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Posted on 06/04/2026 5:07:11 AM PDT by DFG
The U.S. has committed to selling Australia three in-service Virginia-class nuclear submarines while pivoting from the planned acquisition of one new and two in-service Virginias as part the multi-billion-dollar AUKUS submarine deal.
Australia plans to acquire a fleet of cutting-edge, fast attack nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS, a multi-decade defence pact with Britain and the United States.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey announced the revision to the AUKUS acquisition plan during the a recent AUKUS Defense Ministers Meeting held on the sidelines of the International Institute of Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
“The Deputy Prime Minister and Secretaries welcomed the proposed approach to streamline Australia’s acquisition of Virginia-class submarines (VCS), simplifying supply chain management, operational and maintenance requirements and maximizing cost efficiencies. This approach would enable Australia to acquire three in-service VCS in lieu of a mixture of new and in-service VCS variants,” reads a joint statement issued after the announcement as seen by USNI News.
Marles explained the decision to change the parameters was made to simplify Australia’s future operations of submarines as it goes ahead with preparations.
Australia had planned to extend the lifespan of its conventional in-service Collins-class submarine to operate alongside the two used Virginia-class submarines, a new-build Virginia-class and the SSN-AUKUS submarine.
Doing so would mean Australia would at some point operate four classes of submarines.
“That gets pretty complicated in terms of how you’re operating a fleet of submarines,” Marles said, according to a transcript of the conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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The Australian and UK governments have gone marxist. I don’t see how we should be allies of that.
Wouldn’t there at least be a chance of an Aussie skipper who was a good looking kind of lesbian?
Wouldn’t there at least be a chance of an Aussie skipper who was a good looking kind of lesbian?
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There’s a winning lotter-ticket chance, I suppose.
The real take away is we’re so slow at building submarines that we’re cannibalizing our existing fleet to in order to provide hulls to allies.
New Zealand tried that. Not such a good result...
This deal won’t go through. Just like Canada, they will find some way to cancel the deal for something (budget, change of mission, etc).
Unless we can pick up the pace of building them, while maintaining maximum quality, selling them to foreign countries isn't in our best interests.
Frankly, we don’t have enough of these boats as it is. We can’t spare any for sweetheart sales to an ally. They should pay for us to build them for them when we can.
Why? Australia is not our friend.
I didn’t think we had submarines to spare. Don’t we need them ourselves?
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