reaction to the AUKUS project is well worth reading. It does mention a point I made in an earlier post about the French lacking reach in the intelligence sphere. There is no francophone equivalent of 5 Eyes.
France is a strange one that does seem to be seen as an unreliable partner, I really don’t think that Internationally their reputation has really recovered from NATO in 1959!
It was complicated, their semi-detached status made working with them quite difficult. Although there was NATO infrastructure on French soil, from which they benefited, they resented us using it during exercises that involved them although everything was being done using NATO procedures of which the had copies; in French I may add!
A USN colleague never did “get them”. His training (and ours) was mission orientated and he never understood that they viewed everything from a Gallic perspective.
Rowland White’s “Harrier 809” was mentioned earlier and Chapters 9 & 17 give a sense of the readiness (or absence of it) to assist on the part of the French. I can assure you that the attitude and wholehearted support received from US units (much of it totally unofficial) was of an entirely different order.
Must have been well after my time, I was never involved in handover of any north bound tracks from them. We did hand the occasional south bound track over, after it had been declared. The Atlantique acoustics fit wasn’t as good as the AQA5M and the fit in the Atl2 didn’t really compare with AQS901. That had a lot to do with the Dutch opting for the P3 rather than Atl2.
However we digress, we’ll be discussing CZ contacts next!