The budget expense, personnel requirements, and leadership attention of the upcoming nuclear-powered submarine program are expected to be so great, there are fears it could harm other areas of Defence's national security remit.
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Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst at ASPI, and one of the co-authors of a new report on the AUKUS anniversary from the government-funded strategic think tank, thinks there is an argument to taking the entire nuclear submarine enterprise out of the Defence organisation.
The Defence capability and budget expert said it was worth looking at isolating the program from Defence's budget, personnel cap and "not sucking all of Defence's attention all the time".
"You'd have an accountable agency focusing on that one thing, and you're also kind of protecting the rest of the Defense budget from nuclear submarines," he said.
"It's no secret that the nuclear submarines are going to cost more [than the Attack class submarine] and so far that hasn't really been accounted for in the Defence budget."
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Labor promised to lift Defence spending and fund the initial fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, but the greatest of those expenses will not be seen for another decade.
Dr Hellyer said the size of budget offsets which Defence would need to make to absorb the nuclear-powered costs would be "enormous" without additional resourcing from government.
More than 250 people are working for the Nuclear Powered Submarine Taskforce - a hefty grouping in Canberra - before any design work has actually begun. That is expected to grow significantly when the shipbuilding begins in the 2030s.
The new report from ASPI recommended the trilateral pact add military space capabilities and human-machine teaming in air power to its list of eight areas of technology sharing beyond the nuclear-powered submarines that includes cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies.
"This is a surprising omission in some ways, given the vital importance of the space domain and Australia's rapidly developing commercial space sector," the authors wrote.
Future growth for the AUKUS pact might include Japan and South Korea in some technology sectors where they have key expertise and industrial capacity, they argued.
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Harley Dennett
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
