After decades of gradual military build-up by China, territorial disputes with China and Russia, and increasing concern about North Korea’s missile-strike capability, Japan is once again reinventing itself and rapidly moving from the pacifist stance …
Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine fleet is going to be expensive. Not only will the initial production cost run into the tens of billions, but there will be significant ongoing outlays for platform sustainment, operational use and …
The issue of nuclear non-proliferation is back in the headlines, thanks to details announced last week about Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines under the AUKUS pact. The deal, which may cost Australia upwards of $300 …
In a year that saw a significant deepening of Japan–Australia relations, a watershed moment of 2022 was the revision of the Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, first signed in 2007. The revised document lays …
After the long-awaited AUKUS submarine announcement, ASPI director Bec Shrimpton and senior analyst Malcolm Davis give their views on the decisions unveiled in San Diego this week. In conversation with ASPI’s David Wroe, Bec and …
Speaking at a summit in San Diego on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a decades-long strategy to deliver the most costly defence project in Australia’s history. New details of the AUKUS defence and security pact …
Australia’s nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will be of a new British design, but their reactors, combat systems and heavyweight torpedoes will all be American. After 18 months of intense consultations, details of this massive joint …
While we await the AUKUS partners’ announcement of their plans for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), the public discourse on the agreement has become wildly out of sync with reality. Charges that Canberra’s SSN …
The formal unveiling of the AUKUS plan is still a few days away, but we are already seeing strong signs that it will constitute a genuine trilateral partnership. If the blizzard of news reports detailing the plan is …
More than two centuries ago, one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, famously said: ‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ At that time, he was talking about the need for more universal education …
In March, the government is expected to announce its plans to implement the ambitious proposal for an Australian force of nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) that is at the heart of the AUKUS agreement. Any scheme for …
France invented the attack helicopter in 1956. Sixty-seven years later, Japan has decided that the idea has had its day. ‘Elimination of obsolete equipment’ is the cruelly decisive headline above photos of a Bell AH-1 …