Defence Minister Richard Marles and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin were joined by British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps to announce new exercises and technology sharing.

Defence Minister Richard Marles and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin were joined by British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps to announce new exercises and technology sharing.

“What does that say about the environment that we’re operating in and the importance of moving at a pace in terms of our work?” he said.

“The answer is it absolutely highlights the need for this arrangement,and it absolutely highlights the need for speed in this arrangement.”

But when pressed on why a decision on the location of an Australian east coast base for the nuclear submarines would not be made until the end of the decade,Marles defended the timing as appropriate in the “sequence of decisions that needs to be made”.

”There will be other decisions that need to be made,such as where we will locate the place that we will ultimately dispose[of] the nuclear reactors. That’s clearly going to be a difficult decision but in turn,that’s a decision which comes later again,” he said.

Marles said the new technology agreement – struck under “pillar two” of the pact – marked a “watershed moment” in the progress of the security alliance.

AUKUS was established under the Morrison governmentin September 2021 with the primary purpose of Australia acquiring its own nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Pillar two refers to other technologies such as hypersonic weapons,artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

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In a joint statement,the three allies said they would undertake a “series of integrated trilateral experiments and exercises”,including further testing of jointly operated underwater drones and using artificial intelligence on P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to process sonar data gathered by underwater devices.

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The exercises will also involve launching and recovering undersea vehicles from torpedo tubes on current submarines. They will be run in 2024.

“These joint advances will allow for timely high-volume data exploitation,improving our anti-submarine warfare capabilities,” said the joint statement issued with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps.

As part of the expanding co-operation,Australian sailors will be posted to Guam – a US territory in Micronesia – in early 2024 to begin maintenance training on nuclear-powered submarines.

Austin said the foremost goal of the AUKUS alliance was “to ensure that we maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific”.

Shapps said that with China “undermining the freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific,we’ve never had a greater need for more innovation”.

The three countries also agreed to accelerate their “deep-space advanced radar capability” to identify emerging threats in space,with the first radar site in Western Australia to be up and running in 2026. Sites in the US and UK will be operational by the end of the decade.

Peter Jennings,a former deputy secretary for strategy in the defence department,said that while the new steps in the AUKUS alliance were welcome,they needed to be urgently translated into “practical work being done to deliver real capabilities”.

“We’re at a point with AUKUS that the iron control at the bureaucratic level has got to loosen a little bit,and the private sector has got to be brought into their conversation,” said Jennings,who is also the director of Strategic Analysis Australia.

“Pillar two really needs to get a rocket under it now to start moving along.

“That’s just not going to happen if it’s controlled tightly inside the defence department. They’ve got to find ways to bring the technologists,the universities and industry base into the discussion.”

The recent sonar incident involving HMAS Toowoomba remains a key concern in Australia’s diplomatic relations with China.

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wongrebuked one of China’s top diplomats,Liu Jianchao,over the incident at a meeting in Canberra on Wednesday.

At the California press conference,the defence ministers were asked whether such issues should be raised directly between countries’ leaders. There has been a political skirmish in Australia over Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’srefusal to confirm publicly whether he discussed the sonar indecent with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco last month.

Shapps said there were “always diplomatic processes” for ventilating such concerns,adding “no one should be under the impression that any of us are prepared to be bullied out of waters that are clearly international waters”.

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