Antinuclear

Submission to AUKUS Public Inquiry – AUKUS a sellout of Australia’s security – Michael Gilligan

232. Michael Gilligan

I was responsible for Defence Department advice on options after retirement of
Oberon class submarines (Head of Force Development and Analysis Division in early 1980s). I am a Board member of Pearls and Irritations (P&I), online policy forum created by John Menadue. Regular contributor to P&I.

Despite its crippling cost, no Minister for Defence has ever explained what the
Virginia class submarine is meant to do. Why has such an obvious ministerial
obligation been evaded? Because it would reveal a sell-out of Australia’s security.
And an extraordinary direct underwriting of US shipbuilding and defence budgets
by Australian taxpayers – of perhaps half a trillion of our dollars. The Virginia class
submarine is not a general-purpose vessel such as our Collins class. It is designed
for supreme acoustic invisibility for a specific purpose – to find, doggedly track
underwater for months and be able to destroy submarines seen as a nuclear threat
to the US mainland. Principally Russian and Chinese SSBN boats. The United States
is stretched beyond its industrial capacity to deal with China’s growing SSBN fleet.

Assisting in that ongoing task is what Australia offered in AUKUS, and so the US
expects Australia’s submarines to do – effectively embedded into US military
command – against China’s burgeoning capacity to annihilate continental America
from under the sea.

LINK – https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/06/australias-submarine-betrayal/
More broadly, the Minister for Defence has misled Australians habitually on the
value of submarines in defending Australia. His case rests on treating submarines
as essential to Australian sovereignty, while ignoring the powerful array of
capabilities which already protect Australia and its maritime approaches.

Assessments of the submarines’ marginal effectiveness in a whole-of-Defence
context raise serious questions about the value of submarines, even whether they
are warranted at all on cost-effectiveness grounds.

So, the debate on submarines currently consuming Australia’s headlines is
corrupted by two compounding Ministerial lies by omission – the submarines’ job
within AUKUS, and Australia’s range of defence capabilities purposefully created
over decades, which marginalise submarine importance to our security.

October 11, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics