Russia is testing Britain’s defences. Our submarines matter more than ever

Often, AUKUS is viewed as an Indo-Pacific venture – a distant instrument for helping Australia contain China, when the greatest threat is brewing in the seas around the British Isles. Week after week, reports emerge of Russia’s activities in the North Atlantic, even the North Sea and the English Channel.

True, AUKUS will help deter China’s growing maritime heft in the Indo-Pacific by transforming the Royal Australian Navy into a tier-one subsurface fleet. It will also enable Britain to deploy a nuclear submarine to the Indo-Pacific and so maintain a persistent presence it could otherwise ill-afford. But for the United Kingdom, at least, AUKUS is about more than the Indo-Pacific. It is also, perhaps even primarily, about securing British interests in the North Atlantic.

The logic begins with geography. Russia’s modernising Northern Fleet, with its bases on the Kola Peninsula, remains untouched by the Kremlin’s offensives in Ukraine. This Russian fleet can reach the open Atlantic, and the sea lanes that carry British trade and any reinforcement of Europe, in just a few days. Due to the location of the British Isles, the United Kingdom has a simple choice: command the North Atlantic or be threatened by others. For an island that lives by trade and sits at the edge of Europe’s pre-eminent maritime chokepoint – the Strait of Dover – little else matters more. Denying enemies free rein over these vital maritime spaces is a first-order national priority, and a harder one than at any time since the Cold War.

Russia’s newest submarines and warships are armed with cruise missiles that have a range long enough to reach deep into the British interior. Barely a month goes by without the Royal Navy shadowing a Russian submarine or surface ship in or near British waters, often close to gas pipelines or undersea electricity cables. Every incursion tests how fast the country can respond. NATO now plans on the assumption that the alliance could face war in Europe as soon as 2030.

Granted, Britain already has a fleet of advanced nuclear attack submarines – six Astute-class vessels are complete, with another under construction. The wonder of AUKUS Pillar I is that it will allow the Royal Navy to procure even more by the 2040s. In the interim, AUKUS Pillar II – focusing on autonomous undersea capabilities and quantum sensing – provides complementary surveillance capabilities long before the physical AUKUS-class submarines hit the water.

Given that the United Kingdom and Australia will be working together to develop and manufacture the AUKUS-class nuclear attack submarines, they will achieve greater economies of scale. This means that, due to AUKUS, the Royal Navy will be able to grow its nuclear attack submarine fleet from seven vessels to as many as 12 by the early 2040s. A submarine cannot be in two places at once, and refit and training keep much of any fleet trapped in port, so each extra hull is the difference between a persistent and permanent presence in the North Atlantic.

The industrial effect is even larger, and it turns the usual criticism of AUKUS on its head. Sceptics warned the pact would undermine British interests in the Euro-Atlantic to equip a distant, foreign navy on the other side of the world. The reverse is happening: capital is pouring into Britain’s own submarine industrial base. Australia is committing £2.4 billion over ten years to expand Rolls-Royce’s reactor works at Derby, as part of a wider programme to modernise the yards at Barrow-in-Furness.

This is why setting the Atlantic against the Pacific, as though effort in one is stolen from the other, is an illogical error. Russia and China increasingly coordinate their geopolitical revisionism, and China is expanding its submarine force at pace. A British-Australian submarine project scaled up against China is the same enterprise that deters Russia in the North Atlantic, while money invested in Barrow and Derby is money spent on the defence of Europe. At a moment when Europe is no longer central to American interests, AUKUS shows a European power converting a friendship on the far side of the world into decisive power at home. That is one of the most useful contributions Britain has made to European security in years.

Five years on, that is the measure of AUKUS. More submarines planned for the water, a strategic industry pulled back from the brink, and growing dominance over the seas and oceans that matter. As an island nation, command of the ocean is central to British interests. AUKUS is the clearest sign in years that the country intends to control them.

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James Rogers is Co-President (Research) at the Council on Geostrategy.

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