| An Australian co-investment in a new or expanded shipyard in the US would speed up initial production of a fleet of new submarines needed within the next decade to prepare for the threat of China, according to US defence experts.
“We need to make sure that we are contributing to the net industrial base of the three countries that is going to be needed,” Mr Marles said. The US Navy builds two nuclear submarines a year at two shipyards, in Virginia and Connecticut. Its present 30-year shipbuilding plan states: “Nuclear powered ship production .... will be at capacity for the next 15 years.”According to a Congressional Research Service paper, the navy testified in June last year that increasing the capacity of the submarine construction industrial base to an extra submarine a year would require “$US1.
“There really has been a shared vision that actually what we need to do is build a project team. And what that means in terms of defence industry is that we do get to the place of that seamless industrial base.” “Increasing capacity to make more subs more quickly is clearly in the interest of the US and Australia, so this investment makes sense to me,” Mr Edel said. “But there’s still a lot of questions to be asked.”Such an investment by Australia would only be worthwhile if there was the available skilled workforce to put such assets to work, he said, and only if such an investment actually improved the time frame for which Australia could obtain new submarines.