The Biden administration has lifted most bans on defense technology sharing with Australia and the United Kingdom in order to fast-track the development of emerging weapons technologies among the allies.
“These critical reforms will revolutionize defense trade, innovation and cooperation, enabling collaboration at the speed and scale required to meet our challenging strategic circumstances,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said Thursday.
The agreement is designed to establish “an export license-free environment,” as Australian officials put it, in conjunction with the implementation of the AUKUS deal between the three allies. Although the Australian navy’s acquisition of U.S. and British nuclear submarine technology has dominated the international spotlight, “Pillar Two” of the AUKUS deal also aims to harness the advanced technology sectors of each country in a bid to win an emerging technology race with China.
“As tensions increase, and conflicts continue around the globe, our partnerships with our allies are critically important,” British Defense Secretary John Healey said Thursday. “This is a breakthrough that will allow our three nations to deepen our collaboration on defence technology and trade. Our new government will reinforce the UK’s role in AUKUS to boost Britain’s military capabilities and economic growth.”
President Joe Biden’s team regards emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence as “the strategic high ground,” as Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell put it recently. The pressure to outpace China, which is pouring money into a military modernization project powered in part by stolen from Western companies, spurred officials in Washington, London, and Canberra to put a premium on Pillar Two of the deal.
“We need to build an innovation system ... across our three countries which stimulates the defense industry base across our three countries,” Marles said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event last week. “Each of us have our own innovation systems which are focused on our own domestic defense industry bases. How we get value add here is by really kind of getting those much more harmonized.”
Those aspirations have been enmired in hesitation within the U.S. government about easing foreign access to prized American technology, a misgiving that has irritated proponents of the deal. “We have not realized the promise, the bright promise, of this partnership,” Sen. James Risch (R-ID), the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said during a hearing last month. “It was supposed to be a game-changer, but State’s exclusion of the exact technologies we need to advance AUKUS has inhibited this partnership from moving aggressively to reality.”
Still, defense officials announced last week that the AUKUS countries had “tested cutting edge autonomous and AI-enabled sensing capabilities in a multi-domain battlespace … that minimize the time between sensing enemy targets, deciding how to respond, and responding to the threat.” The Pentagon hailed those trials as a portent of future AUKUS projects.
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“This will be the most important strategic military engagement between the United States and Australia, and brings Britain into the context of what we're engaging with in the Indo-Pacific,” Campbell told Risch in the July 30 hearing. “I can tell you that this will be never-ending. We will have to invest substantial resources, build internal capacities in our government and with our institutions to contest everywhere.”
Marles, the Australian defense chief, offered a similar overview. “A lot of this stuff is, you know, genuinely groundbreaking technology,” he said at CSIS. “I think we … will end up evaluating Pillar 2 based on whether it meets its stated objective, which is to pull through innovative technologies into service quickly. And quickly is measured in years, not decades.”
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