How AUKUS has brought an alliance revolution to Australia

That led then defence minister Linda Reynolds to declare at the Perth launch of the 2020 defence strategic update that the “world we grew up in is no more”.

As late as November 2020, five months after the launch of the strategic update, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was still arguing that “sovereign Australia is free to choose both China and America [and] … being forced to make a binary choice between China and US is not in Australia’s national interest”.

The new alliance will be even more central to Australia’s security will come with increased risks and increased strategic costs.

Yet only six months later, by the time Morrison was on his way to the G7 meeting in June 2021 (including a key sideline meeting with Biden and Boris Johnson that would lock in the AUKUS deal), the Prime Minister’s rhetoric had changed. In a speech to the Perth USAsia Centre, he noted that the challenge Australia faces is “nothing less than to reinforce, renovate and buttress a world order that favours freedom’”.

In the same month as the Morrison speech, the US announced, later reaffirmed in its 2022 Indo-Pacific strategy, its move to adopt integrated deterrence. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin noted that “integrated deterrence means using every military and non-military tool in our toolbox, in lockstep with our allies and partners”.

As the Australian diplomat Jane Hardy has noted, for integrated deterrence to be a success, it will require a further “deepening [of] combined strategic, diplomatic and military planning between the United States and Australia”, including in “high-value deterrence scenarios”.

By September 2021, a series of key meetings and announcements would culminate a decisive shift in Australia’s strategic approach. The most significant event was AUKUS, but until now the importance of this pact beyond submarines has far too often been overlooked.

AUKUS decisively accelerates co-operation in science and technology initiatives, supply-chain resilience, space co-operation, the cyber sphere, critical infrastructure protection, quantum computing, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence co-operation. Its other key feature is high-tech missile and defence technology sharing – central to deterrence and high-end war fighting in the Indo-Pacific.

More USAF units in Australia

Even less acknowledged than these areas of AUKUS is the outcome of the AUSMIN meeting of 2021. That brought a large expansion of US Air Force units in northern Australia, and a joint logistics base to support “high-end war fighting and combined military operations”. It increases the scale of multilateral exercises and Australia’s engagement with the US technology and industrial base.

Finally, also in September 2021, there was an in-person leaders’ meeting of the revitalised Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

To many commentators, the AUKUS and Quad initiatives represent a clear indication of Australia’s focus on working multilaterally to counter China strategically in the Indo-Pacific. Fundamentally, September 2021 ended Australia’s three-decade-old policy of attempting to not have to choose between the US and China: effectively trying to have our cake and eat it too.

Just as significantly, AUKUS and AUSMIN saw the acceptance of the end of US primacy. This new era is based on Indo-Pacific strategic competition, and a balance of power. It accepts a changing rules-based order based on multipolarity and requires a deep Australian role in integrated deterrence alongside the US and other partners.

Add in advanced science, technology and defence industrial co-operation between the US and Australia, and what you get is the most profound changes to the US-Australia strategic alliance since ANZUS was signed in 1951.

Not only is the world we grew up in no more, gone too is the US alliance we had come to know and understand. The emerging new alliance will be even more central to Australia’s security; it will also come with greatly increased risks and, as events in Ukraine have demonstrated, potentially increased strategic costs.

It will require a new approach to force structure and force posture, adjustments to alliance management, and a significant change to combined command arrangements and approaches to integrated strategic planning and operations.

Last year indeed brought an ANZUS alliance revolution that “will bend the arc of Australian history”. Remarkably, back in September, the impact of this revolution passed almost without notice. Six months on, perhaps we will now see a broader recognition of the significance of the AUKUS pact.

Peter J. Dean is chair of defence studies and director of the Defence and Security Institute at the University of Western Australia.