AUKUS — Pillars I and II as alliance architecture
Charles Edel at CSIS has written the most detailed open-source account of AUKUS's two pillars — the nuclear-submarine program and the advanced-capabilities cooperation track. The pact's significance is not the platforms it produces but the industrial-defence integration it locks in.
Key fact
Estimated AUKUS Pillar I total cost to Australia: AUD 268-368B over 30 years (Australian government 2023 estimate).
Charles Edel, Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and previously a State Department policy planner, has been the most consistent public analyst of the trilateral AUKUS pact since its September 2021 announcement. His 2023-2024 work distinguishes the two pillars of the agreement in ways that the popular framing has not.
Pillar I is the headline: a path for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered (not nuclear-armed) submarines. The implementation plan, finalised in March 2023, has three phases. Australian personnel embed with US and UK submarine forces from 2024. The US sells Australia between three and five Virginia-class submarines from the early 2030s. Australia and the UK jointly develop and build a new class, SSN-AUKUS, with first delivery to Australia in the early 2040s. The total cost to Australia is estimated at AUD 268-368 billion over thirty years.
Pillar II is the less-discussed but potentially more consequential track: trilateral cooperation on advanced capabilities — undersea systems, quantum, AI, autonomy, hypersonics, electronic warfare, cyber. The Pillar II workstreams operate outside the submarine timeline and have produced deliverables faster, including 2024 announcements on AI-enabled maritime autonomy demonstrations.
Edel's analytical move is to read AUKUS not as a deterrent against a specific threat but as a long-run industrial-defence integration mechanism. Once Australian, US, and UK shipyards, research labs, and procurement systems are deeply interlocked on submarines and on Pillar II capabilities, the cost of any future government — in any of the three countries — unwinding the integration becomes prohibitive. The deterrent function is embedded in the industrial structure.
The critics — including Hugh White at ANU and Sam Roggeveen at the Lowy Institute — argue the submarine timeline is too slow to matter for the most plausible Taiwan-contingency window, and that the cost is misallocated relative to other Australian capability needs. Edel's response is that the alliance architecture matters more than the platforms themselves, and that the architecture is what AUKUS actually buys.
The AUKUS arrangement announced in September 2021 is structurally two distinct workstreams that share the same trilateral institutional vehicle. Pillar I — the headline track — covers the Australian nuclear-powered submarine acquisition through interim Virginia-class purchases from the United States and the subsequent SSN-AUKUS programme jointly designed with the United Kingdom. Pillar II covers advanced capabilities in eight initial domains: undersea autonomous systems, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, advanced cyber, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities, electronic warfare, innovation, and information sharing.
Pillar I has dominated public coverage because the submarines are the visible platform with a confirmable price tag. The two-phase plan commits Australia to acquiring three to five Virginia-class submarines from the early 2030s under the Submarine Rotational Force-West agreement, then transitioning to the SSN-AUKUS design with first hulls entering service in the late 2030s. The total programme cost is estimated at AUD 268-368 billion over the lifecycle through the 2050s. The Osborne Naval Shipyard in South Australia is the planned assembly site for the SSN-AUKUS hulls.
Pillar II's strategic importance has grown relative to Pillar I as the implementation effort has progressed. The structural reason is that Pillar I produces capability on the timeline of 2030s and beyond, while Pillar II can produce deployed capability on the timeline of the late 2020s. The undersea autonomous systems working group has progressed fastest, with trilateral exercises involving Boeing's Orca extra-large unmanned undersea vehicle, Anduril's Ghost Shark, and other emerging platforms. The hypersonic working group has produced the SCIFiRE flight-test programme that has run since 2020. The AI and cyber tracks are at earlier stages of trilateral integration but are progressing through specific research-and-development collaboration agreements.
The export-control reform that the three governments completed through 2024 is the institutional precondition for Pillar II's effective operation. The US International Traffic in Arms Regulations exemption for Australia and the United Kingdom, signed into effect in August 2024 under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 provisions, removed most ITAR licensing requirements for trilateral defense-industrial cooperation on in-scope technologies. The UK has implemented reciprocal arrangements; Australia has updated its Defence Trade Controls Act framework. The combined effect is that the three countries' defense-industrial bases now operate, for in-scope technologies, as a single integrated supply network — which is the precondition for Pillar II's working groups to produce field-deployable capability rather than research papers.
The alliance-architecture reading is what Peter Dean at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney has developed most fully across his Quad and AUKUS scholarship. The argument is that AUKUS, properly understood, is not a submarine deal with a technology-cooperation appendix. It is an institutional framework that ties the three countries' defense planning, industrial capacity, and technology-development cycles together at a depth previously reserved for the Five Eyes intelligence relationship. The submarines are the most visible expression of that depth; the Pillar II integration is the more durable institutional change.
The expansion question — whether Japan, Canada, New Zealand, or South Korea might join Pillar II in some form — has been debated at the political level since 2023. The April 2024 joint statement from the three AUKUS defence ministers specifically referenced 'partner consultations' on Pillar II with Japan, Canada, and New Zealand. The institutional model under consideration is partner-specific access to particular workstreams rather than full membership in the trilateral framework. Japan's participation in the maritime autonomous systems track has progressed furthest. The eventual shape of Pillar II's partner-expansion remains under negotiation; the directional movement is toward layered access for trusted third parties on specific technology domains rather than a broader formal alliance expansion.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.