While Russia tests our defences, AUKUS is beginning to deliver

Around sixty fibre-optic cables carry an estimated 99 per cent of our internet traffic, alongside the pipelines and power interconnectors that bring much of our energy ashore.

It is easy to forget this network exists. Our adversaries have not forgotten.

Earlier this year the Royal Navy, working with Norway and other allies, tracked a Russian submarine and two specialist vessels operating near these cables for roughly a month. There was no evidence of damage, but the activity was a deliberate signal that this infrastructure can be located and, in a crisis, put at risk.

This is the kind of grey-zone competition that now characterises our security environment. Vessels can loiter lawfully within our Exclusive Economic Zone, just beyond our territorial waters, and damage can be done by deniable means, such as an anchor dragged across a seabed cable.

Severing even a handful of these connections could disrupt card payments and mobile networks, alongside the systems behind the NHS, our transport, and the power reaching homes across the country.

This is not a distant threat in a far-off ocean, but one unfolding in the Euro-Atlantic, close to home. The question for any government is what we are doing about it.

Part of the answer was set out last weekend in Singapore.

AUKUS, the partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is usually discussed in terms of submarines. That is understandable. The SSN-AUKUS programme, which will build a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarines in Barrow and Adelaide, is one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings this country has attempted in generations.

It is, by design, a long-term endeavour. The first British boats may enter service as soon as the late 2030s, and building the workforce, shipyards, and supply chains to deliver them is necessarily a decades-long effort. That long horizon reflects the nature of sovereign submarine construction rather than any failing in the programme, and the investment behind it is reshaping communities now.

But AUKUS was always meant to be two things at once. Alongside the submarines sits Pillar II, the strand of the partnership designed to field advanced technology on a far shorter timescale. For most of AUKUS's life, Pillar II has been a statement of intent rather than a funded programme. Last weekend, that changed.

The three nations announced the first Pillar II signature project, with the United Kingdom committing over £150 million, and the first capabilities expected to enter service from 2027. The project will develop payloads for uncrewed undersea vehicles, including the sensors and weapons they carry, as well as the command-and-control systems that allow these vehicles to operate as part of the fleet and to use equipment interchangeably across all three navies.

Its applications are wide-ranging. They include protecting seabed infrastructure of exactly the kind Russia has been probing, as well as surveillance, reconnaissance, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, mine countermeasures and electronic warfare. The same technology is intended to reinforce the future SSN-AUKUS fleet when it arrives. This is capability measured in years rather than decades, aimed at the threat we face today.

It matters because of what uncrewed systems make possible. The Royal Navy is smaller than it once was, and every crewed hull is valuable. Autonomous platforms allow a limited number of ships and submarines to extend their reach across a far larger area, acting as command nodes for networks of drones that can monitor a wide expanse of sea and, where necessary, respond to a threat within it.

This is the logic behind the New Hybrid Navy the Senior Service is now building, which it sums up as a principle of operating uncrewed wherever possible and crewed only where necessary. On this basis, deterrence need not wait until the late 2030s, and Pillar II is part of how AUKUS strengthens it now.

There is also a domestic dividend, much of which is already visible. The submarine programme is forecast to support more than 21,000 jobs across UK shipyards and the supply chain at its peak, with the wider nuclear workforce set to grow by tens of thousands by the end of the decade.

That investment is landing in real places: in Barrow, the constituency I represent, where a billion-pound regeneration partnership is overhauling the town; in Derby, where Rolls-Royce is delivering the submarines' reactors; and in Plymouth, where billions are being invested in Devonport. This is sustained employment and apprenticeships in communities that defence has supported for generations.

What Pillar II adds is reach into places not traditionally associated with this work. Three of the four winners of the AUKUS maritime innovation challenge announced alongside the signature project are British: a small enterprise in Basingstoke, an established engineering firm in Frome, and a micro-consultancy in Dorchester, sharing in £3 million of funding for the command-and-control technology at the heart of the new capability.

The same weekend, the three governments agreed to widen the licence-free trade environment between them by narrowing the list of technologies excluded from it, opening the trilateral defence market to British suppliers who have previously found it difficult to enter. The benefit of AUKUS is therefore extending beyond the established shipyards and prime contractors to smaller firms across the country.

None of this happened in isolation. The signature project sat within a wider set of commitments made last weekend, including the finalisation of the Submarine Rotational Force West, which, from 2027, will see allied submarines operating from Western Australia, and continued progress on the SSN-AUKUS design, underpinned by the £6 billion the United Kingdom committed last year. Together, these commitments show a partnership progressing across both of its horizons at the same time.

That is worth recognising. AUKUS is not simply a commitment deferred to the middle of the century. It is a generational submarine endeavour already creating skilled jobs in our communities, and it is now also a nearer-term capability programme that begins to answer the threats beneath our seas within two years. Each strand reinforces the other.

The task from here is to sustain the pace. That requires giving industry the certainty of long-term investment so it can build the production lines and train the people a multi-decade programme requires. It means continuing to bring small and innovative firms into the supply chain rather than leaving them at the margins, and it means keeping Parliament and the public properly informed, since a national endeavour of this scale depends on public understanding to sustain it. Last weekend demonstrated what AUKUS can deliver, and the task for those of us in Parliament is to ensure it continues to do so.

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Michelle Scrogham is MP for Barrow and Furness since 2024, Member of the Defence Select Committee, and Chair of the AUKUS APPG.

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