Save the AUKUS partnership — share the B-21 bomber

AUKUS, the defense technology partnership that Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States formed in September 2021, is already in trouble. The central focus of AUKUS is to provide Australia’s navy with state-of-the-art nuclear-powered attack submarines, to replace Australia’s aging and nearly obsolete Collins class boats. Achieving this upgrade would give Australia a long-range military asset that could patrol the Taiwan Strait and western Pacific, countering China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) alongside U.S. and Japanese forces.

But this vision for AUKUS is dead in the water. Australia has no experience with nuclear-powered warships and indeed has no civil nuclear power industry. Nor do the United States or Great Britain have any spare capacity to build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia; both countries are urgently modernizing their own attack and ballistic missile submarine fleets, projects they deferred for too long. The earliest possible date for getting Australia its first new submarine is the mid-2030s. That’s too late for the 2020s, which the Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy describes as the “decisive decade” for the competition against China.

Fortunately, there is another way to make AUKUS work: share the U.S. Air Force’s new B-21 Raider bomber, starting with the Australian air force. The B-21 will be the Air Force’s next-generation long-range stealthy bomber, able to penetrate advanced air defenses and deliver large weapon payloads against any adversary target. There are six B-21 jets already in production. Armed with the B-21, Australia would quickly become a major player in the coalition countering the PLA in the Indo-Pacific region. Such a move would greatly enhance conventional military deterrence in the region.

The B-21 would provide Australia with powerful military capabilities, sooner and cheaper than AUKUS’s submarine plan. A B-21 can carry more weapons and attack more land and ship targets on a single flight than a submarine can on a patrol lasting weeks or months. A B-21 flying from Australia could patrol across the Indian Ocean one day, the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait the next, and the south Pacific the day after that. A submarine can’t do that.

In a crisis, the Australian air force could disperse its bombers to bases across Australia, to friendly bases in the region, or even to the United States. Submarines by contrast will have to operate from one or two known and vulnerable bases.

If Australia expects to buy a nuclear-powered submarine similar to the U.S. Navy’s Virginia class subs, today’s cost is $3.5 billion per submarine. For that, Australia could buy five B-21s, giving its air force the capacity to strike scores of targets per day across the Indo-Pacific region.

The AUKUS partnership would have to expand the existing capacity to assemble B-21s. As with its submarines, the Pentagon delayed the overhaul of its rapidly aging bomber force for far too long. As a result, the Air Force’s bomber force is dangerously old and small. The new B-21 will be America’s main aircraft for deterring China. The Air Force must be first in line as the jet comes off the assembly line.

That assembly line, in Palmdale, Calif., is a dangerous single point of failure and lacks the production capacity to build during this decade the new bombers the Air Force needs plus those that Australia should have.  

Congress should appropriate the relatively modest sum needed to build a second B-21 production line somewhere in the center of the United States, along with enhancements to the B-21 production supply chain. A second plant would be a wise insurance policy for Palmdale, and it would speed the arrival of new jets to the Air Force. The second plant would also provide the capacity to build a squadron of export-modified B-21s for Australia before the end of this decade. The United States possesses half of the world’s nearly trillion-dollar aerospace industrial enterprise and has the capacity for this diversification.

AUKUS is a powerful idea for strengthening the three-nation strategic relationship. But its plan centered on nuclear-powered submarines won’t deliver relevant military capability in time to face the threat from China. Sharing the B-21 Raider and expanding its production capacity will make AUKUS work. The Indo-Pacific is in a dangerous decade. A new AUKUS, centered on the B-21, is an opportunity to reinforce deterrence and maintain peace in the region.

Robert Haddick is a visiting senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Air & Space Forces Association and the director of research at Champion Hill Ventures in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer with experience in East Asia and Africa. His new book is “Fire on the Water, Second Edition: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific.”