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Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Mark Hammond;American Virginia Class submarine.Credit:

Rear Admiral Scott Pappano,the senior officer in charge of the US Navy’s nuclear submarine program,recently said helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines directly from the US under the AUKUS agreement would likely be too much to ask of the country’s overburdened shipyards.

“If you are asking my opinion,if we were going to add additional submarine construction to our industrial base,that would be detrimental to us right now,without significant investment to provide additional capacity,capability,to go do that,” Pappano told the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Pappano’s comments were widely interpreted as meaning that Australia would have to assemble all the nuclear submarines in Adelaide,with the delivery of the first boat not expected until the 2040s.

Asked about Pappano’s comments,Hammond toldThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age:“My initial reaction was,‘there’s another commentary’.

“There’s been a lot of commentary ever since the[AUKUS] announcement about a year ago,” he said. “I would listen to whatever the President of the United States and[his] authorised spokespeople say on this because I think there’s going to be lots of different opinions.”

Hammond,who spent much of his Navy career as a submariner,added:“I always try to wait for the senior leadership to actually put a position forward. For me,it’s a bit in the noise.”

Following the Coalition’s election defeat,Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said he had been working on a plan as defence minister to purchase two Virginia-class submarines directly from the American production line to accelerate the arrival of nuclear-powered vessels to Australia by a decade.

Defence Minister Richard Marles said he will announce by March the model of nuclear submarine Australia will acquire under the AUKUS pact.

Asked about whether Australian naval vessels had encountered any difficulties in the increasingly contested South China Sea,Hammond said Australian ships had been transiting through the region for over a century.

“What has changed over the past few years is the behaviour of the Chinese forces in that region,” he said.

He said when Australian vessels pass through the area now there is routinely a vessel from China’s People’s Liberation Army within sight,“quite often following us around”.

“That’s unusual behaviour,” he said. “I don’t know another Navy that does that.

“It’s a departure from what we would call normal maritime behaviour,but it hasn’t stopped us from conducting our operations.”

Hammond said he was concerned about the possibility of a miscalculation between Australian and Chinese vessels at sea,but he was comforted by the fact China’s behaviour had not escalated to a “reckless” level.

Hammond was speaking ahead of a major multinational navy training exercise later this month off Darwin,known as Exercise Kakadu.

Some 3000 personnel from twenty-two nations – including Germany,India,Japan and the United Kingdom – will participate.

Hammond said it was a decision for government whether Chinese vessels participate in the exercises again,as they last did in 2018.

“If the political relationship returns to that position it was in 2018 then we may be in that space again,” he said. “I think there’s probably some distance to go before we’re in that space.”

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